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MarathonPerformance.com, a new web site highlighting the Boulder- and Eugene-based athletes coached by Brad Hudson, has launched. The current roster includes Casey Burchill, Jason Hartmann, Dathan Ritzenhein, James Carney, and Stephanie Rothstein, with promises of more athletes to come in 2008.
Posted by Alison Wade at 9:57 p.m. | Tags: Web Sites, Elite Development | Comments (0)
As of last night, we have posted all of our photos from the NCAA Division I Cross Country Championships —nearly 1,500 of them—and we will now be working on our photos from the NCAA Division III Cross Country Championships.
Posted by Alison Wade at 8:56 a.m. | Tags: Site News, Running Photos | Comments (1)
Sally Kipyego of Texas Tech said, even before the race, that the biggest difference between the 2006 NCAA Cross Country Championships, when she won the first of her now-lengthy series of NCAA titles, and the 2007 edition was that the extra year's experience gave her more confidence in her own ability to win the race. And this year, instead of tearing away from the pack early in the race, Kipyego sat back. "I wanted to start slowly and move up," she explained afterward.
Still, Kipyego feared the strong finish of 2007 USA steeplechase champion Jenny Barringer, the only NCAA athlete who has been within 10 seconds of beating Kipyego this season. "I knew Jenny would finish strong, and I wanted to be away from her before the end of the race." So on the long hill that makes up the Terre Haute course's backstretch, she pulled away from the competition. By the halfway mark of the 6k course, Kipyego was alone, and she stayed that way until the finish. Her lead over Barringer, who pulled away from Florida State's Susan Kuijken and Iowa's Diane Nukuri in the last 2k, would be 17 seconds. Kipyego's winning time of 19:30.90 broke Jenny Barringer's course record by approximately 18 seconds.
"[Barringer] motivates me to work a bit harder," said Kipyego. "Having such good comptition makes me who I am." Kipyego, who was accepted into Texas Tech's nursing program this year, now carries an academic schedule which requires her to do three quarters of her workouts by herself. "My coaches work around my schedule, and sometimes my team waits to run with me," she explained. "It's been good for me to see that I can manage two things at once if I work for it."
Barringer echoed Kipyego's words, saying, "She's getting better and I'm getting better. I wouldn't be as good as I am without her."
Once again, Stanford's women arrived in Terre Haute strongly favored, and, as coach Peter Tegen said, "We wanted to make sure we didn't do anything, for lack of a better word, cute, or acrobatic. We wanted to avoid mistakes, not chase after individual honors." And for the most part, they did; West regional champion Teresa McWalters and regular contender Arianna Lambie ran together, a few seconds off the lead, through halfway, with the rest of the team, led by Lauren Centrowitz, also working together. At that point, Tegen said, it looked like a solid performance, and with a mile to go Stanford looked untouchable. "Except for something like a lightning strike," Tegen qualified himself, wryly.
But then McWalters began to unravel, struggling up the homestretch as other runners streamed by, and eventually crawled across the finish line. Lambie finished ninth overall (scoring 8 points after non-scoring individuals were removed) and McWalters was eventually credited with 62nd, almost a minute behind. But McWalters still scored for Stanford, as their fifth finisher, and as it happened, they would have won even if she had not. They scored 145 points to Oregon's 177 (led by Nicole Blood, who finished just ahead of Lambie).
Tegen noted that with Stanford's third-consecutive title, Lambie now had the rare (if not unique) distinction of having contributed to four national team titles in four years of competition; her redshirt season coincided with Stanford's one loss in the last five cross country seasons.
Posted by Parker Morse at 6:39 p.m. | Tags: Race Reports, 2007 NCAA Cross Country | Comments (0)
Josh McDougal hasn't lost many races in his four-year NCAA cross country career, but most of his losses have come here in Terre Haute. The Liberty University senior has come to the NCAA Championships here as a contender for the individual title four times, but in his previous three appearances, McDougal was 13th, fourth, and 27th, respectively.
This year, McDougal stuck with the lead pack through the early parts of the race. Around the 7k mark, he made a move to thin down the pack, which at that point included Oregon's Galen Rupp, Lopez Lomong of Northern Arizona, and Jacob Korir of Eastern Kentucky. Rupp covered that move and then pushed the pace himself, which thinned the pack down to two.
"I moved again in the second loop," said McDougal, but even though Rupp fell 10 or 15 meters behind, "I knew it wasn't over."
Rupp battled back, pulling even with McDougal again on the 500m-long finishing stretch and forcing McDougal to reach deep for one more finishing drive. Perhaps Rupp was a bit less rested after his long summer track campaign, or had used too much of his finishing speed catching up; perhaps McDougal remembered the 400 repeats which he said he'd been doing three or four seconds faster this year than ever before. Wherever it came from, it was enough to put McDougal ahead by one second, finally, for the win in his last chance at the cross country crown.
When it came to team scoring, though, McDougal was a non-scoring individual, so Rupp scored only one point for Oregon. Behind him, teammate Shadrack Kiptoo-Biwott was ninth, good for six points, and a trio of sophomores (Diego Mercado, Kenny Klotz, and Diego's twin brother Danny Mercado) wrapped up the scoring to give Oregon 85 points and their first men's team victory in 30 years. Behind them, third-ranked Iona brought in a tight pack (with just a 33-second 1-5 spread) to score 113 points for second; the Cowboys of Oklahoma State were a surprising third with 180 points.
