As the men's cross country team's sole runner competing at NCAA Championships Saturday, junior Jesse Faller earned his second straight All-American honor in Hanover, Ind., finishing 35th overall.
Hamilton junior Peter Kosgei, the second-place finisher at last year's championship, won the race with a time of 24:22.03, 10 seconds in front of Wisconsin-Oshkosh senior Willy Kaul, who finished second. Cortland State won the team title, with its top four men earning All-American titles for finishing in the top 35 in the field of 278 competitors.
Faller finished the 8,000-meter course in 24:59.89, just 10 seconds outside of 20th place but less than a second from missing out on the All-American recognition. Despite setting a PR in the event, the junior found the elite competition stiff on the course.
"[The race] went out fairly conservatively throughout the first mile as far as Nationals go," coach Ethan Barron said. "But being pretty much a flat course, they were able to hold the pace more than they would on a lot of other courses. Almost everyone I talked to after the race set a personal best for an 8k course, Jesse included."
Saturday's competition marked Faller's second time competing at the NCAA Championship. Last year he qualified as part of the Jumbo squad and led his teammates at the national meet with an 18th-place finish.
"It was disappointing getting 35th when I was kind of gunning for a top 20 or a top 15 spot," Faller said. "I was still All-American, and it was still an 8k PR for me to run under 25 minutes, but it was a little bit unsatisfying finishing 35th this year and not improving from last year's finish.
"It's disappointing looking back at the results and seeing if I only had run 15 seconds faster, how many places I would have been up," he continued. "It would have been more like where I expected to finish. Knowing that I could have only run 10 or 15 seconds faster is unsettling."
Nevertheless, Barron praised Faller's efforts and said the junior ran an intelligent race.
"Jesse is a really great runner at sticking to a more foundational open-ended strategy and setting himself up to run a great race and then being a smart enough runner to make decisions as he goes," Barron said. "He did exactly that this weekend. He put himself in a great position at the mile and then moved up the race. He put himself in the position to be an All-American, and then he finished off strong."
"Everything was going [according] to plan for the first mile or two miles -- kind of get out strong, establish a good position and start to pick off the runners who had gone out too fast," Faller said. "I think it was the third and fourth miles where I started to kind of lose it a little bit. I wasn't keeping the pace and I was getting passed by a lot of guys that I knew were slower than me. Nationals is a relentless race in the sense that it starts out fast and is fast for the entirety of the race. I knew that in theory but having it happen in the race was difficult to respond to."
The racecourse itself consisted of a series of field loops, which can sometimes prove a factor in longer-distance competition, but the course for NCAA Championships appeared not to have affected Faller's results.
"From an athlete's perspective, it can be boring to run the same loops over and over again," Barron said. "Sometimes it's easy to fall asleep out there, which I don't think Jesse did, but running a predominately flat course in circles isn't very exciting -- granted Nationals takes care of much of the excitement."
Barron also praised the fans who made the trek out to Hanover, Ind. to support Faller along with women's cross country runners, sophomores Steph McNamara and Amy Wilfert, who also earned individual bids to Nationals.
"I think it's pretty safe to say we have some of the most dedicated fans in the nation, for us to have 34 athletes rent their own vans and drive all the way to Indiana to watch the race for Jesse and the two women," Barron said.
"No other New England program can put that together, and I think it says a lot about Jesse, Stephanie and Amy and about their teammates. I think a lot of their success at the meet is owed to their family and teammates that came out to support them."
"I was proud to represent my team and Tufts University as a whole, and I definitely felt the support of my teammates," Faller said.
