Northfield Mountain - Bay State Invite

The 5K course at Northfield Mountain (site of the 2006 All-State meet) has inspired a lot of talk and debate this year. On Saturday, the Newton North girls will have a chance to try out the course at the Bay State Invitational.

Bay State Invite - Meet information and Schedule (PDF)

The course at Northfield Mountain is particularly challenging because it is so hard to figure out exactly how to run it. One must not only know the course, but know one's own strengths and weaknesses.

The race begins with a short sprint across a field, up and over a little rise, and then into the woods for a lengthy climb up the side of the mountain. The climb is interrupted half-way up by a short strecth of level ground, and then resumes at the same grade as before. The highest point on the course is reached after about 3/4 of a mile. After that the course basically rolls downhill until about 600m to go, at which point there is a short but extremely nasty hill that interrupts the overall downward momentum of the final miles.

The State meet was last run at Northfield in 2003, and the times were approximately 25-45 seconds slower for Northfield than for Franklin Park the week before. The meet produced a huge upset in the Boys Div I team race, as St. John's Prep beat Brockton, Wachusett, Methuen, and Newton North in an extremely close contest. The Prep had trained on hills all year, and it paid off when they ran at Northfield.

The race rewards a combination of toughness and patience. In that sense, it is a true, fair test of cross-country prowess. North's Liz Gleason ran a terrific race at Northfield in '03, finishing fifth overall and beating runners who had beaten her in at Franklin Park. Having had several years to think about it, I believe the key to Northfield is first to have trained for long hills, and second to run the hill at the beginning at a normal effort, not trying too hard to establish a gap over one's competitors, but not intimidated. The bad thing about having a big hill so early is that one is likely to feel the discomfort of oxygen debt much earlier than normal, and this can be alarming. The good thing is that as long as the effort used on the first climb is not excessive, there is time to recover. Early patience should start to pay off by about the 1.5 Mile mark, as the recovered runner starts really working the downhills. Of course, it helps if you are running in a pack -- where the hazards and inefficiencies of an inconsistent pace are smoothed out by collective wisdom.

This Saturday, North will be running a JV team, a freshman team, and one runner in the varsity race (Jess Barton). Many upperclassmen on the team are taking SATs that day, and the varsity runners other than Jess will be resting up for next week's meet with Weymouth. They'll be at the course, though, running through it, taking its measure, in the hope that the information will prove useful in Novemeber.