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 November 22, 2021, Issue 156



Whittni Orton (Photo: Julia Caterson for the NCAA)
 

Whittni Orton, NC State make history with NCAA wins

The 2021 NCAA Cross Country Championships, hosted by Florida State at Apalachee Regional Park in Tallahassee, Florida, went out quickly and never let up. The field was likely one of the deepest ever at this meet, thanks in part to the fact that the condensed 2020 cross country season didn’t count against anyone’s eligibility, so there were a record number of fifth- and sixth-year seniors in the field. BYU’s Whittni Orton kicked away from last year’s champion, Mercy Chelangat, to win the 6K race in 19:25.4 and NC State won the team title with an impressive 84 points.



NC State coach Laurie Henes holds the winning trophy while celebrating with her team. (Photo: Julia Caterson for the NCAA)
 

The team race

Heading into the race, it was easy to imagine scenarios in which any of the top four teams—NC State, BYU, New Mexico, and Colorado—could come out on top, but NC State, with 84 points, left no doubt, winning by 38 points. BYU (122), New Mexico (130 points) and Colorado (187) earned the remaining podium spots. (It’s less confusing that the top four teams make the podium in the NCAA, as opposed to top three in most other places, when you consider the tournament format of many collegiate sports.)

At the 2020 championship, held just eight months earlier, in March 2021, NC State led the race at the 4K mark, only to have their lead slip away over the final 2K of the race. They finished second in that race, 65 points behind BYU. This time out, NC State led the entire way. “We didn’t really change how we raced, we just finished it off,” NC State head coach Laurie Henes said.

The Wolfpack didn’t have a perfect day. Henes said that probably four of their top five hoped to have higher individual finishes, but collectively, their performance was more than enough. Kelsey Chmiel led the way with a sixth-place finish and she was backed up by Katelyn Tuohy (15th), Allie Hays (22nd), Hannah Steelman (24th), Sam Bush (32nd), Heather Holt (95th) and Dominique Clairmonte (153rd). Tuohy, who finished 24th in 2020, was the top freshman in the race for the second championship in a row, a feat that is unlikely to be repeated by anyone else.

BYU returned its top five runners from the 2020 race, while NC State had some key changes to its lineup. Former Columbia runner Hays, now a graduate student, had a clutch performance, finishing third for the team in her first NCAA Championship appearance for NC State. And Bush was the team’s fifth scorer, earning All-America honors in her first NCAA cross country championship.

Because NC State has consistently been one of the stronger teams in the NCAA, it’s a bit surprising that this was the team’s first-ever NCAA cross country title. They’d finished second three times—in 1987, 2001, and 2020—but this was the team’s first time atop the NCAA podium. NC State did win the national collegiate cross country title two times previously, though, in 1979 and 1980, but that was when women competed in the AIAW, before women’s cross country became part of the NCAA.
 


Florida's Parker Valby, BYU's Whittni Orton, and West Virginia's Ceili McCabe lead the 2021 NCAA Cross Country Championships. NC State's Hannah Steelman and Alabama's Mercy Chelangat run close behind. (Photo: Tim Doyle for the NCAA)
 

The individual race

The race was fast and intense, and with 1K to go, only 1.3 seconds separated the top 10 runners. At that point in the race, I was looking at Stanford’s Julia Heymach, who had inched her way up to 10th place, wondering if she could use her 4:04 1500m speed to win the whole thing. But with 800 meters to go, Orton made her move, and the list of contenders shrunk rapidly. (And Heymach, who generally prefers the shorter distances, dropped to 13th.)

West Virginia’s Ceili McCabe was the first to give chase, but Alabama’s Chelangat moved into second with 500m to go and held McCabe off all the way to the line. Iowa State’s Cailie Logue had an impressive run to take fourth, and Oklahoma State’s Taylor Roe, the 2020 runner-up, finished fifth.

