The Grass Is Always Greener ⏱️

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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, Jasmine Fehr, and Audrey Allen.

Dancing With The XC Stars 💃

This year, the Big Dance is going down in the heart of Big Ten Country: Madison, Wisconsin. And if the promise of Spotted Cow and the possibility of a snowy race course aren’t enough to get you excited, the battle royale between home-grown Olympians, 28-year-old freshmen, and everyone in between will certainly be a tango for the ages.

Whether or not meet organizers will regret their decision to not cap spectators at the Zimmer Cross Country Course remains to be seen, but the excitement around the nation can’t be cooled down by a forecasted local high of 39°F. Particularly if you’re watching from the couch Saturday morning, the chance to follow the whole meet for 2.5 hours straight on TV via ESPNU isn’t something we can take for granted…

This year has a lot to live up to. The last time NCAAs were held in Madison, back in 2018, home field advantage helped Wisconsin senior Morgan McDonald edge out Stanford’s Grant Fisher for the men’s title. Mike Smith added a major bullet point to his resume and some significant hardware to the ol’ trophy case with NAU’s second consecutive team title. Notable top dogs on that snowy day included eventual Paris Olympians Conner Mantz and Clayton Young, eventual podcast co-hosts Olli Hoare and Geordie Beamish, and future OAC teammates Joe Klecker and Yared Nuguse, to name a few. On the women’s side, Dani Jones’s individual title led Colorado to the team crown over eventual Paris Olympians Weini Kelati, Jessica Hull, Elise Cranny, Fiona O’Keeffe, Courtney Wayment, Val Constien, Sharon Lokedi, and Susan Ejore-Sanders. No small feat!

Six years later, the course is once again slated to be trampled on by two stacked fields and we’re anticipating the sort of racing that almost gives one a sense of nostalgia before anything’s even happened. 

And a lot of that starts with the Mountain Region’s batch of qualifiers. Some of our hypotheticals from last week came to fruition as indeed six men’s teams qualified out of that corner of the country, with small surprises from Utah State and Colorado clinching qualifying spots when it mattered most. But with 25 other teams in the mix, all eyes will be on the firepower up front. 

BYU and NAU both enter with their sights set on picking up another team trophy. But with teams as talented as regional rivals New Mexico and podium favorites Oklahoma State, Iowa State, and Arkansas – not to mention the front-running tendencies of Texas Tech duo of Solomon Kipchoge and Ernest Cheruiyot and WSU’s Evans Kurui – things may get out hot early, testing the patience and late-race mettle of the deeper teams’ 3-4-5 runners. The Cougars and Lumberjacks may end up slugging it out largely off-camera, as their recent success tends to come from huge point swings deep in the pack in the final kilometers.

Nerd alert: Stats obsessives might want to keep tabs on where Lars Mitchel of Colorado State ultimately places. The lowest-placing individual qualifier to make NCAAs, he finished 18th in the Mountain race – a positive spin to racing in a region sending 40+ runners in teams spots. How close can he come to an All-American performance one week later?

However, in a small rebuttal to altitude-training diehards, the Southeast region also got six men’s teams into the Big Dance. Among this sextet, Virginia Tech proved to be a true dark horse. The Hokies had not been ranked, or even received votes for that matter, the entire season. It’s probably fair to call this entire region underdogs. Wake Forest, the top dog in the area for much of the fall, looks to be limping into Saturday with some question marks around its runners’ health. But don’t count out a team like UNC, led by two low sticks still rounding into form. 

Another fun, dorky exercise: Score the race as if it were a dual meet between the Mountain and Southeast regions.

For the women, the story is very similar. Team title favorites BYU come in ranked number one, and the three other Mountain squads that qualified, NAU, Utah, and New Mexico, all arrive in Wisconsin ranked in the top 10. Between the influx of oxygen they’ll experience coming down from altitude and the fact that some of the other contending teams – Washington, Oregon, and Providence, for instance – are relying heavily on 1500m specialists, it may prove advantageous for the Mountain squads to push a hot early early pace, rather than leave things to a fast close.

