Every year, a handful of runners from the Affton High School cross country team take a trip to Colorado to enjoy a week of hiking and running in the mountains. This trip — which takes place this year from July 19-26 — will be the team’s tenth year of its tradition.

“I really think that me taking (students) out there gives them the inspiration to travel, to do hard things,” head coach Rob Walker said. “That’s the big thing I take away from it. Giving those kids that experience. Exposing and inspiring them to live a life that’s a little more adventurous than maybe they would have before.”

Walker has served as the head coach of the Affton cross country team since 2015. He previously worked as a varsity football coach at Affton from 1999-2014, but as he became more and more passionate about running, he made the switch to begin coaching cross country.

In his second year of coaching, Walker got the idea for the trip. He’d heard of a cross country team going to Colorado to run and was struck with inspiration.

“I thought it was a really neat idea, to expose my runners to a really cool part of the country and to show them a side of running that a lot of people don’t know about: running on mountains and trails,” Walker said. “It would be a great way to build team chemistry and give them an experience outside of just showing up and running every day.”

Every year since — except 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the team’s plans — nine or ten students take the trip to Colorado, either renting a short-term rental home or using the house of one of Walker’s friends. This year they’ll stay in Breckenridge, Colorado, and throughout the week, they’ll run, hike and go white water rafting.

Walker rotates the hikes each year so that returning students can get new experiences. He says there is always at least one hike in Rocky Mountain National Park, and that the hike to Sky Pond is the students’ favorite. They also do one “fourteener” each year, which is hiking a mountain peak that exceeds an elevation of 14,000 feet above sea level.

Walker says he tries to choose hikes with good overlooks or waterfalls, saying, “We’re not just getting a run in; we’re seeing some cool stuff.” But it’s not just a scenic trip — it also teaches the young runners about the different style of running necessary for the mountains.

“It’s different, because you’re running at altitude,” Walker said. “Anything above six or seven thousand feet, you start to feel that oxygen, especially if you’re coming from St. Louis. Most of the runs we’re doing are above 10,000 feet. They have to get adjusted to that.”

He says that the student runners also have to adjust to the mountainous inclines. They accomplish this by doing a “fast hike” up inclines, but running when the trail is flat or going downhill.

“When you’re running on trails or running on rocky stuff, you’re not running close to the pace you’d run on a road,” he said. “It’s more of a casual pace where you can watch the trail, watch your feet. You don’t have to hold a pace like you do on a road or in a race. You run how you want and how you feel comfortable.”

The team’s assistant coach, Kyanne Ruth Williams, will also accompany the group. Walker says this is a special, full circle moment as years ago, Williams was his student and one of the runners on the Affton cross country team’s very first trip to Colorado.

“She went last year on the Colorado trip, so that was a neat thing, to have a runner come back and participate as a coach,” Walker said.

When reflecting on his decade of trips with Affton students, Walker added, “It’s fun for me, because I can remember those (past) runners very well. When I have memories of them, I remember them on top of a mountain. I have pictures in my photo feed of all these different runners over 10 years. There’s probably about 80 different kids I’ve taken out there. They email me all the time when they go back out on their own, as adults, to Colorado.”