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USA Track & Field has announced the members of the team that will represent the U.S. at the 2007 IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Mombasa, Kenya, on March 24.
| Senior Men | Senior Women |
| Junior Boys | Junior Girls |
Posted by Alison Wade at 9:04 a.m. | Tags: Event Previews, 2007 USA Cross Country Champs | Comments (0)
All of our photos of the USA Cross Country Championships are now posted. Randy Miyazaki has also posted a slew of photos of the races at TrackAndFieldPhoto.com, and Cheryl Treworgy's photos are available at PrettySporty.com.
We also have photos of BU's Valentine Invitational coming soon.
Posted by Alison Wade at 11:34 a.m. | Tags: Running Photos, 2007 USA Cross Country Champs | Comments (0)
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 | Comments (0)
It was supposed to be a dramatic contest. Flora London Marathon champion Deena Kastor would play the part of The Veteran, and 8:33.25 3,000m runner Shalane Flanagan, recent American record setter at the Reebok Boston Indoor Games, would play the part of The Young Challenger. It worked out that way for the first of four laps of the 2-kilometer loop at the USA Cross Country Championships, held Saturday in Boulder, Colorado. But it wasn't long into the second lap of the senior women's championship before Flanagan was struggling with the thin air of Boulder's 5,350 foot altitude, and Kastor was cruising to a dominating win—her eighth cross country national championship—in a manner that demonstrated why she's one of the world's best.
Kastor's winning margin over Flanagan was more than a minute: 26:47 to 27:48, on a relatively flat course which had been chopped into muddy ruts by four previous races.
"Running against Deena is like shooting hoops with Michael Jordan," conceded Flanagan after the race. "I came here to win, and I went after it, but I faced down a lot of demons in those last two laps." At the finish, Flanagan still held a 13-second advantage over third-place Kara Goucher as a legacy of how hard she had worked to stay with Kastor. "Maybe I was a little naive in thinking that [the altitude] wouldn't affect me much, but I feel terrible now, so probably it did."
Kastor, who trains in the skiing community of Mammoth, California, noted that "I'm actually probably one of the few athletes that's coming down in altitude to run here, by a couple thousand feet."
Kastor, who hadn't run the national championships since 2003, was thrilled with her return to the mud. "I was just so excited to be here again. I am passionately in love with cross country running, and so I’m glad the spectators were able to come out here and appreciate it, because I think this is the greatest sport in the world."
Kastor, who plans on running the Boston Marathon in April in hopes of improving her standing in the World Marathon Majors, said she would have to consult with her coach regarding her decision whether or not to run at the World Cross Country Championships in Mombasa in late March.
Many alumni of the University of Colorado, both those still based in Boulder and those returning for this race, were mentioned as possible contenders for the men's title, but it was Alan Culpepper, who also won this race in 1999 and 2003, who was standing on the awards podium spraying a bottle of water over the crowd as though it was champagne. Culpepper, who lives in nearby Lafayette, ran a distant third behind Dathan Ritzenhein and Adam Goucher for much of the race. As Goucher fought to catch Ritzenhein, both were swept up in the fifth lap by Culpepper's steady pace.
"I did plan on running an even race," said Culpepper, "because as soon as you get out over your head, you can't slow down like you can at sea level and get it back. Just having raced here before and [having] run the Bolder Boulder [10k], I just knew that I needed to be conservative, especially the first k[ilometer]. I did that and then really from there I just ran what I felt like was the right effort."
For four of the six 2k laps, it looked like Ritzenhein, CU's most recent NCAA Cross Country Champion, might run away with it. Goucher, attempting to close the gap, found himself frustrated regularly by a muddy ditch added to the course at the insistence of former marathon world record holder (and Boulder resident) Steve Jones. "Three out of six times, I fell in the ditch," reported Goucher, "and every time I lost all the ground I'd made up on Dathan." Goucher finally caught Ritzenhein not long after Culpepper sailed by both of them.
Culpepper's winning time was 37:09; Goucher came in at 37:35 with Ritzenhein at 37:37. Jorge Torres in fourth made a top-four sweep for University of Colorado alums.
Posted by Parker Morse at 11:51 p.m. | Tags: Race Reports, 2007 USA Cross Country Champs | Comments (0)