Before we move on to our final championship meet of the
cross country season – ECAC/IC4A on Saturday at Van Cortlandt Park – and then
onto the long grind of track seasons (indoor and outdoor), here are some final
thoughts on the snow and mud and muck in Buffalo for the NCAA Northeast
Regional.
As noted, our women’s team racing to 11th place
for the second consecutive year is a big deal to us and really validates the
hard work of our athletes and the consistently high level we have reached within
the program. It’s a testament to the women who put in the work – every day,
every week, every month, every season. They are relentless warriors, and it is
an honor to be associated with them. The conditions affect every athlete and
every team in different ways; for us, it seems to bring out the best in our
unit. And that’s great.
On the men’s side, we can say similar things. While our goal
was to finish anywhere between 15th and 20th place, in
analyzing our 21st-place finish you’ll note that we finished ahead
of numerous teams that were ranked ahead of us and/or finished ahead of us all
fall. In some cases, we outdistanced these teams by a wide margin, and our men
did it in a progressive fashion by constantly improving their team standing as
the race unfolded. So while we were hoping for slightly better, we know that on
this day our men did what they tend to do here: Grinded it out and
overachieved.
Mostly, what I’ll remember from this is the sheer enormity
of effort. At the end of the race, we had athletes covered in mud, sweat, tears
and a little blood. They were shivering cold, despite the intensity of their
racing. A few of them couldn’t feel their extremities. They all finished –
strong, hard, proud – and they all “left it out there” (one of those well-worn
coaching clichés that I don’t even like, but actually fits here), and to summarize, they made us proud.
It was, to paraphrase the T-shirts, a great day to be a Running Red Fox.
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