How do you portray cross country running for a senior portrait? Most of the cross country pictures you see are of crowds of runners jockeying for position. Occasionally, you might see someone running solo, but usually looking kind of exhausted, rather than heroic. There’s no typical athletic field, although a track might be used for practice. And uniforms? Well, they have team jackets and jerseys for competition, but usually, my senior explained, he doesn’t even bother with a shirt when he runs. I guess it’s an un-uniform. And frankly, I do so much sweaty boy laundry that I can appreciate the practice.

Speaking of sweaty boys, we didn’t want him to run himself into a drippy mess and then stuff him into his suit for his shot for Grandma’s wall. So we started the session in town with the suit looking all GQ and elegant. He, of course, had no idea what GQ was, or if it was a good thing.

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He was a good sport about it, but he was probably relieved to be released from the suit and into a more casual outfit.

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He bore the whole thing with much patience, as mom and I reviewed the back screen of the camera to make sure he had the “good” smile and not the cheesy fake one. And we did find that some of the guy poses just weren’t going to work with his long limbs, no matter how hard we tried to contort him.

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But overall, he was doing just fine. Better than fine, really. Especially because he doesn’t like to have his picture taken. Usually, for guys that don’t care to have their pictures taken, I have a thirty-minute mini-session that just makes sure you have something good for the yearbook and the family mantel. But mom signed him up for the two-hour big enchilada session. Multiple locations, multiple clothing changes.

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Speaking of clothing changes, we finally decided it was okay to let him sweat and do his cross country thing. The original idea was to have him run up a hill silhouetted against the sunset. Except we were having a beautiful, cloudless autumn day. No clouds, no sunset color. It just gets dark.

I made him run anyway, multiple times. He’s a distance runner. He can take it, right? I think I made him run up the hill a dozen times in a row, adjusting his path so we could see his feet as they cleared the grass. We got some far away shots and some close ups.

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And a few posed shots in his cross country jacket.

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And even some in the un-uniform.

He was so obliging and easy to work with, despite his natural disinclination for taking pictures, that we got a huge number of keepers for his mom to choose from. My husband and his brother have an actual #1 Son button that gets passed back and forth between them depending on what they do to either please or aggravate their mother. My senior runner has two brothers, but I think he earned the #1 Son badge this week.