This Halloween, the Bruins won’t be wearing costumes or carving pumpkins.

Instead, they’ll be donning bibs and carving out the track.

UCLA cross country will participate in the Big Ten Championship on Friday at Forest Akers East Golf Course in East Lansing, Michigan. The team will compete as part of a pool of Big Ten competitors – 18 squads on the women’s side and 15 on the men’s side.

“When we sit down and look at the season as a whole at the beginning of the year, over the summer, we only look at the championship portion of the season,” said assistant coach Andrew Ferris. “The first few meets of the year, that’s more so to set ourselves up to have our best performances at Big Tens and regionals.”

For the Bruins, the Big Ten Championship marks the start of the postseason.

And UCLA has refined its mentality and amped up the motivation all season for this very moment.

“(It is about) deciding who we want to be each day when we go out there, either at practice and especially at competitions,” said redshirt sophomore Kai Mitchell-Reiss. “I think there’s a chip on my shoulder – and a lot of our shoulders – just going out there and doing what we say we’re going to do.”

The Bruins have run over a thousand total miles this season. The female competitors each run 60 miles per week, and the male competitors each run 80 to 90 miles per week. But their routines have become even more structured as the postseason approaches.

Mitchell-Reiss said the team commences its mornings with two workouts – a run and a weight training session. The Bruins return to the track in the afternoons for their third workout of the day. The athletes center the remainder of their daily routines on rest, nutrition and treatment, in addition to schoolwork, Mitchell-Reiss added.

Ferris said key workout days increase in intensity throughout the year but begin to taper off as the squad approaches championship meets.

The assistant coach added that the Bruins’ physical and mental preparation has made them more well-conditioned than past years’ competitors.

It has also given them belief.

“Their confidence and their belief that they can compete with some of the best teams in the country has certainly come a long way,” Ferris said. “They’re fit, they’re confident in their ability, they’re certainly students of the sport. We spend a lot of time watching film and looking at past races to help them develop an understanding of how those races play out, what the tactics look like.”

Friday will mark the first postseason experience for a team that looks markedly different from last season. Only one man – junior Aaron Cantu – and three women – sophomore Olivia Foody, junior Ailish Hawkins and senior Annika Salz – from last year’s Big Ten Championships will compete in this year’s competition.

Mitchell-Reiss – who ran in last year’s Big East Tournament for Villanova – said he emphasized to the younger Bruin runners that experience is not necessary for postseason success.

“Experience is helpful, but there’s no reason why you can’t be a dark horse who comes out there and does something special,” Mitchell-Reiss said. “It doesn’t matter who’s around you at the end of the day. They’re all just bodies, and they’re all just jerseys. It doesn’t matter what color the jerseys are, how old they are, what schools. You go out there and you put your best foot forward and take risks to try to be the person and the team who we want to be.”

The Bruins are aiming high at the Big Ten championship meet.

Mitchell-Reiss said he aspires to help achieve a fourth- or fifth-place team finish among the 18-field pack in East Lansing, and Ferris said he hopes for improvement from last year’s conference championship performance, in which UCLA finished twelfth on both the men’s and women’s sides.

“I think we’re about to make some coaches in the Big Ten and West region a little upset,” Ferris said.