Much like the NC State women, Orton (who got married earlier this year and also goes by Orton Morgan) led the 2020 championship late in the race, but she faded in the final kilometer and finished 17th. She entered that race coming off an injury, having put in a lot of cross training but only a month of running, and it caught up with her. Orton had some strong performances during the outdoor track season, lowering her personal bests to 4:09.31 (1500m) and 15:12.91 (5,000m), but she struggled at the NCAA outdoor championships, where she didn’t advance to the 1500m final and finished 18th in the 5,000m. Orton ran the 1500m at the Olympic Trials and qualified for the semifinals before ending her season as the fastest runner not to make it to the final.

This season, Orton has flown under the radar, and she raced only twice leading up to Saturday’s championship. When listing runners who entered the NCAA meet undefeated last week, I missed Orton, because she won both of her races, but her wins came at the lower key FSU XC Open and the West Coast Conference Championships. And she was fortunate to have a team strong enough to qualify for the NCAA championship without her help, as she even skipped the regional meet.

But that was all part of coach Diljeet Taylor’s plan. “We took a completely different way of training this last year that kind of created a lack of confidence going into this weekend,” Orton told reporters after the race. “We took a more conservative approach; I like to push and go dark in practice and [it] resulted in injuries often. Trusting my coaches, myself, and God was the biggest thing I focused on in my mind.”

Returning runners who finished behind her can take heart knowing that in Orton’s first NCAA cross country championship in 2017, she finished 115th. She vaulted all the way to seventh in 2019 before her 17th place in 2020 and this year’s win. The cross country title is one of the hardest to win, because it brings together runners who race a range of distances on the track, but Orton pulled it off, winning her first individual NCAA title in her last collegiate race. Orton, who turned 24 last month, will now go pro, and it will be interesting to see where she ends up. (Full race replay | Results)
 


Notre Dame's Lauren Bailey (left) and Jocelyn Long. (Photo: Tim Doyle for the NCAA)
 

Other Notes

  • The most improved runners in the top 10: Logue, who improved to fourth this year after placing 126th in 2020 (but she also finished 15th in 2019). Notre Dame’s Maddy Denner placed ninth after not running the meet in 2020 and finishing 81st in 2019. McCabe was third after finishing 42nd eight months ago, and Yale’s Kayley DeLay finished 10th in her first appearance at the meet.

  • Oregon’s Cooper Teare got a lot of attention for struggling to make it across the finish line, but Sophie O’Sullivan of the University of Washington had a similar collapse. O’Sullivan willed herself to move forward, rolling and crawling her way up the course before the broadcast cut to commercial, but she crossed the finish line on her feet before collapsing again. O’Sullivan, who is from Australia, is the daughter of Irish world champion and Olympic medalist Sonia O’Sullivan. She was 244th out of 250 finishers.

  • Weber State’s Summer Allen, who is in her ninth year in the NCAA due to various delays to her collegiate career, finished 35th and earned All-America honors (which go to the top 40). Her husband, Christian Allen, also of Weber State, also earned All-American honors, placing 16th in the men’s race. They were cheered on by their 20-month-old son, Miles. Both had previously been cross country All Americans, but this was the first time they pulled it off in the same year.

  • For the second year in a row, teams coached by women went 1–2 at this meet.

  • Though BYU has been one of the top teams in the NCAA for many years, Orton is the first BYU woman to win an individual NCAA cross country title.

  • With Conner Mantz winning the men’s race, BYU swept the individual titles. That has happened only once before, in 1988, when Indiana’s Michelle Dekkers and Bob Kennedy won.

  • Only four women earned All-America honors at all four of the NCAA championships held in 2021 (2020 and 2021 cross country, indoor and outdoor track & field): NC State’s Chmiel and Steelman, Minnesota’s Bethany Hasz, and Michigan State’s Jenna Magness.

  • After watching her win the Northeast Regional, I was curious to see how Syracuse’s Amanda Vestri would do at nationals, so I was surprised when I didn’t see her name in the results. She shared on Instagram on Sunday that she had some pain on a run after regionals and an MRI revealed an injury that kept her out of the race.

