Kernersville – The cross-country state championship is exactly where Tri-County Early College freshman Fern Crayton wanted to be Saturday.
It was one of her goals for the season, along with breaking 20 minutes, which she did for the first time at the Smoky Mountain Conference Championship on
Oct. 15.
It would be easy to say the season went smoothly for Crayton. The beginning and end did, but in the middle part Crayton wasn’t sure if she’d be able to run again.
After top-five finishes in the first three races of the season, Crayton tested positive for COVID-19. Her father, Josh, who is also her coach, said she had flu-like symptoms and started feeling better after a couple of days.
Fern didn’t run at the Swain County meet on Sept. 17, which was tough because the Kituwah Mound course is one where many runners set personal records. The next week, Fern started training again, with Josh trying to ease her back into it.
“Even though she felt better I still wanted to hold the reins on her because she had missed a week of training and been sick for a week,” he said. “I think the fact that everybody had gone so fast at that race, she was really chomping at the bit to get back going.”
In some harder runs at the end of the week, Fern started having breathing problems. That included a run at the Jackrabbit Trail, where she was still hyperventilating more than five minutes after finishing the run.
A few minutes later, she went through a spell where she couldn’t move.
“It almost looked like she was having a stroke,” Josh said. “Her whole body kind of went paralyzed.”
The next day was a Friday, and Fern went to the doctor with her parents. They told Fern she could not do any athletic activity until they figured out what the problem was, and recommended she see a cardiologist.
They were worried she could have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy like her grandmother, which doctors recommend testing for when you hit high school, Josh said. If Fern was diagnosed with that, she wouldn’t have been able to run again.
“I just tried not to think about it, focus on school and get through the days,” she said.
After an agonizing weekend, Fern was cleared by the cardiologist to run again on Sept. 28. Both the breathing troubles and incident were connected to trying to return too early after the COVID diagnosis.
“It was just a really big relief to get back into training,” Fern said.
When she returned to training, Josh said he reset her training like it was the beginning of the season. That meant trying to build up a base of endurance before moving into more speed work and pacing.
For the first week, it was about going on long and steady runs, Josh said. After feeling strong at the Robbinsville Currahee Classic on Oct. 5, she set a new personal best of 20 minutes, 32.28 seconds at the NCRunners Elite Meet on the state course three days later.
They had only been speed work for two days up until that point, but Fern felt strong and thought she could go faster. She had also started doing workouts before school to build up her cardiovascular endurance.
She would run 19:59.70 at the Smoky Mountain Conference championships, then ran a 19:26.26 at the 1A West Regional Championships and finished second. Though she didn’t set a personal best at the state meet, she still finished fifth and was named All-State.
Through it all, Fern has learned to appreciate running more. As for a few days in September, it was up in the air whether she’d be able to do it again.
“Some of the days where I’m just really tired and not feeling it, I think of that and it’s motivation,” she said.