LAUREL — Caleb Cook is just happy to be running again.
The Laurel sophomore missed his freshman track and field season after getting surgery on both legs.
"What really happened is I grew too much. There was too much muscle behind my knee pinching off my artery. There was no blood flow beneath the knee. I had to get surgery and take out some of my muscle," Cook said. "It was just really bad. I couldn't run very far without my calves cramping up so bad. I couldn't even run a block."
Cook said his muscles atrophied due to the surgery and he had to grind in the weight room and through wrestling to get back into form. But there's still work to be done.
"It helped a lot because with wrestling you use a lot of different movements, and it helped because I wasn't running on it all the time. It helped bring me up a little bit," Cook said. "It just sucked a ton. I like being active and it really just sucked sitting on the couch not being able to move my legs."
Caleb's older sister Carly is currently running at Utah Tech and was quite the talent while here in Montana, so it's no surprise there's a little sibling rivalry going on.
"The standard she set was she was fast. But my goal is to be faster before I'm her age," Caleb said. "Funny story, I was in eighth grade and she was a sophomore. We beat each other's time every other meet and were pushing ourselves to beat our sibling the next meet."
That competition is going to live on between the two as Caleb continues to improve.
