Easy run through the Bronx lands M. X-C in second place

Charlie Powell wasn't trying to fool anyone. The bespectacled Penn men's cross country coach wasn't even trying to win. But he certainly had rival coaches and runners baffled on Saturday during his team's second-place finish at the Fordham Invitational. After the first mile, the Quakers -- expected to challenge for the meet title at New York's Van Cortlandt Park -- were lagging along in a pack near the back of the race. "Everyone was like, OWhat's wrong with Penn? What are they doing?'" Powell said. But Penn's coach wasn't worried. This was exactly what he wanted. Powell instructed his Quakers to approach this race as just a glorified workout -- an even-paced tempo run. So while most of the runners were blasting out to sub-five-minute first miles, the Penn harriers were cruising along at about 5:20. "[The Duke runners] were hiking out in 4:40 the first mile, and I didn't want our guys to have any part of that," Powell said. Instead, Penn slowly moved up as a group -- to the middle of the pack by the three-mile mark and in the top-30 with less than two kilometers to go. And, for the most part, that's where Penn stayed. Four Quakers finished in the top 25, leading Penn to a second-place finish in the 12-team field. "Everyone was like, OHoly cow, how'd they do that?'" Powell said. "As strange as it was, it worked exactly to game plan." Led by junior Matt Gioffre's 15th-place finish, Penn totaled 80 points -- good enough to beat schools like Harvard (110 points), but nowhere near Duke. The Blue Devils scored only 20 points and garnered 13 of the top 18 places. "They take it pretty seriously, this meet," Penn junior Anthony Ragucci said. "They were treating it as a race." The Quakers, on the other hand, purposely held back, trying to maintain a tight pack -- albeit at a slow pace. "Times were irrelevant this weekend, as were places for the most part," Ragucci said. Several Quakers -- including Ragucci -- didn't even wear racing spikes on the cinder track. That made footing tough, as Ragucci slipped and fell at the two-mile mark. "Spikes can really tighten up your calves and we didn't want that to happen," Ragucci said. The keys for Penn were building confidence and avoiding injury, not necessarily racing well. "If we were racing well right now, we'd be in trouble because we would be peaking too early," Ragucci said. The Quakers did get an encouraging performance from senior Andrew Kish (20th place) -- who spent last semester in Egypt. "If we're going to be a good team, [Kish] is going to have a good season," Powell said. Matt Caporaletti (21st), Bryan Kovalsky (25th) and Ragucci (27th) rounded out Penn's top five in the meet. It was an encouraging -- though far from awe-inspiring -- race, according to Powell. "I think this could gel into a good team, but we're not there yet in no way," Powell said. "We're not a great team yet, but we took the first step that we needed to do.

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