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There's no question that Boulder's version of the USA Cross Country Championships was, in many ways, better than the meet has been for years. There were more spectators than we've seen at any cross country meet other than possibly NCAAs, even if we don't swallow the quasi-official estimate of 10,000.
Those spectators lined the course almost completely by the time the men's senior race started, and the athletes noticed. "There wasn't one spot on the course that there weren't people yelling for us," said men's runner-up Adam Goucher. "I've never seen such a great representation of spectators. It was really the entire course, people yelling, whether they knew us or not, they were out there and enthusiastic and it was wonderful to be a part of it," said women's champion Deena Kastor. They set out to the corners of the course and ran back and forth across the loops to track the leaders.
They congregated, too, by the muddy creek called the "Jonesy Surprise" which was really the only terrain on the otherwise flat course. The creek started the day snowy and frozen, but with each successive race got muddier and more treacherous. The athletes would negotiate the obstacle easily early in their races, but as their fatigue grew the ditch got tougher. The crowd resembled the sort of group you'll see by the water jump of a steeplechase—they cheered a good performance, but they cheered louder when an athlete bounced up from a fall and scrambled on up the course, muddy but not defeated.
The ditch was the only significant obstacle on the course because the other significant obstacle was the air—or, at Boulder's 5,350 feet, the lack of it. While many altitude-trained athletes did well, it was how the athletes adapted their race strategy to the altitude which made more of a difference. Getting in oxygen debt early was a bad choice, as men's champion Alan Culpepper explained: "As soon as you get out over your head, you can't slow down like you can at sea level and get it back."
"It takes its toll and you don't know until you get out here," said women's runner-up Shalane Flanagan.
Conspicuous by his absence was defending champion and new half marathon American record holder Ryan Hall, now slated to run the London Marathon in April. "There were a few people who didn't show up, and that's their loss," said Adam Goucher after the race, with Hall, as well as Meb Keflezighi, almost certainly in mind. While Hall's training base in Mammoth would have positioned him well in the altitude sweepstakes, the aggressive racing strategy which led him to victory in New York was the same one tried, unsuccessfully, by Dathan Ritzenhein in Boulder. Ritzenhein noted that his outing in Edinburgh earlier this year was "the totally opposite [strategy]. I went out easier and closed hard."
The lack of a short course race may have also changed the faces in the fields. Names like Alan Webb, Matt Tegenkamp, and Carrie Tollefson, who have run cross country in the past, stuck to the indoor track circuit. Race Results Weekly publisher David Monti noted, however, that Kastor won the last championship before the introduction of the short course race (1997), the first long-course race of the two-race USA Cross Country Championships (1999), and now the first championship after the removal of the short course races.
An open question now is which athletes will sign on for the IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Mombasa, predicted by one Kenyan specialist to be "...an organizational train-wreck, but a lot of fun anyway." Kastor has committed to running the Boston Marathon, which will almost certainly take priority for her; Culpepper is also unlikely to go. Ritzenhein, on the other hand, stated with some certainty that Mombasa would be his next goal race, though he wouldn't be drawn out about what his expectations for that race would be. USATF is requiring that athletes declare their intentions by this Thursday, February 15th, so that alternates may be offered spots; the team will probably be announced sometime next week.
Posted by Parker Morse at 2:10 p.m. | Tags: Race Reports, Editorials, 2007 USA Cross Country Champs