This past Friday, the UNM men’s and women’s cross country teams headed up to Madison, WI for the Wisconsin adidas Invitational to compete against some of the top teams in the country. In the Men’s 8k, 28 of the 36 teams competing were either ranked or receiving votes in the national polls while in the Women’s 6k, 20 of the 36 teams were ranked. The men held their own, finishing 23rd in the stacked field while showing some positive signs for the rest of the season. The women were the real story of the day, giving an incredible, record-setting performance to dominate the field.
The women ran first for the day, and as has been a point of emphasis for the team, they ran as a pack throughout the race to lead basically wire-to-wire. In the end, the top five finishers for the Lobos all finished in the top 10, taking 4th (Courtney Frerichs, 19:39.3), 5th (Rhona Auckland, 19:41.1), 6th (Calli Thackery, 19:42.7), 7th (Alice Wright, 19:43.8), and 10th (Molly Renfer, 19:55.5). This gave them a total of 32 points (remember, lower is better), beating the second place team, #11 ranked Arkansas, by 156 points and setting a new event record in the process. They beat Providence, who is the #3 ranked team in the country, by 232 points. Their closest conference competition, #6 Boise State, finished in sixth place with 275 points. They are making it more and more obvious that they are the team to beat this season and, if they keep performing at this high level, that’s just not going to happen.
The following plot shows the points for each of the top 10 teams from the meet, with a breakdown of how many points each team’s top five runners accumulated. Again, the Lobos performance was incredible and just impressive to look at. I could say more about this plot, but I think it’s better to just look at it.
The next plot shows the time result for every runner in the meet, with the red bars representing Lobo runners and the dark gray bars represent everyone else. As we can see, the top five Lobos were all at the front of the pack, but we also see that the other two runners, Whitney Thornburg and Heleene Tambet, did really well too. If they had run for just about any other team, they would have scored points. They also left some runners out who would have also likely finished in the top 100. This team is good, deep, and has been putting it all together so far this season for tremendous results.
In the Men’s 8k race, the Lobos managed to finish 23rd in a stacked field. Almost every team that finished above them was ranked or receiving votes and a few of the teams below them were ranked. They were led this time by Dan Milechman, who finished 59th with a 24:14.8 showing. Their top two runners from the Notre Dame Invitational, Elmar Engholm (24:22.4) and Graham Thomas (24:29.9), finished 84th and 109th respectively, which might be a little disappointing for them. They both ran a little slower pace than they had been, so if they return to form the team’s overall performance will jump up quite a bit. Matthew Bergin (24:32.8) finished in 120th by taking about four seconds off of his mile pace and Josh Kerr (24:41.4) finished 139th by running almost the same pace he did a couple weeks prior. If these two can keep improving, that will pay dividends in both the conference meet and the regional meet and will help them as they try to qualify for the NCAA Championships.
The following plot shows the results of the top 10 teams from the men’s race along with UNM’s result. The breakdown of how the teams got their points from their top five runners is also shown. Again, I think if Engholm and Thomas had run as well as they had a couple of weeks ago, the Lobos would be right there in the mix. Still, it was a solid showing by the team.
The last plot shows the time results for all of the runners in the Men’s 8k race, with red again meaning the Lobos and dark gray meaning everyone else. There are a few things that stick out to me here. First, the Lobos don’t currently have a high-end runner, which is okay so long as everyone else is solid. The Lobos seem to have the potential to pull that sort of performance off, so building towards the regional meet and making sure all of their runners are peaking at the same time will be the goal of the coaching staff. Second, the sixth and seventh place Lobo finishers were well behind the top five, showing that this team isn’t super deep right now. Hopefully someone can step up and show that they can be a solid safety net for the team in case someone either gets injured or just has a bad performance. Finally, the top five runners for the Lobos were all fairly close together about halfway through the race, but then started to separate near the 6k mark. Finishing strong and as a pack will be important for the team to have success in the next couple of meets.
The cross country season only consists of a handful of meets, so at this point, the season is already halfway over. Next up is the Mountain West Cross Country Championships in Reno, NV on October 30th. Look for the men to be in the mix for the championship along with CSU, Air Force, and Boise State and for the women to try to fend off Boise State for yet another conference championship.