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Neftalem Araia at the 2006 NCAA Cross Country Championships pre-race press conference.
With the start of the 2007 NCAA Division I Cross Country Championships less than 24 hours away, athletes and coaches from some of the top teams agreed that the men's field was as close as it had been in years. "Wisconsin is half a head taller than everyone else," conceded Colorado coach Mark Wetmore, "but there are five or six very even teams here." Oregon's Vin Lananna and Arkansas' John McDonnell agreed with Wetmore's analysis. "Wisconsin will be tough to beat," said Lananna. "We're happy to have a shot at it if Wisconsin trips over themselves," said McDonnell.
But it was Josh McDougal of Liberty, a three-time Pre-Nationals winner, who pointed to the factor most likely to sort out that even field: the course conditions. After days of rain, the Wabash Valley Family Sports Center outside Terre Haute is saturated. Though the sun came out on Sunday afternoon, conditions for Monday's races are most likely to resemble the 2004 NCAA meet here, where favored Wisconsin stumbled in the last mile. McDougal said, "I remember those Colorado guys flying us in the last few kilometers like we were standing still."
McDonnell observed that the soft going would probably keep the front runners closely packed. "It won't be that fast up front." The athletes mostly agreed that the race was likely to come down to the final mile, though Neftalem Araia of Stanford, an Indianapolis native who raced here in high school, observed that he planned to "try to make these guys hurt as much as possible."
"The first time I ran this course," Araia recounted, "I ran 18:35 for 5k; it was 100 degrees. It was my first varsity cross country race. The next time, I had just taken the SATs, and I didn't warm up because I was late. Every time I've run here, it's been stressful. The conditions have always been ridiculous. So I smile, because it's like, 'What's going to happen today, what's going to be the challenge?' It's not like [outdoors] in Sacramento, where you don't hear anyone in the crowd; it's lined with our friends, it's lined with our family. I could buy in to it, and grimace and die and hurt, but smiling makes it easier."
Posted by Parker Morse at 6:17 p.m. | Tags: 2006 NCAA Cross Country, Event Previews