For New York Cross-Country Runners, a Century-Old Proving Ground In a Bronx Park, a Century of Testing Runners" Speed and Spirit Fifty years ago this fall, my running career began the way most do in New York, with a trip to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx for a high school cross-country race. It was an inauspicious debut to say the least. My 1962-63 racing diary from junior year at Sheepshead Bay High in Brooklyn contains this comment about a team time trial on the 2.5-mile course: "Stopped five times. First time on course. Terrible experience. I actually wrote those words 50 years ago: terrible experience. Yet I have run at Van Cortlandt every year since and found it to be a wellspring of athletic purity and a touchstone of grace and empowerment, as have thousands of other runners. My time that day was an embarrassing 21 minutes 50 seconds. I improved by about four minutes in "62 - and completed the course without stopping - but never broke out of what the Public Schools Athletic League then designated the "scrub" division, sort of a third-string junior varsity. "C'mon, Bloom, blossom!" my coach, Richard Lerer, would call out as I charged the opening flats and into the notorious back hills. Blossom I did not. But the honesty and even spiritual quality of a hard-fought cross-country race found a place in my heart, and over the decades little that happened at Van Cortlandt eluded my embrace. Van Cortlandt, established as a park in 1888, is commemorating its 100th year as a mecca for high school cross-country meets, like Saturday's huge Manhattan College Invitational, currently the park's signature event; college meets; the IC4A; N.C.A.A. championships and United States nationals; and age-group and adult races. When my older daughter, Allison, was 5, in 1978, my wife and I took her to her first race at Van Cortlandt, an age-group run across the field. We pinned an official number on her chest, and she proceeded to fall asleep in her car seat and missed the race. She did run the next year, and the 6-and-under winner that day was a Long Island boy, Jay Fiedler, who became an Ivy League decathlon champion at Dartmouth, then an N.F.L. quarterback. The Van Cortlandt Track Club, now with 600 members, began in 1971. In addition to Van Cortlandt club events, New York Road Runners sponsors a cross-country series there every fall. Events range from 5 kilometers to 15 kilometers (3.1 miles to 9.3 miles). Road Runners" Harry Murphy Cross Country Classic, a 5K race, is Sunday. The great miler Marty Liquori, who in 1966 at Essex Catholic in Newark set a scholastic record of 12:23.2 for Van Cortlandt's 2.5-mile course, once said that road racing was like rock "n" roll, but that track racing was more like a Carnegie Hall symphony. When I recently spoke with Liquori, an accomplished guitarist, he suggested that cross-country at Van Cortlandt was like jazz: unpredictable, always changing, demanding adaptability and quick decisions. To Liquori's jazz drumbeat, I would add that cross-country at Van Cortlandt is like Paul Simon's "Graceland," blending rhythms of different cultures - while coexisting with other sports cultures - into a unified tapestry. At times, that connective tissue is tested. Perhaps no more so than when high school runners encounter horseback riders straying from the park's bridle path and blocking the racecourse in the back hills. It happened time and again in the 1970s and "80s. In the early "70s, the stable owner, contending that runners scared the horses, told me that he had instructed riders to "knock "em down." In 1982, when horses interfered with the Manhattan meet, race officials summoned the police to clear the trails. The tension between the groups has eased, but it's still not unheard-of to encounter horses - and what they leave behind - on the course. Van Cortlandt's open fields are also at a premium, with rugby, cricket and soccer players scavenging for a little space. The cross-cultural mix reflects the Bronx at its finest - most of the time. In one IC4A championship years ago, a rugby-versus-runner standoff was settled in the middle of the opening race flats by a New York meet official, Robert Hersh. Wearing a three-piece suit and carrying stopwatches around his neck like military honors, Hersh used his training as a lawyer to persuade the rugby players to retreat. Marc Bloom's books include "God on the Starting Line," about his experience coaching a Catholic high school cross-country team in New Jersey.