BY JEFF CAO

In print | October 5, 2006

The Swarthmore cross country teams finished ahead of many strong teams on Friday at the Paul Short Invitational. Falling behind only Haverford College and Wayne State University, the women’s team finished third, ahead of conference rivals Muhlenberg and Franklin and Marshall.

The men’s team finished a respectable sixth place, led by Vernon Chaplin ’07. Before the race, the Swarthmore team was not notified about the use of timing chips; scrambling to put them on, the team missed out on its usual warm-up strides, short runs at around 85 percent of race pace to get loosened up and increase heart rate.

“They didn’t tell us and they had to hold the race for a couple of minutes so we could get chips,” Colin Schimmelfing ‘10 said. The meet became more unusual after one team’s false start, but this allowed the Garnet to get “strides” in. “It was pretty crazy, but it turned out alright,” Schimmelfing said.

With a sixth place finish, the men surpassed their predecessors. “Relative to past teams, we ran faster compared to two years ago,” head coach Peter Carroll said.

“The competition is real tough. We were missing two of our top seven [Ross Weller and Dan Hodson]. Many of our guys were also sick,” captain Nat Erb-Satullo ’07 said.

Chaplin finished third with a time of 26:02 out of a total of 273 runners. Following him were Jon Shoop ’08 (17th), Erik Saka ’09 (35th) and Nat Erb-Satullo ’07 (64th).

The women’s team did even better. With over 300 runners, Emma Stanley ’09 and Nyika Corbett ’10 both finished in the top 25. They were closely followed by Erin Ronhovde ’10 (29th), Bess Ritter ’09 (46th) and Kathy Feeney ’09 (58th).

With such a young women’s team, one would expect this season to be about rebuilding, but the squad seems determined to prove that it is a competitor. “The girls are way better than two years ago. I think the women are doing great. They are exceeding expectations this year,” Carroll said.

Both teams are exceeding their predecessors even in practice. “The freshmen are doing more mileage. That never happened in past years,” Erb-Satullo said. “We have been training really hard. We have been doing really hard interval workouts … I run around 80 miles a week.” With six practices a week, the team is trying to squeeze in as much mileage as possible, even waking up at 8 a.m. on Sundays to run.

The team this year is not only training harder but also staying healthy, allowing them to be more successful in major meets. One of the main goals of this season is avoid injuries. “Of course if you run only 20 miles a week you won’t get hurt,” coach Carroll said. “We do a lot of core stuff, [such as] stretching and icing.”

As another meet to prepare for conference championships in late October, many thought of the race as a successful practice. “We run 8Ks instead of 5Ks. So it takes time to get the pace down,” Schimmelfing said about getting used to college meets. “You have to run the first three miles [equivalent to a 5K] at your high school pace and then run two more at the same pace.”

Another main goal of the team is to finish higher in the conference than it did the past three years. “The conference championships determine where you are,” Erb-Satullo said, “We were third for the past three years. Our goal is to take second this year over Dickinson and Muhlenberg.”

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