 

Hannah Becker and Kassie Rosenbum win DII, DIII titles

On Saturday morning in Saint Leo, Florida, Grand Valley State’s Hannah Becker and Klaudia O’Malley went 1–2 at the NCAA Division II Cross Country Championships, but it wasn’t quite enough to win the team title. Adams State put their five scoring runners in the top 21 and scored 59 points to GVSU’s 79. Fatima Alanis of Queens University, who was originally recruited for triathlon, finished third in her first season of running cross country. (Race replay | Results)

At the Division III championships, held in Louisville, Kentucky, Kassie Parker (formerly Rosenbum) of Loras pulled away from her competition in the third kilometer of the 6K race and won by 17 seconds, in 20:11.1. Wellesley College’s Ari Marks, competing in her first NCAA championship, worked her way up through the field to take second, narrowly holding off Tufts’ Danielle Page, who took third. The team race was a dramatic one with Johns Hopkins (130) edging Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (132) by two points. Johns Hopkins won a record-tying seventh national championship, and this was their reaction. The runner-up CMS team is lead by first-year coach Marina Muncan, a 2012 Olympian for Serbia and a former Villanova standout. (Race replay | Results)

Milligan University’s Alyssa Bearzi kicked to win the NAIA Cross Country Championships, held in Vancouver, Washington. Bearzi covered the 5K course in 18:14.19, just ahead of Rocky Mountain’s Sydney Little Light (18:16.8). Milligan won the team title and their coach, Chris Layne, who has recently been accused of being an abusive coach in a series of social media posts from multiple runners he formerly coached, was named coach of the year. (Results)
 


(Photo: Tim Doyle for the NCAA)
 

A final note

With the recent focus on the ongoing problem of abusive coaching practices in collegiate cross country and track & field, as I watched all of Saturday’s races, I was mostly hoping for health and happiness for all of the participants. No title or honor is more important than that. It’s long been known that collegiate distance runners are at greater risk of developing RED-S, though the vocabulary we’ve used to describe it has changed over the years. Many athletes will develop RED-S no matter how great their coach is, but the best coaches will put their athletes’ health first, and act immediately when they recognize a problem.

On top of that, there have been an increasing number of accusations against collegiate coaches, ranging from sexual assault to body shaming to creating an unhealthy team culture. It’s impossible to know what a program is like unless you are a part of it. And even when you’re a part of it, you’re not always aware of every team member’s experience. So it’s entirely possible that in writing about Saturday’s races, I’m applauding the success of some programs that aren’t doing things the right way.

There is a growing recognition that prioritizing mental and physical health leads to long-term success in running. Some of today’s runners will have longer, more successful careers than the women who have come before them because of it. But it’s also increasingly clear that some coaches either aren’t getting the memo on that, don’t care, or don’t know how to do better. So regardless of how anyone placed on Saturday, or whether they made it to the championship meet at all, it’s important to remember that what looks like success is really only success if it’s achieved while also prioritizing student-athletes’ mental and physical health.
 


Thanks to Janji for sponsoring Fast Women

Janji makes purpose-built running essentials to equip and inspire all runners. This week only they are offering 20% off (or more) sitewide. Check them out at www.Janji.com.


 

The Bowerman Track Club dominates the Michigan Pro Ekiden

The second edition of the Michigan Pro Ekiden, held on Wednesday, was not a close race, but it offered a nice opportunity to see some athletes racing who normally don’t race this time of the year. There was only one lead change up front as Annie Frisbie took the lead early on in the opening 6.1K leg for Minnesota Distance Elite. Given Frisbie’s seventh-place breakout finish at the New York City Marathon only 10 days earlier, it was impressive to see her running away from Olympic silver medalist Courtney Frerichs.

Because Frerichs didn’t finish her track season until September, that’s all the more reason that she would not be in peak form right now. But Frisbie handed off the sash with an 18-second lead, having covered her leg in 19:25. During the second leg, Thomas Ratcliffe took over the lead for the Bowerman Track Club, and it only grew after that. Vanessa Fraser had the fastest time on the third leg (16:22 for 5K), and Elise Cranny led the way on the fifth leg (32:19 for 10K). The BTC won the race in a course record of 2:08:24, and NAZ Elite took second in 2:12:01.

The BTC earned a team prize of $20,000 for the overall win, but Kevin Hanson shared that coach Jerry Schumacher gave it back, saying they want this event to continue. (Results | Visual representation of how the race played out)

 

Other Results

  • Ethiopia’s Tsehay Gemechu won the Lisbon Half Marathon in 1:06:06. 

