IU squads hit road for 1st time

The young Hoosier track teams are packing up their shoes, speed suits and toothbrushes as they hit the road for the first time this season. \nThe teams are heading to Fayetteville, Ark., the home of this year's NCAA Indoor Championships and this weekend's Tyson Invitational.\nThe Tyson Invite will host the stiffest competition the Hoosiers have seen this year. But it will also provide an opportunity for national's hopefuls, such as seniors Lindsey Hattendorf and Stacey Clausing, to run on the same track they will be running on in early March. \nArkansas' Randal Tyson Track Complex houses one of the steepest banking 200-meter tracks in the NCAA with a bank of 60 degrees.\n"There isn't much you can do to prepare for such a high track," men's coach Wayne Pate said. "It will give our athletes a chance to see the facilities for nationals. It will be the first time there for a lot of our kids."\nThe men's side of the meet boasts athletes from 15 teams in the Trackwire 25 Power Rankings, including the tied-for-19th Hoosiers. Indiana athletes on the women's side will face athletes from 12 of the Trackwire Top 25 teams.\nTwo Hoosiers looking forward to the competition are sophomore mid-distance runners Caitlin Lauer and Molly Beckwith.\n"The competition is better -- best we've seen actually, so I'm really excited for that," Lauer said.\nLauer will be running the 800-meter run and a leg of the 4x400-meter relay this weekend. Beckwith will also be running the 800-meter run, and has been training with Lauer all year. \n"We workout together just the two of us, and really push each other," Beckwith said. "In fact, we weren't able to run together part of this week, so we ran by ourselves and our times were identical, so it is great to have someone running the same times as me -- pushing me."\nThis is Beckwith's first season with the track and field team. She played four years of high-school soccer, received a soccer scholarship at IU and was a standout reserve on the women's soccer team. She played in all but two of the Hoosiers' games her freshman season, and scored two game-winning goals, the first freshman to do so since 2003. Beckwith switched from soccer to track this year due to knee problems she has been battling since her sophomore year in high school.\n"I ran track my freshman year in high school and posted numbers that would have been competing in the Big Ten today, but I chose to play only soccer my sophomore and junior years because I loved it so much," Beckwith said.\nBeckwith ran track again her senior year while finishing her four-year career in soccer, but said she wasn't as fast as she was her freshman year, and is still working her way back to where she once was. \n"Both Molly and Caitlin show us a lot of promise in mid-distance," women's head coach Judy Wilson said. "Both are talented, strong competitors that workout very well together"