Although the women's cross country team posted a 14th-place team finish at All-New England Championships for the second year in a row on Saturday, this year's results yielded some pretty significant differences.
Among them was the performance of sophomore Stephanie McNamara, who bested last year's time of 19:23 by nearly a minute and a half, vaulting from 48th to sixth place in a field of competitors from Div. I, II and III.
McNamara, whose 17:58 mark was a vast improvement on her former personal record, was followed by sophomore Amy Wilfert, who also scored a huge PR with an 18:27 mark to land 21st place overall in the 5,000-meter race.
McNamara and Wilfert benefited from the strong pool of competition as they faced such strong New England runners as Amherst senior quad-captain Elise Tropiano and Middlebury senior tri-captain Alexandra Krieg in addition to strong Div. I runners from Boston University and Boston College (BC).
"This meet, you have such great competition so you just go after it and use the people around you to try to better your own time and get a good race in," McNamara said. "I was really fortunate for that."
Both McNamara and Wilfert, however, were at a disadvantage down the stretch from expending too much energy at the get-go.
"They went out really hard," coach Kristen Morwick said. "Steph was like 5:20 at the mile and Amy was like 5:35 — for both of them, that's too fast. Especially for Steph to go out as far as 20 — that's a 16:40 pace, and she ended up running 17:58. I think they both knew maybe they would have had more left at the end of the race if they hadn't gone out so fast."
But in a race like Saturday's, with over 300 participants, runners must strike a balance between gunning too fast early on and managing to maintain their ground while holding off their competitors. McNamara led Tropiano through the first two miles before losing some steam and relinquishing the Div. III lead.
"I definitely think that was probably a bad idea," McNamara said. "It was a pretty poorly paced race, but it's hard to judge. The BC girls started out really fast, and the first mile itself is fast by nature, so you're going along and it's hard to judge the pace that you're going. You also want to try to establish position in the race, so it's almost kind of crucial to get out hard, but there's a really fine line between getting out hard and killing yourself.
"I wouldn't say I regretted it in the next two miles, but I definitely think my splits and my overall time could have been better if I had conserved in the beginning," McNamara continued. "But it's still early in the season, and we're still learning from our mistakes [before NESCAC Championships]. If I can learn now, that's where it's going to matter."
But Saturday's race wasn't all good news for the Jumbos: After Tufts' frontrunners, the next group followed far behind. Over a minute separated Wilfert from Tufts' No. 3 runner, senior Amy Hopkins, who ran a 19:37 time for 116th place overall. Hopkins was followed by freshman Anya Price in 128th and junior Lisa Picascia in 152nd.
The gap sunk the Jumbos three points below league rival Colby, which snuck into the top five at Regionals last year to bump Tufts off the list, ultimately inhibiting the Jumbos from taking a trip to Nationals. While the Mules' top runner, sophomore Emma Linhard, took a modest 57th place overall, only 25 seconds separated Colby's No. 1 through No. 4 runners.
"That's what killed us," Morwick said. "I think we're potentially a better team than both Colby and MIT right now, but we can't drop off a minute between our second and third runners. Somehow, that will have to tighten up."
Tufts squeaked out a one-point lead over MIT, a non-conference regional threat, but the Jumbos will need to post a series of solid performances if they hope to beat out the Engineers for a ticket to the NCAA Championship race.
"As it turned out, we ended up being the fifth [Div. III] team," Morwick said. "We beat MIT, which was ranked 12th in the country last week, and we were only a couple points from Colby. It's just going to be really close. We still have some issues to address if we're going to beat them later in the season."
The Jumbos will work on sorting things out on Saturday at the Williams' Plansky Invitational, where MIT will get another crack at Tufts on the course that will be home to the NCAA Regional Championship. While many of Tufts' runners are familiar with the course — the team ran there three times in 2007 — the invitational will be the Jumbos' first 6k race of the season after a rainout at Conn. College re-routed Tufts to the 5k Codfish Bowl at Franklin Park in Boston.