The South region showed the most depth with five teams making it on following the at-large selections. Few of these teams are likely to threaten the Mountain favorites’ battle for the title, but discount a team like Alabama – with its multiple low scorers – at your own risk. Similarly, a squad like Florida that received a good deal of pre-season attention is worth keeping tabs on as the race progresses. Hilda Olemomoi has as good a shot at the win as anybody, it never hurts to basically only have to score four runners, and all it takes is for one or two other runners to have a banner day.

The way a team performs at Regionals isn’t necessarily indicative of how they’ll perform at Nationals. A team good enough to auto-qualify while, for lack of a better phrase, farting around, will look very different on Saturday. Look at the hometown team for example. Wisconsin got second in the Great Lakes meet by employing the oldest “we’re not really trying” trick in the book: running the whole damn race as a five-man pack. Untethered from this sort of strategic approach to racing this weekend, who’s to say how the Badgers and any other teams that kept something in reserve will fare? 

The best part of cross country is that the best storylines that come out of championships tend to be the ones that nobody even bothered to put in the newsletter beforehand. Last weekend is a great example. At first, it seemed like Douglas Buckeridge’s premature celebration at the front of the Great Lakes race would simply be a silly viral moment, as the Purdue Boilermaker let Butler’s William Zegarski slip past his outstretched arms to take the regional win. But that one-place swing – from 2 to 1 – lowered Butler’s team score to 104, tying Michigan State. Butler won the tiebreaker and the men get to go to Wisconsin. But the butterfly effect of the Spartans’ fourth-place bump meant that the Spartans are staying home and Tulsa, the 36th-ranked team in an entirely different region, qualified instead with an at-large bid. 

The lesson here? Well, for starters, run hard through the line. But more importantly, team outcomes in cross-country are famously unpredictable and, with no heavy favorite, the title could come down to one runner finishing somewhere in the mid-40s. What a sport!

For even more NCAA XC coverage, check out Owen Corbett’s detailed preview on the CITIUS MAG site.

Sprint History Is Written By The Victors 💥

Only three short months after the last spike crossed the finish line in the Paris Olympics, we got a post-championships addendum: the second season of SPRINT, which follows the world’s top 100m and 200m stars throughout the 2024 season.

Netflix’s sophomore swing felt… a little underwhelming, to say the least. Perhaps it’s the shortened length – down from six episodes in season 1 to four in season 2 – or the close proximity to the season it covered. “ ‘Member this?” works a little better with a bit more room to breathe and reflect, like in Netflix’s biggest sports doc offering of the year, The Comeback, which takes Boston Red Sox fans back through the historic 2004 postseason 20 years later. Regardless of the exact reason, SPRINT, take 2, felt more perfunctory than revelatory, more highlight reel than deep dive.

The most common criticism so far by the track and field peanut gallery has been a perceived over-focus on Americans at the expense of their global rivals, most notably spending way more time with 100m champ Noah Lyles than 200m winner Letsile Tebogo. But the folks at Netflix can’t help that the podiums in Paris were decidedly red, white, and blue, with Team USA accounting for 9 of the 12 100m/200m medals and 7 of the 10 medalists. And when you’ve only got about 3 hours of screen time, diving much deeper than the medalists and their primary rivals (i.e. the Jamaicans) feels like a tough ask. In fact, you could argue that Americans were under-represented as the only two medalists in this season without featured interviews were Americans Sha’Carri Richardson and Brittany Brown.

The greater weakness of SPRINT isn’t who’s featured; it’s what’s featured. After 10 episodes across two seasons, it’s clear that the series’s strongest move is expanding the 9-to-22 seconds of a race into hype-music, slow-mo, rapid-cut drama. SPRINT shows off what’s cool about track between the start and finish lines, but it never quite captures the true essence of the sport outside the stadium. There are exceptions – a quiet moment of tearful reflection for Julien Alfred post-100m gold is a real high point for this season – but overall, far more is missing than is shown.

