Cross Country, Winter Track, Spring Track
Favorite athlete: Bernard Legat
Favorite team: Eagles
Favorite memory competing in sports: Winning our cross country league title.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: While warming up for a race, I ran into a trashcan and fell over.
Music on iPod: Mostly Hip Hop
Future plans: Go to college and pursue a career in engineering
Words to live by: “The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare.” Juma Ikangaa
One goal before turning 30: Do a triathlon
One thing people don’t know about me: I was born in Hong Kong.
Jonathan Gross did not grow up a runner. In fact, he was hardly what anyone would call an athlete as he developed during his childhood.
Sure, he tried basketball and baseball and soccer, but nothing lit a fire under him. Nothing made him want to come out each day and get better. The desire simply was not there.
Even when he decided to take up track and field in middle school, Gross only did it to get some exercise, not because he enjoyed it.
When he arrived at Upper Merion High School as a freshman, he went out for the cross country team. Again, though, this was not high on his priority list entering ninth grade.
“I only signed up because a couple of my friends were going to be on the team,” Gross said. “They talked me into it. It really didn’t interest me at that point.”
And to say his freshman season on the team did not go well, that would be understating it just a bit. Having barely broken a sweat in his cross country career, one day he arrived at practice on crutches. He would not run again for more than nine months.
“One week into the season, I got a stress fracture in my right tibia,” Gross said. “I had a vitamin D deficiency. I was done.”
When Gross showed up to practice on crutches that first day, head coach Lynda Newhart was more than just surprised. What surprised her even more was that he kept coming to practice on crutches, doing anything he could to be part of the team.
“Even though he could not run,” she said, “he still came out and helped out with the team. One of my assistants even started calling him ‘Clipboard’ because he always had one with him.”
Still, Newhart was realistic. She did not expect to see Gross come back for another go at it for his sophomore year.
“When ninth graders come out - you never know if you will get them back the next year,” she said. “When he had his fracture, Jon was one of the kids I didn’t think we would see back here again. He didn’t get to have a positive experience from his freshman season, and that usually means they don’t come back.
“But he came back.”
The Vitamin D deficiency affected the level of strength in his bones and also meant the fracture would not recover as quickly as with the average injury. The stress fracture occurred in September. Gross was not allowed to have physical activity until the following July.
Yet, for some reason, when he was finally cleared as being back to full health, Gross did something out of the ordinary. The first thing he did was go running.
He was determined to make the cross country team as a sophomore, and excel at it. Last year was lost. This year, he was going to make up for that.
“Even before the stress fracture, I was slow,” Gross said. “I wasn’t much of a runner. But, I’m also not much of a quitter.
“I like the challenge. The more they are telling me ‘no,’ the more I wasn’t going to listen to them.”
At the start of his sophomore year, Gross was putting in 5k times of about 26 minutes. Gross would not have been surprised if turtles would have been passing him along the course. But he kept at it. By the end of his junior year, Gross posted a district time of 17:16. This year, he is the captain of the Vikings cross country team.
“And he does it all with a smile on his face,” Newhart said. “He is the go-to man on the team now. The other kids know he did not start out as a fast runner and he worked real hard to turn himself into one. You see the effort. Every time he runs, you can see his heart is so into it.
“As a freshman, I didn’t get that sense that this was the kind of kid he was. Toward the end of his sophomore year, though, you really saw the improvement.”
Newhart selects her team captains in a nontraditional way. She makes the players apply for the role and interview for it. Gross, now 17, seemed like a natural fit for this fall season.
“Jon has been the slow guy on the team, the new guy on the team,” she said. “He knows what that’s like. Some say leaders are born. I think leaders are developed. I saw Jon develop into one.”
Gross’ goal for the season is for the Vikings to make states. He thinks the team can do it. If they fall short, then he would like to get there individually.
“Cross country is a team sport, first off,” he said. “I go out there to help my team.
“To me, the race is the definition of challenging yourself. Right now, I race for place. When I first started, I wasn’t in the same spot as now. I was racing to push myself. Now, if I’m in a race and someone is in front of me, I race to beat him and I’ll kill myself to pass him.”
The senior knows how far this is from his early days of running, when he was only doing it because he felt like he had to.
“I don’t have lots of medals, but I do have some,” said Gross, who also runs winter and spring track. “When I first was running and was at 26, that was really bad. Back then, I didn’t think I would ever be in the position to get any medals.”
Gross is not only the cross country captain but is also an honor student at Upper Merion and takes part in several school clubs. A typical day for him right now is to wake up and go to school, attend cross country practice, then come home, eat dinner, and study the rest of the night until he goes to bed. Oh, and somewhere during the day, he takes his Vitamin D supplement to make sure that problem never surfaces again.
His desire is to go to college for engineering, preferably a more physical specialty like aerospace or mechanical engineering. He will run at college if the opportunity presents itself, but it will not be a determining factor in his college selection.
“I’m not going to college to run, I’m going there to learn,” he said. “And if I don’t run on the team, I can still keep running on my own. It doesn’t take much to run.”
Well, that is not exactly true in this case. For Gross, it took a lot to get him to run back in the beginning. First he had no desire, then he had no luck. Now, he has no choice.
Like it or not, he is a runner.
