Men’s team seeks improvement
Senior Alex Crabill and his team are training for next week’s tournament.
By Chris Chen
Oct. 21, 2009 9:58 p.m.
The men’s cross country team wanted to go home. Instead, the runners were left stranded curbside, with no shuttle back to campus from LAX.
And with this coming after a four-hour flight, which included a stop in Chicago, the team needed nothing else but to re-focus and re-unite with the other half of the team.
In a sense, it was the underlining moment of a weekend gone bad ““ a weekend that the runners believe was a fluke.
The performances at Terre Haute, Ind., were lackluster at best and all kinds of possible excuses ““ nagging injuries, illness and jet lag ““ could be wagered.
But instead, the team was able to gather itself and is determined to bounce back and make an impression at the Pac-10 Championships held in Long Beach on Oct. 30.
“We have been working on competing and battling,” senior Alex Crabill said. “We are disappointed, but we won’t let our season be defined by one poor performance ““ we can totally change that and make something out of it during Pac-10s.”
Though the team got back on campus early Sunday morning, both the men’s and women’s teams were ready to run 16 miles the next day. Usually that kind of mileage indicates some kind of punishment, but there have been longer days.
“During the summer, our workouts would go up to 20 miles,” Crabill said. “But Monday usually is a good mileage day.”
The following day, the team highlighted the importance of the conference championship race.
“We’re giving it all at the Pac-10s, and I think that we’re going to peak exactly at the right time,” junior Shannon Murakami said.
Emphasizing speed, the team immediately set off to work on the intramural field, focusing on the technical aspects of running, such as strides and sprints.
“We can’t lose motivation, coming off a loss like they did is tough, you can second guess yourself a lot,” Murakami said. “The secret is to learn from your mistakes and how you can fix it in practice. When you know you’ve put in the work over the summer, you keep at it and you have to keep your head held high.”
The Bruins also look to take full advantage of the Pac-10 Championships’ close proximity to Westwood.
“We kind of have home-field advantage at Long Beach and hopefully we will make an impression that we can use as momentum going into regionals and hopefully nationals,” Crabill said.
Though the team believes it could run without a congregation of followers, a rather large-sized group of alumni-based supporters is expected to show in Long Beach.
But meanwhile the men’s team is doing everything it can to erase the memories from the pre-NCAAs.
