What is a CCQ?

What is a CCQ?

It's early August. I lace up my shoes for my first collegiate practice, eat a granola bar and walk to the locker room where I meet all of my new teammates. Some of them friendly looking, almost all of them intimidating. It’s easy to see the guys that are returners, greeting each other and introducing themselves to the freshman, while the freshman (me included) shit their pants as they await the first dreaded practice. That’s when I heard it for the first time. "So how does it feel to be a collegiate CCQ?” I followed up that question by asking what in the heck he was talking about. That’s when I finally understood what he was talking about.

Now you know what a CCQ is, even if you don’t know it yet. Think back to high school. The scrawny kid that wasn’t tall enough for basketball, muscular enough to play football, coordinated enough to put a bat on a baseball, heck couldn’t even put a golf ball on the green. If that’s you get thrown on the cross country team. The scum of the earth, the nerdy kids, misfit toys of the athletics world in high school. 

This was the inside joke of the team. In high school the football players called him a CCQ, which stood for Cross Country Queer. Instead of taking this to heart he just sort of embraced it, and even put a brand on it. I laughed at the thought of it at first and the joke grew on and on until eventually others started finding out about it outside of track and cross-country. Hell we even had the frats calling us CCQs, because they thought that the story was too funny not to join in. I thought about it really hard, and when I really put some thought about it, I realized how CCQ we all really were. We were "Queer" (Different) for the lifestyles we all chose to live. We saw some early mornings, and too many miles to count. We got to see are teammates and coach more than our real families, and made running not only a sport, but turned it into a lifestyle. This is my “CCQ” story.