  • Canada’s Leslie Sexton won the Philadelphia Marathon in an event record of 2:28:34 and earned $10,000. Lexie Thompson, who just finished out her collegiate eligibility at Weber State in the spring, finished second (worth $5,000), running 2:30:37 in her marathon debut. Thompson wrote on Instagram, “I moved to working full time as an MRI tech at my hospital right after nationals in June and then increased my training to be ready for the marathon. There were lots of tears shed, and lots of lonely runs in the dark, but every single moment was worth it with the result I got today!”

  • Kenya’s Vicoty Chepngeno won the accompanying Philadelphia Half Marathon in an impressive 1:07:22 (earning $2,500). The top seven women all broke 1:15, including Roberta Groner, 43, who was fifth among the women and the top masters runner in 1:14:07 after a hiatus from racing. Susanna Sullivan won the 8K in 25:47, earning $1,000. (All results from Philadelphia)

  • Josette Norris won the Sugar Run 5K in Memphis by 0.09 seconds over Julie-Anne Staehli of Canada, who now trains with New Balance Boston. Both their times will be rounded up to 15:43. Kim Conley finished third in 15:48. (Results)

  • Jessy Lacourse won the U Sports Cross Country Championships, Canada’s collegiate championship, in 28:25. (Canadian women run 8K compared to 6K in the NCAA.) Lacourse led Laval University to the team title.

  • Sarah Cummings took the lead 35 miles into the JFK 50 and held it to the finish, winning the 50.2-mile race in 6:18:43, the third-fastest time on the course. Both Cummings and runner-up Sarah Biehl (6:22:03) took wrong turns in last year’s race and were looking for redemption. Former course record holder Devon Yanko took third in 6:31:12, running less than two minutes off her best time. (Results)

  • Hillary Allen won the Madeira Island Ultra-Trail, a 115K race, in 17:18:26. 



Cailie Logue (left) and Taylor Roe receive their fourth and fifth place awards. (Photo: Julia Caterson for the NCAA)
 

Additional News and Links

  • Last week, &Mother and Oiselle released model sponsorship contract provisions for pregnancy and parental leave for professional athletes. You can read the language they’d like more brands to use here, and they’re asking brands that are on board to declare their commitment here. More on this from The 19th.

  • Canadian Olympians Andrea Seccafien and Lucia Stafford (whose sister is already on the team) are joining the Bowerman Track Club.

  • Elle Purrier will run the Wanamaker Mile at the 2022 Millrose Gameson January 29 and Race Results Weekly points out that NYRR is no longer the meet’s title sponsor. WHOOP will step in to sponsor the Wanamaker Mile, and collect data on its participants while they compete, some of which will be displayed during the race.

  • Salomon released a 51-minute YouTube video last week, Long Shorts, that follows Courtney Dauwalter and François D’Haene through their Hardrock 100/UTMB doubles. Altra also released a short film recently, about Amanda Basham’s return to ultrarunning after becoming a mother. The ultrarunning branch of the sport is doing a much better job with storytelling on YouTube at the moment, helped by the fact that the longer distances are less likely to run into usage rights with race footage.

  • Elvin Kibet shared that she re-enlisted in the Army for another three years, and she will continue to train with the World Class Athlete Program.

  • Danae Rivers, the 2019 NCAA Indoor 800m champion for Penn State, announced that she’ll be running for Under Armour and the District Track Club.

  • Taryn Rawlings announced that she has signed with Adidas.

  • Kaitlin Goodman shared that she’s expecting.

  • Emily Sisson posted about her new approach to recovering from injuries, as she gets older and wiser. She was able to do her first speed workout in three months last week.

  • Leah Falland wrote about what she’s doing with the hopes of getting rid of the pain in her plantar fascia.

  • Karissa Schweizer shared that she underwent a minimally invasive surgery to deal with the Achilles pain she’s been experiencing.