How do you talk about the 2024 season without mentioning Fred Kerley’s mid-year sponsor switch? Elaine Thompson-Herah’s calf injury? Sha’Carri Richardson and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce’s troubles entering the Paris stadium on finals day?

The spectacular collapse of the Jamaican sprint machine (Kishane Thompson’s silver medal notwithstanding) was, perhaps, the biggest meta-narrative of the Olympics. And yet Shericka Jackson and SAFP are largely absent from the latter half of the season, nor are any Jamaican coaches or commentators asked the obvious question: what the heck happened?!

Richardson’s absence is also conspicuous, despite her coach Dennis Mitchell being featured prominently. Sha’Carri is one of the most dynamic and fascinating figures in the sport, and viewers didn’t get so much as a peek inside her psyche after finally making her Olympic debut and getting beat in the final. Obviously, even the bigwigs at Netflix can’t force everyone to participate, but the inevitable result is a hollowness when so much of the conflict and drama ends up framed in vague, distant terms by a Greek chorus of old-timers like Michael Johnson, Ato Boldon, and Allyson Felix offering analysis from the outside.

As much as the “Noah Lyles gets COVID” segment will undoubtedly irk many viewers and perhaps win Noah more haters than new fans, at least it offers a small window into an athlete's mentality when things go wrong. One of the hardest things a track and field pro has to do is walk through the mixed zone and face reporters after things have gone poorly, and for better or worse (with the blow cushioned by a 100m gold, to be fair), Noah has never avoided the media.

Emotion tends to feel more real in the low moments than the high ones; many more of us have dealt with setbacks than have won gold medals. Vulnerability is harder for the athletes to offer and for the cameras to capture without feeling exploitative, but that’s what could take a series like SPRINT from unremarkable to unforgettable.

If Grass Is Good Enough For Gold Medalists, It’s Good Enough For You 🤷‍♂️

Beatrice Chebet and Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the two Olympic 5000m champions from Paris, have more in common than you might think. Beatrice may be more distance-oriented and Jakob keeps insisting he’s a miler, but over 12.5 laps, they’re both able to unleash a lethal mix of strength and speed. They’re both 24 years old and coming off a banner year. Both set world records this season – Chebet in the 10,000m and Ingebrigtsen in the 3000m. And, instead of embarking on a six-month press tour or disappearing into the mountains to pound out thousands of base miles, both Olympic champions are spending their fall racing cross country.

Last weekend, Chebet blew away the field with a gun-to-tape win at the Cross Internacional de Italica in Seville, Spain, traversing the 7.542km course (hell yeah, random XC off-distances!) in 23:32. And yesterday, Ingebrigtsen announced his intention to defend his title at the European Cross Country Championships on December 8th, looking to add a ninth medal to his collection from that race (he currently is the two-time defending senior champ, plus holds four junior titles individually and gold and silver for Norway on his junior teams). It’s safe to say that neither Chebet nor Ingebrigtsen are doing this to improve their World Athletics rankings, and furthermore, they could probably pick up a bigger paycheck with a road race or two if they were in it for the money. So why are the world’s best distance runners sacrificing valuable base-training time to trudge through mud and hills all fall?

Trick question! Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves instead why our best American distance runners aren’t trying to copy the athletes that routinely beat them in hopes of leveling up? The notion that racing on grass matters less or that late autumn is a fallow racing time for tracksters is a decidedly U.S.-centric one. The 2024 World XC champs – Chebet and Joshua Cheptegei – both ended up with Olympic 10,000m titles later in the summer, and the two silver medalists in the event are following their lead. Berihu Aregawi finished second in Seville, and Nadia Battocletti’s first race since August was a 6.2km XC race last Sunday in her home country.

But wait – what about the speed-based 5k runners? Surely world junior record holder in the 1500m Ronald Kwemoi, the silver medalist behind Jakob in Paris, never races on grass! Wrong again: while Kwemoi hasn’t raced since the Brussels Diamond League this year, he competed in three XC races in two weeks between October 29 and November 12 last fall. On the women’s side, Faith Kipyegon may be a small exception to the rule, but her last cross country race came a lot more recently than you might think – she won the Sirikwa Cross Country Classic in Eldoret, Kenya in February 2023.

