Runners travel north

The No. 19-ranked men's cross country team and women's cross country team will head north to Michigan State this weekend to compete in the Big Ten Championships Sunday afternoon.\nEast Lansing will welcome many of the best cross country teams in the nation this weekend as the Big Ten boasts four of the top 20 teams in the country.\nNo. 2 Wisconsin will probably be the toughest opponent for the Hoosiers. The defending conference champion Badgers easily won last year's meet, topping second place Ohio State by 54 points. \nAlthough it would be tough to beat Wisconsin, the Hoosiers know it would be more realistic to aim for No. 6 Michigan and No. 7 Ohio State.\n"I think it is a very realistic goal to get second in this meet," senior Chris Powers said. "The Big Ten conference is just so tough this year. Overall, it has probably the best distance teams in the country."\nIn last year's meet the Hoosiers finished fourth behind Ohio State and Michigan, yet the three teams were only separated by a total of 16 points. The Buckeyes and the Wolverines are the teams IU men's coach Robert Chapman said he wants to focus on as they head into the conference meet. \n"We have focused our training towards November, and they (Wisconsin and Michigan) have performed better than us in the early season meets this year," Chapman said. "So it would be a natural marker of out training to see if we can beat them now in early November."\nThe team has trained so it can hit its peak in these last three, most important meets of the year. The Big Ten Championship, one of these crucial meets, is now upon the Hoosiers, but Chapman said the most important race is still to come.\n"While we always want to do our best at the Big Ten Championship meet, we also can't completely taper and rest for it since the NCAA Championships don't occur for another 22 days," Chapman said. "So it is a delicate balancing act."\nAfter Big Ten the team has a weekend off before it competes in NCAA Regionals, and then a week later in the National Championships.\nChapman compared this weekend's meet to collegiate basketball, saying all teams, of course, want to win the Big Ten tournament, but they know the "big dance" is still to come.\nThe IU women's team is lead by senior Audrey Giesler who finished sixth overall at last year's conference championship with a then-career best five-kilometer time of 17:49 and earned All-Big Ten honors. Giesler's best 5K time in the 2003 season is 17:47, the time she ran when she finished first overall at the Indiana Intercollegiates Sept. 19 in Terre Haute.\n"[Audrey] is going up against some pretty experienced runners -- the two girls from Michigan State, there's three from Michigan, there's a girl from Penn State that are all running really well, so that's six right there," IU women's coach Judy Wilson said. "But I think that she is a big meet runner so she has just a good of shot at it as anyone else does."\nThe women's race features four teams ranked in the top 20 of the FinishLynx NCAA Division one women's cross country poll: Michigan State is ranked sixth, University of Michigan 10th, University of Wisconsin 18th and Penn State University 19th.\nWilson said she thinks the team can finish in the top five with all of the nationally recognized teams competing in East Lansing. Wilson said in order to accomplish this, the team needs to have five in the top thirty individual finishes.\nThe runners will leave for East Lansing Friday morning and have a couple days to accommodate themselves to the course before the women's six-kilometer race begins at 10:45 a.m., with the men's eight-kilometer race following at 11:30 a.m. on The Forest Akers East Golf Course. \n-- Contact staff writers Alex Witteveld and Steve Slivka at pawittev@indiana.edu and smslivka@indiana.edu.