The Golden Eagles cross country team started their season with a home meet on Sept. 6 at OC Great Park in Irvine, for The Irvine Invitational. The men’s team finished fifth overall with 124 total points, while the women’s team finished second overall with 71 points. After this Golden finish, the PacWest awarded the women’s cross-country with Team of the Week.

Taylor Whitfield, a Highlands Ranch, Colorado senior, was named the PacWest Runner of the Week after competing in the 6k. Whitfield finished second overall with a time of  21:58. “I love the mental toughness side of the sport. I'm big into visualization, so I will practice visualizing the course about two weeks before the event. We usually get a course map, or I run the course before, and I will practice just going over in my mind repeatedly,” said Whitfield.

Whitfield had a specific race strategy for the Irvine Invitational. For the first 2k section, Whitfield was very conservative, “hold the reigns back,” as her coach likes to say. Approaching the second 2k section of the race, Whitfield said, “The goal was to start passing people, moving up.” To close out the race, Whitfield said her mentality was to “finish hard and pass as many people as you can.” 

After being named PacWest Runner of the Week, Whitfield said, “The award was pretty exciting, just because any sort of individual or team award in this conference is a huge deal for this team, as it is just a testament to how hard we worked, how much the coaches have poured into us.”  

Sharing her vision for the season, Whitfield said, "We have some big goals for this season; our women’s team is going to Nationals! You will see us in Sacramento on Nov 23; we wanted to go last year but missed out by .01 and then lost the tiebreaker. The team is going out of region more to get more out of region points which will help to qualify for Nationals dream. Still, we plan to take care of businesses at regionals and make it to Nationals this year.”  

Another stellar athlete on the women’s side is Elizabeth King, who finished ninth in the 6k with a final time of 22:22, the second Golden Eagle to cross the finish line. King said working on her mentality over the summer helped her a lot for this race. “Team building is huge for the women’s team,” said King “Our team does a talent show every year before the season. My group's talent replicated the movie ‘White Chicks’ dance.” 

King was asked what was the best advice she received from a teammate; King responded, “It's so simple, but don’t settle in a race; always gotta be comfortable during a race.” “Just have fun with it,” she added. King’s race strategy for the invitational was to “go out, not at a tempo pace but pretty close to it, not going out super hot, also working with our pace groups.”

Fernando Aguire, a graduate student on the men’s cross-country team finished 12th in the men’s 8k, finishing 25:46 at the Irvine Invitational. Aguire said, “My goal [for the season] is to be in the top 15 at PacWest and to earn a medal for the 8k race, so I need to keep training and pushing myself by getting rest, eating right and stretching. I would like to run 24 minutes in the 8k this year at UCR and 30 minutes in the 10k at regionals and place high for that race. 

Another stand-out finish at the Irvine meet was junior, Noah Plaza who finished fourth at 25:25. 

Cross country will be racing in the UC Riverside Invitational in Riverside at 8 a.m. on Sat., Sept. 21. To keep up with Golden Eagle cross country, follow cuitfxc on Instagram and visit cuigoldeneagles.com for more race statistics and their upcoming schedule. 

Tags: cross country

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