Wisconsin

Three weeks later, we raced at the Wisconsin Invitational. Over the past couple of years this has been the biggest meet in the regular season, and probably the hardest field besides NCAA’s. This year was crazy with something like 45 teams in the field (Mick Byrne said after the race that he’ll limit entry to 30 or so because the field was just too big). We were optimistic about this race and thought that if we executed the pack running concept as well as we did at UVA, then we should be able to win. Well, the race went about as weirdly as anyone had ever seen a big cross country race go. Instead of going out fast and then settling in, everyone went out slow for the first two miles and then hammered the last half. 

I'm back there somewhere, I promise

The big move at 3k split us up and we ended up not running our plan, and so we didn’t run as well as we wanted to. We got 3^rd in the meet behind Stanford and Iona and were disappointed as a team, although some guys had great races. It was a good learning experience and we did our best to objectively look at our mistakes and fix them for the post-season. Even though Wisconsin was such a big meet, it was still regular season so it didn’t count for much besides a rehearsal for NCAA’s.