  • Aliphine Tuliamuk wrote in her Instagram stories, “It’s been roughly two weeks since I stopped breastfeeding… [My] public bone has improved significantly, I can’t believe how fast the relief is coming…. I am so excited to be pain-free soon…”

  • This is a nice article about Annie Frisbie, but the photos are my favorite part.

  • METER published a nice feature on Angela Ortiz, who is a 2:39 marathoner and a NYC-based professional musician. 

  • The Seattle Times published a piece on why focusing on weight for athletic performance is not the way to go. Case in point: Remember this Olympic Channel segment that revealed that Des Linden had 19.6 percent body fat? (Which is low, but far higher than the University of Oregon team members were allegedly encouraged to aim for.)

  • Craig Donnelly, who has been charged with stalking Emily Infeld, has been declared unfit to stand trial. He will be hospitalized and receive mental health treatment.

  • Tianna Madison (formerly Bartoletta) shared that she was unknowingly pregnant while she was trying to make the Olympic team over the summer. She gave birth to her son 14 weeks early, and she tells the story here.

  • The IOC announced a new framework for transgender and intersex athletes last week. Instead of imposing their own rules, they will leave it up to each sport’s federation to determine the appropriate rules for that sport. While it’s easy to imagine how that could go wrong, it also makes sense for different sports to have different rules. World Athletics has said that it has no plans to change its current rules, so this shouldn’t impact running and track & field.

  • Caela Fenton writes that she wants sports organizations to sound the alarm on climate change, and she uses the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials to support her argument.

 

Podcast Highlights

  • I loved hearing more from Annie Frisbie on both the Clean Sport Collective and C Tolle Run last week. Frisbie said in the latter episode that she was dealing with a small injury scare leading up to the New York City Marathon. She also said that she was not drug tested as the seventh-place finisher at the New York City Marathon, which surprised me, because I thought NYRR and the World Marathon Majors had more stringent testing than that. She said (at the time of her interview) that she’s currently deciding if she wants to sign with an agent, and yes, now that she’s run the Michigan Pro Ekiden, she’s going to take some down time to recover from New York.

  • Mary Ngugi, who recently finished third at the Boston Marathon, was on the Keeping Track podcast, where she talked about the creation of the Women’s Athletic Alliance. It was interesting to learn that she’s coached by Steve Cram, and she revealed that she got married while she was in Boston for the marathon! She didn’t talk about this, but she was previously in a relationship with Sammy Wanjiru, who died in a fall in 2011.

  • It was interesting to hear more about Lanni Marchant’s ups and downs in recent years on both I’ll Have Another and The Shakeout Podcast. Marchant said on the former that particularly as a Canadian athlete, some of the sponsorship opportunities she received were barely worth the trouble. She said Asics paid her $10,000 (Canadian dollars) per year with no travel bonuses, and she would get $1,000 if she won nationals, when she made the Olympic team in 2016.

  • Jenny Simpson said on the Running Start podcast that she wished she had gone into the last mile of the USATF 10 Mile Championships with the expectation that she could win. I enjoyed hearing her story about having to leave her internship with Congressman Ed Perlmutter in 2008, when she made her first Olympic team. 

Other episodes: Aliphine Tuliamuk (and Luis Grijalva) on 2 Black Runners | Tatyana McFadden on More Than Running | Rosalie Fish on The Grounded Podcast | Shalane Flanagan on Glennon Doyle’s podcast (with Abby Wambach), transcript here, if you prefer | Emily Sisson on the Hurdle podcast | Gwen Jorgensen on For the Long Run | Grayson Murphy on Singletrack | Photographer Cortney White on The Ali on the Run Show

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The biggest road racing day in the U.S. (numbers-wise, assuming the pandemic hasn’t changed this) is coming up on Thursday. I’m keeping an eye on Connecticut’s Manchester Road Race, where Weini Kelati and Edna Kiplagat are among those scheduled to compete. If you aren’t otherwise occupied, there will be a live stream of the race at fox61.com, with the race beginning at 10:00 a.m. ET.

Huge thanks to Janji for sponsoring Fast Women in November. Their Black Friday sale begins today—20% or more off everything—and runs through Sunday. Thanks to all of you who support Fast Women via Patreon and I hope you all have a great week.

Alison

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