2007 NCAA Cross Country Championship

Yesterday was the 2007 NCAA Cross Country Championship at the Lavern Gibson Sports Complex. It was awesome. If you've never gone, you can't imagine how cool it is. You've got the best runners from all colleges (and your future Olympians) on a great course. It was televised this year, so you can watch it live or the replay on TV too.

The men's race ended great. It was side by side the whole way down the backstretch, but in the end, a runner from Oregon, Galen Rupp, got edged out by Josh McDougal, a runner from Liberty (that's right, I said Liberty......not a school that is known for it's running program). Steve Prefontaine would have been pretty disappointed, but it still looked like Oregon's team dominated the event.

The men's winner has been at the championships every year in college and his worst finish was 27th!

The women's race was a little different. Once again this year, it was dominated by Sally Kipyego (a Kenyan) from Texas Tech. She was in a different league out there. I think at one point she even stopped and had some coffee and a donut and did a quick interview. This year she only beat the rest of the field by 16 seconds. That's not very impressive considering last year she had around 30 seconds on everyone.

In the next few years, I will be traveling to Kenya to select a new wife (one who is that fastest in her land). We shall have offspring and I will train them to be the fastest U.S. born distance runners ever. Then, we will collect the $1,000,000 prize that is up for grabs for any U.S. born runner who breaks the marathon world record. I think my children should be able to accomplish this feat by the age of 11. If not, they will be sold to a third world country and forced to run full speed on a treadmill all day just to provide a wealthy landowner electricity for his chicken coup.