Going into this cross country season, Gavin Belzowski was nervous on how it would turn out, but now with the 2024 season in the past, he gets to celebrate his success. Belzowski is a Junior Cross Country runner at Penn High School. He has had much success this past season with him running in three out of the seven meets for the varsity team. But all of this did not happen overnight for Belzowski.
Back in middle school, Belzowski had a rough go because of how things were playing out. He had had many disappointing races in his middle school career and he was very down on himself for not setting very many PRs for his last year of middle school. His mentality also wasn’t the greatest because of all of the disappointments he had gone through in middle school
“Going into high school, I wasn’t looking too positive but I kept in mind that I wanted to get top 18 (Tournament Team) and at least top 10 for Freshman so I could make the team in the first place and that carried me through Freshman summer conditioning,” said Belzowski.
While keeping that mentality throughout the whole season, Belzowski completed the goal of making the Tournament Team, being one of the four freshmen on that team during the 2022 Cross Country Season. He also had much success with winter conditioning and track the next year by being one of the only freshmen to run a sub-5-minute mile.
Going into his sophomore year, Belzowski decided to drop his other sport, baseball, for the sport that he had truly grown to love over the past year. It changed his perspective on the sport and helped him make some of his best friends from high school. Belzowski also started thinking about cross country as an actual career as in running in college and maybe at the professional level. Belzowski continued to run fast, dropping a 17:22 for his season best, during his sophomore year, and he was able to make it onto the Tournament Team back-to-back seasons.
Now, in the first two meets for the regular season, Belzowski ran some of the worst times ever in his two years of running. He didn’t know what was wrong with him and at one point he debated whether he wanted to quit. He had to dig deep during this time, trust his training, and change his mentality. After this mentality switch happened, Belzowski ran a personal best at the Harrison Invite with a 17:09. Belzowski has now gone on to run the last three races: Wildcat Invitational, New Prairie Invitational, and Culver Invitational, racing in the Varsity race for Penn High School.
“The greatest thing that cross country taught me was that failure often leads to success because in the sport, you don’t always win and you don’t always get a PR,” Belzowski said.
Belzowski is looking to make the Tournament Team for the 3rd time this year not just to watch the top seven run in the postseason, but to try and earn a spot on the top seven. Belzowski’s teammates also speak very highly of him one of which is his teammate and one of his best friends, Brett Spriggs.
“Gavin’s always been a really nice guy to me. He’s always been by my side running and I hope he does really well during the tournament season.”
Belzowski is looking forward to this postseason and the idea of possibly running in the IHSAA tournament. He is also looking forward to how much he is going to improve and grow as an athlete and a person in the next two years of his athletic career.