Grant Fisher, on the other hand, hasn’t raced on dirt since his last collegiate XC race, the 2018 NCAA championships. Which is pretty weird considering he’s a two-time Foot Locker champ and there have been five pro-level national cross country championships since then. But this isn’t a Grant Fisher callout piece – he’s the norm, not the exception, when it comes to Team USA’s approach to the fall season. On the other hand, kudos to Olympic 1500m champ Cole Hocker, who probably had to swallow a little bit of pride en route to a 12th-place finish at this year’s USATF XC Championships, but hey – he showed up, got a hard effort in, and hopefully learned something.

Some of it has to be circumstantial. Frustratingly, the U.S. XC champs are consistently in the middle of winter, often directly conflicting with notable indoor track races. So that’s one problem. The other is that the bulk of quality cross country races for pros do take place in Europe, and it’s understandable that a West Coast resident who just spent three months in a series of non-air-conditioned hotel rooms bouncing between track meets eight time zones away from home might not be eager to go back.

But if every mid-tier podium chaser on the U.S. distance running scene is willing to try bicarbonate and double thresholds because they watched the right YouTube video, why not give fall cross country a[nother] shot? For those of us who don’t give a shit about football, cross country is the quintessential fall sport in America. The crunch of leaves underfoot and the specific odor of mud-caked spikes left in their bag overnight dredge up nostalgia for all the good times when time didn’t matter. And since Americans haven’t won Olympic 5000m or 10,000m gold in 60 years, it might be worth considering that following the champions’ footsteps to greener pastures is the secret to success that’s been hiding in plain sight.

Cross Country Head Coach Sean Cleary On West Virginia’s Progression From Unranked to NCAA Podium Contenders 🎤

For our final coach spotlight ahead of the NCAA Cross Country Championships this Saturday, Jasmine chatted with Sean Cleary, Head Coach of Cross Country and Track at West Virginia University. Cleary has been at the helm of West Virginia’s program for 18 years, following a tenure as an assistant coach and his own time as a student-athlete, graduating in 1992.

In our interview, Cleary discusses his approach to structuring training, the importance of supporting his athletes, and how he creates a positive team environment. He also shares his perspective on the widening resource gap between college programs and reflects on Ceili McCabe’s development—from a promising high school recruit to a 2024 Olympian. 

Cleary’s insights offer a glimpse into what it takes to build a successful cross country team both on and off the course. You can read the full interview here!

Jasmine Fehr: Let’s touch on your coaching philosophy. Can you share about your coaching style and how it’s evolved over the years?

Sean Cleary: When you first start coaching, you think you know everything – but you don’t. I was fortunate to have a strong men’s program early on. A few years later, I started recruiting Canadian women. That began in the late 90s – fall of ’97, I think.

The backbone of my philosophy is creating a club atmosphere within the NCAA. If you have the right culture, you can treat young men and women as individuals. We haven’t nailed it every year, but most years training like a stereotypical European or Canadian club has worked for us.

At West Virginia, we don’t train together everyday. Some women text each other to meet up; others run solo. My friends often ask, “How do you know they’re running?” I just know. And I’m available in town whenever they’re typically running. 

The philosophy is we’re going to work hard twice a week and run long almost every week of the year if we can get it in. The rest of the time we're building mileage. Some double, some cross train, and others have low mileage. I've had women running 90+ miles [per week] and some around 30 [miles per week]. It's tailored to them individually. My hope is that we can eventually have them all on the same page with double runs, consistency, and accountability.

Can you talk more about how you build team culture and what you value most in that process?

As long as my team knows they’re spoiled rotten, as are 99% of the young adults in college running right now, then we’re off to a great start. They might not have as much compared to “x” school, but they’re spoiled compared to athletes 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That’s the first thing you have to do to be able to get along with me: acknowledge that you have a great opportunity in front of you. If they can recognize that, we’re off to a great start.

