X-Country teams come up short at Heps

Men struggle to keep pace with Big Red The goblins were wearing Cornell red as they spread havoc through Van Cortlandt Park's five-mile course during Friday's Heptagonal cross-country championships. The Penn men's team finished a disappointing seventh in their first important meet of the season. In one of the most unusual races the Quakers have run since coach Charlie Powell and junior co-captains Terry McLean and Joe Hall can remember, Penn finished with 160 points behind rivals Cornell (46), Brown (83), Dartmouth (84), Harvard (94), Navy (118) and Yale (143). McLean was Penn's top finisher in 16th place, clocking in at 25 minutes 58 seconds, and Hall was not far behind, crossing the finish line in 19th place with a time of 26:06, but Penn had hoped to place both captains in the top 10. Freshman Matt Wilkinson was praised by Powell for finishing as Penn's fourth man in 26:33. "It was just weird," Hall said. "It was a strange race – beyond anything we were expecting." Cornell, ranked 22nd in the nation, was the culprit of the mayhem as it led the pack out with a first-mile pace of 4:32, more than 15 seconds faster than the first-mile pace Penn has been training at. Despite the speed of the first mile, the finish times were the slowest they have been in years because most of the runners were burnt out from the intense first miles as they crossed the finish line. But Penn in particular had a tough time staying on pace. "I think they just got a little crazy," Powell said. "They went out too hard and tried to do too much too soon. "We thought we would go out slower," Hall said. "It was contradictory to everything we had been training for." Since the course, according to Powell's experience, requires runners to race from the front of the pack the entire time, the team initially tried to stay with the Cornell runners, which drained them of all energy. "Everybody challenged [Cornell] and pushed them, that's what made it crazy," Powell said. "Nobody was scared of them and nobody wanted to let them go." The rest of the race progressed much more slowly and it became more a battle of wills than one of physical vigor, where the only strategy was to finish. "It shows what the pace did for everything," Hall said. "Really good people died, while everyone else held on for their lives." "We haven't been training as a speed team simple as that," Powell said. "Things will be different at the IC4A's when we'll be running 10,000 meters and it will be impossible to go out that fast." Powell was understanding of the team's instincts and attributed the team's failure to challenge the top Ivy powers to inexperience. It was plain to see that the more experience a team had, the better it finished in the race. Cornell ran with four seniors, Dartmouth with two and Brown with three. Without any seniors and only two juniors, Penn was unable to collect itself into a pace in order to avoid early exhaustion and to utilize its strength advantage. "In a competitive runner's mind, it would have been difficult to watch the top Cornell and Dartmouth guys go out so fast and not react," Powell said. "A good runner goes out looking to win. Maybe the next time he'll learn from the mistake – that is why experience was such a factor. We are still a young team." As Penn prepares for the last meet of the season, it hopes to keep in mind the lesson it learned at the Heptagonals without losing the will that brought it to the finish line. Although the Quakers did not do as well as they had expected, Powell summed it up best. "You can't knock someone for having the guts to be a competitor."