Oregon coach Vin Lananna said his team, comprised entirely of juniors and sophomores, was "poised to create another chapter" in the Oregon story. "I asked them to be aggressive from the beginning. Winning or not winning was less important. I told them what was more important was establishing the identity of this Oregon program. They're young, and they have even bigger and better things ahead of them."
Posted by Parker Morse at 6:37 p.m. | Tags: Race Reports, 2007 NCAA Cross Country | Comments (0)
The press conference the day before the NCAA Cross Country Championships is largely for the convenience of reporters from daily newspapers who are writing meet previews for Monday papers, and it seldom, if ever, reveals any new news about the top individuals or teams. The athletes and coaches are usually deliberately vague about any plans or expectations beyond the obvious. "I'd like to have my top athletes scoring as few points as possible," said Mark Wetmore about Colorado's men. Mick Byrne of Iona, asked what he would have to do to finally bring a men's team title to New York from Indiana State University's Terre Haute course, looked over at Wetmore and Oregon's Vin Lananna and said, "Beat these guys."
Florida State's first-year women's coach Karen Harvey, who arrived in Tallahassee from the University of Illinois, was one breath of fresh air in the room. Asked about what was left for a coach to do before the race, she exposed her own stress level. "I probably won't sleep tonight," she admitted. "I'll talk to each runner individually this afternoon about goals, and the team together. I'll try to keep them calm and focused on goals. But it's out of [the coaches'] hands now."
Harvey also took a question about the development of women's running in the NCAA head on. "When I was at Michigan," Harvey said, "there was a lot of talent in the front, much of it developed by Coach [Peter] Tegen [who was sitting just down the table from Harvey]. Now, that talent is going deeper and deeper in the race."
Tegen, who had previously been relatively quiet, then noted that the improved depth has brought problems as well. "There have always been doubts about the qualifying procedure: did we get them all, did we get the best. As parity grows between the teams, questions about the qualifying procedure are going to come up. The system is good, and it works, but that may not always be true."
The men expected to contend for the individual title were also more candid than usual. It started with Josh McDougal's confession that his 2006 performance (27th) was "really disappointing." "My first year, I ran like a freshman," he recalled, about the first time he arrived in Terre Haute off an undefeated season. "Sophomore year, I had things more dialed in. But last year, I just fell apart. [But] I think I can say that this year I'm in the best shape of my life."
Lopez Lomong, who raced McDougal when both were in high school in New York, also had a burst of candor, spilling most of his race plan, unless he was bluffing. "I don't want to hammer at the start," he said. "I want to stay back and just chill for a while." Lomong, McDougal, and Shadrack Songok all agreed that the real racing, even with faster, drier course conditions than 2006's mud-fest, would begin between after the 7k mark of the 10k men's course. "People start to run out of patience around there," explained McDougal. "That's where things thin down to two or three guys who are really contesting the title. Before that, it's a much larger pack."
It's unlikely that anyone's race plans will change based on the "secrets" spilled in the press conference, however. "It's hard to correct any weaknesses at this point," Songok observed. "We can't go out and do another speed workout now. There's not much you can do but try to stay healthy."
Posted by Parker Morse at 8:37 p.m. | Tags: 2007 NCAA Cross Country | Comments (5)
We've posted photos of last weekend's NCAA West Region Cross Country Championships and NCAA Northeast Region Cross Country Championships. We have also (finally) had time to finish posting our photos of the Mayor's Cup.
We will be photographing today's NCAA DIII Cross Country Championships and Monday's NCAA DI Cross Country Championships. We will be posting all of those photos as quickly as possible, but might be slowed by the high volume and our travel plans.
Posted by Alison Wade at 9:16 a.m. | Tags: Running Photos | Comments (0)
As was announced in late August by the NCAA, the NCAA, USTFCCCA, and CSTV have partnered together to bring you the first ever live telecast of the NCAA Division I Men's and Women's Cross Country Championships which will be held in Terre Haute, Indiana on Monday, November 19th. The live telecast will run from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (11:00 a.m. -12:30 CST) and will also be webcast live by CSTV. The link to the live webcast will be available on the USTFCCCA web site, www.ustfccca.org.
Posted by Alison Wade at 12:11 p.m. | Tags: Television Coverage, Webcast | Comments (1)
While we were putting together our Ryan Shay photo gallery, we came across this previously-unpublished photo of this "unknown" guy who was in the 10,000 meter race which Shay won at the 2001 NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon.
Posted by Alison Wade at 3:54 p.m. | Tags: Running Photos | Comments (3)
Donations in memory of Ryan Shay can be sent to:
The Ryan Shay Memorial Fund
5873 Leisure Lane
East Jordan, MI 49727
Posted by Alison Wade at 9:49 a.m. | Tags: Fundraising | Comments (4)
We have posted our photos of the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials - Men's Marathon.
Other galleries:
New York Road Runners
Steven Starr's photos (plus pre-race gallery)
Getty Images
Raymond Britt's photos
Running Times
Flotrack
Countless other photos on Flickr (try your own search)
Posted by Alison Wade at 9:50 a.m. | Tags: Running Photos | Comments (0)