By Mark Walters

Throughout autumn there are hundreds of cross country races. Every Saturday, toes are lining up on starting lines all across this great nation, awaiting the starter’s gun before shoulders are lowered, and in the blink of an eye, weeks worth of anticipation go up in smoke as spikes and elbows fly all over the place.

This happens in New York, Oregon, Florida, Texas and everywhere in between. Regardless of the weather or course conditions, races go on without fail. They absolutely do not wait, as I learned last season when I was still tying my shoes as the gun went off, having to run a five minute mile’s effort to come through in 5:30.

Something widely known by runners and coaches, but not known by many others is the specifics behind the runners that take the line each week. Powerhouse programs like Wisconsin, Colorado and Oregon have a lot of really good runners. They can have respectable showings at meets even when they sit a lot of their top guys. Because of this, many of the top teams don’t race their best squad much more than two or three times in a given season, maybe four with nationals.

Hofstra does not have that luxury. We have 11 runners, and every one is just as important as the next. We’re not expendable by any means, and when one falls down with an injury, it becomes everyone else’s responsibility to step up and stop the bleeding. Our top guy ran two races this year then was diagnosed with a stress fracture in his foot and it hurt us. While football and basketball teams can fill in voids left by missing players, cross country teams like ours struggle to do so. Because of this, we race our top guys every time out. There are no secrets, like when highly ranked teams lose to lower ranked teams, it doesn’t take a genius to tell that the XC higher ranked team that lost probably sat at least a guy or two. Many teams do this to fool their opponents and make it a mystery as to who they will race at conferences and regionals. It is also done to rest guys so as not to wear them out by running less-important races.

Take for instance the Iona Meet of Champions back on September 20 at Van Cortlandt. Iona was ranked fourth in the nation, but lost to unranked Penn State. I’m not discrediting Penn State by any means, they ran a great race, but Iona did not run all of their top guys, and the next time the rankings came out, they remained near the top at fourth. Penn State climbed into the national rankings last week at 29th.

But back to the point I’m trying to make. Regionals is what I’m talking about right now. Regionals, being the NCAA national qualifier meet, always has every team’s best runners on the line, bar none. Lots of teams sit some guys at run-of-the-mill meets in September and October. Few teams sit runners for their conference championship race, but it happens. No team in their right mind sits so much as one of their top guys at regionals, unless they’re that good, which few teams are. There are nine regions-Mid-Atlantic, Great Lakes, Midwest, Mountain, South, Southeast, South Central, West, and finally our region, the Northeast. The top two teams from each region receive automatic bids to the NCAA Championships held in Terre Haute, Indiana.

We will be racing at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx for the third time this season, and as ever, we’ll be putting our seven best runners on the line. I had to scratch and claw to be among that seven last season, being finally selected the morning of the race last year up in Boston. This year the seven will be Phil Giackette, Tom Daly, Mike McCristall, Fred Shattell, Eric Tremblay, Owen Graham and myself.

Our coach, Pete, told us last Saturday as we did our workout at Van Cortlandt that we were preparing for regionals, that’s that what it was all about at this point, but I disagreed and took the guys aside for some motivation.

I told them this had nothing to do with regionals. In my time at Hofstra we’ve done no better than 23rd out of 30-40 some teams. Last year we all ran phenomenally but fell in the final standings from the previous year. I told them to screw regionals, but to rather look at this race as merely another race. Don’t take it too seriously, and just relax. We didn’t run quite the way we wanted to at conferences, so here we have a second chance, something that I don’t know where my life would be without. I said this is about scraping up whatever you have left in your tanks and running with whatever heart you have left. Whatever respect you have for yourselves and your team, put it out there. While this may not be our last race, it may as well be, because this is the one where all the big guns come out. The Ionas, Providences, and Syracuses, they’re all gonna be there Saturday, and their seven best runners are all going to be toeing the line.

Mark Walters is a senior staff writer for The Chronicle. He is the senior captain of the Hofstra men’s cross country team. This is his memoir of his final season wearing the blue, yellow and white.