Another thing is I make myself accessible for one-on-one meetings anytime it’s needed. Sometimes it’s for venting, sometimes it’s because they’re struggling, and other times it’s a discussion about their potential. We sit down in a coffee shop, wherever that may be. Currently it’s McDonald’s because most of the team lives about a 90 second walk from there. We sit in there and talk about the good, bad, ugly, whatever needs to be changed, or whatever’s working really well. 

If they feel lonely or like they’re not performing, they tend to leave these meetings feeling a little better about themselves. I think personal relationships like that are invaluable – to know that away from home, someone is in their corner. If everyone is willing to adjust – whether it’s the athlete making changes or me as a coach – then we can achieve the outcomes we all want.

I love that you have these one-on-one chats at McDonald's. Usually it's in the coach's office or after practice, but nope – you go to McDonald's. 

I haven’t had a meeting in my office in probably ten years. Sometimes we’ll go to a fancier coffee shop in town, but McDonald's is really convenient and quick for them since a lot of them live nearby.

Time management is everything. One reason I don’t schedule practices every single day is because of their lifestyles. Right now, we have three or four women in medical school who recently graduated from West Virginia. Student-athletes in our sport tend to be bright and ambitious, and managing their time is everything.

You have athletes on the team who are currently in medical school? That’s amazing!

It’s unique, but it’s not without its challenges.There’s value in having 10 or 15 athletes training together daily, warming up, cooling down, and going to war together. It’s definitely backfired occasionally. But I think at the end of an athlete’s four- or five-year clock, I’m most comfortable with that process. 

For example, we work out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, depending on the athlete's schedule. It’s not about blocking off a rigid four-hour period but about finding a time that works. When I first started coaching, I wasn’t as flexible – it was “this is the workout day; figure out your academics.” Now, I adjust based on what’s best for each athlete.

Take someone like Ceili, for example. The week of a big race, we don’t have her do a workout. It’s not about tapering or staying fresh – it’s just that her training is already at such a high level that we might overdo it. So, we adjust. 

I think there’s a lot of ways to get it done. Some might work out on Tuesday, others on Wednesday. Even during these staggered workouts, the team comes together. If some athletes work out Tuesday and others Wednesday, those not training will still show up to cheer. They’ll go for their own runs and then cheer for their teammates. It’s a different approach, but I think it creates a positive team atmosphere.

Read the full interview here!

Rapid Fire Highlights 🔥

– Grand Slam Track’s inaugural season schedule has been finalized. The final two Slams for 2025 are set to take place in Philadelphia, May 30th through June at Franklin Field, and in Los Angeles, June 27th through 29th at UCLA’s Drake Stadium. Tickets will go on sale next month.

– Contrary to what LA28 chair Casey Wasserman said over the summer, there is in fact a push on the part of USATF to host the 2028 Olympic Trials in Los Angeles. USATF CEO Max Siegel told the Associated Press the hope is to condense the usually 10-day-long meet, hold it at the LA Coliseum, and for everything to be sorted out by the end of 2024.

– Who knew? Being the fastest to ever run a half marathon sets you up incredibly well to run 15K world record, too. Jacob Kiplimo now owns both marks, aftering going 40:42 in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.

– The elite fields have been announced for next month’s Valencia Marathon, and as usual, it’s shaping up to be a good one. 

– The world 50 mile world record was obliterated two weekends ago by American Courtney Olsen. She went 5:31:56 (6:39 pace) at the Tunnel Hill 50 Mile in rural southern Illinois, the same event that saw the men’s WR fall last year.

– Congrats to recently retired Olympic gold medalist Matt Centrowitz on the birth of his son. Maybe it’s time to give that chest piece tattoo a subheader so it reads “LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON: WHO IS ALSO A FATHER.”

– Tatyana Tomashova’s disqualification from the 2012 Olympic 1500m final has been upgraded (downgraded?) from provisional to official. Congrats, and apologies, are in order to Shannon Rowbury for the belated bronze medal!

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