Lobo runner Jacob Kirwa started off lost in a sea of 209 runners at the NCAA Cross Country Championship in Terre Haute, Ind., last Monday.
By the end of the race, he outperformed 198 of them, climbing to the 11th spot and finishing with a career best in the 10,000-meter run (29:46.1).
“When we started I just hoped I could go fast at the beginning, but I ended up in like the 100th position, so I had to fight back,” he said. “Although the pace was really high, I kept trying to struggle to get up there.”
That is the story of both the men’s and women’s cross country teams this season — over-performance.
Both teams finished with a combination of 16 spots higher than their rankings predicted.
The men finished eighth after being ranked No. 12., and the women finished 13th after
being ranked No. 25. The women’s team was led by Ruth Senior, who finished in 46th place with a UNM record-breaking performance (20:50.9) in the 6,000-meter run.
Those jumps in ranking are not characteristic of cross country teams, said head coach Joe Franklin.
“I would not say that it is common, but the men and women were just very confident in what they could do,” Franklin said. “We knew all along that if we just ran well we could score very well. It shows that UNM is a University that is not only a great academic institution but also is a good school for endurance athletics and cross country. It is one of the best in the country.”
It’s also uncommon for both the men’s and women’s team to have such high results. Only 18 of 320 Division I schools that offer cross country qualified their men’s and women’s teams for the NCAA Championship this season. Of those 18, the Lobos finished fourth.
Franklin said he can attribute that to the caliber of athletes that come to UNM.
“I think it is (the athletes) wanting to compete very well,” he said. “It is kids that want to come to a wonderful university and compete at the highest level athletically. And those students are proving themselves daily.”
Cross country running is a hybrid of a team sport and an individual competition, and Kirwa said a nice balance between the two has evolved at UNM this year.
“It is that motivation that you are given and that pressure from the team that makes you think you have to do something,” he said. “If we have a team common (goal), we are trying to fight for it and make the best.”
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Kirwa said he uses some inventive methods of training to make sure that he is the best runner he can be for his team.
“You have to use imagination,” he said. “You already know that there are other people training like you, but you have to imagine that they are training more than you. So you train harder and think, ‘Maybe they are training better.’ So that will keep driving you.”
