BY MELISSA CRUZ

In print | October 4, 2007

This past Friday afternoon, Swarthmore’s varsity cross country teams raced at the annual Paul Short Invitational held at Lehigh University. Every year, teams from far and near, of all divisions and regions, meet at the Lehigh University campus to race and to see how they measure up against other teams, other runners, fellow teammates and the infamous clock.

Both the men’s and women’s teams competed in separate junior varsity races against many challenging competitors, including Princeton University, Villanova University, Johns Hopkins University and Syracuse University. Because the races took place while classes were still in session, several top runners had to miss their races. “which we ran last year), we would’ve placed third out of the 33 complete teams that raced,” Coach Pete Carroll said.

Although they couldn’t score competitively against other teams, the Garnet women did their fair share of conquering individually. The ladies were led by Ashley Davies ‘10, who smoked the 6k race in 23 minutes and 39 seconds and placed 60th out of 407 female runners. Davies ran the race with a remarkable pace of 6:21 per mile. She was also accompanied by several of her teammates at sub-6:30 pace. As a reflection of the team’s depth, “we had six of our runners within 20 seconds of each other,” Kathy Feeney ’09 said. Finishing a mere four seconds behind Davies and placing 67th was Emma Stanley ’09, with a time of 23:43. Bess Ritter ’09, who crossed the finish line at 24:08, was the leader of a pack of several Garnet ladies who completed the race within the 24-minute mark. Following right on her heels were Caitlin Russel ’11 (24:10), Feeney (24:13), Lauren DeLuca ’10 (24:17), Nyika Corbett ’10 (24:22), Faith Pampel ’09 (24:28), Ada Okum ’11 (24:34), Rebecca Woo ’11 (24:47) and Chelsea Brett ’11 (24:55).

“The strength of our women’s team is that we’re all together,” Carroll said. “Now we want to move up by 20 seconds over the course of the next six weeks.” With the team already running in the tight pack that was seen Friday, this goal is certainly not unattainable.

The men’s team raced the 8k course following Erik Saka ’09. Saka flew through the course with a pace of 5:26 and an overall time of 27 minutes flat, landing him with a 77th place finish out of 443 male finishers. Close on his tail and placing 110th an 112th were Jon Shoop ’08 and Jonnie “Jonnycakes” Tompkins ’10, who raced at 27:22 and 27:23, respectively. More top Garnet male finishers were Patrick Harnett ’11 (27:54), Alex Frye ’11 (28:28), Andrew VanBuren ’10 (29:13), and David Riccardi ’10 (30:23). “The guys are where they want to be,” Saka said. “Running at Lehigh gave all of us, especially the first-years, a good feel for what Regionals will be like.” Toward the end of the fall ’07 season, the regionals race will also be held at Lehigh.

With regards to training in between weekend invitationals and the occasional weekday meet, Carroll commented on a new speed approach he is testing. “Right now we are doing a lot less speed-specificity running than we did last year,” he said. When the team did lots of sprint workouts last year, Carroll noted that “the runners would get faster, very quickly and early in the season, but then they would plateau around the final, more important races of the season.” This year, they’re saving the speed for a bit later in the season.

“Our number one mission was to get on the course and get a dry run to get a feel for the course,” Carroll said.

The Garnet will race again this Saturday at the Dickinson Invitational in Carlisle, Pa.

« RETURN TO SPORTS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »