Senior Tim Kaijala is used to winning races. But Penn's middle distance standout, who finished first in the 800 meters last season at the Heptagonal Championships, did not even place in his most recent race.
There are no 800-meter races in October. Rather than wait for outdoor track and field to start in the spring, Kaijala has taken his training to a new level as a member of Penn's cross country team this fall.
The extra work will ideally land him in the NCAA track championships this June, a plateau he just missed out on last season.
But the senior from Muskegon, Mich., is far from the only middle-distance runner to make a foray into cross country in order to improve his times. About half of Penn's 800-and 1,000-meter runners are running cross country this season, according to men's coach Charlie Powell, and several athletes on the women's side are doing the same.
Nor is the practice confined to Penn, or even to this season.
"Middle distance guys doing cross country has been a way of life," Powell said. "If you look at the national results way back into the 1800s, you'll find that some of the best middle-distance runners always use cross country for strength training."
Indeed, because of the unique nature of races like the 800m, the value of a distance-oriented extra season of training can hardly be overstated.
"To compete on this level, you have to be able to run a really good distance and really good sprints, that's just the nature of the beast for the 800 - it's right in the middle," Kaijala said. "You have to be good at both your speed and your endurance."
Endurance has been a pitfall for him in the past and something he is aiming to remedy with his work on the cross country team.
"When you get to the big championship races, it's a couple days of racing, it's not just the finals," Kaijala said. "The endurance to do multiple days of back-to-back racing, that comes from the strength that I think I'm going to get in cross country."
The practice is also found on the post-collegiate Olympic development level, where athletes simply include a season of distance workouts in their yearly circuit rather than officially competing on school cross country teams.
Frank Gagliano, head coach of the Oregon Track Club, is a staunch believer in the benefits of distance training for all the post-collegiate middle-distance runners at his Olympic training facility.
"No doubt about it. I have some of the best 800m runners in the country right here, and all of them are running cross country types of workouts right now," Gagliano said in a telephone interview.
One of the runners working out in Oregon with Gagliano is former Penn standout and All-American Courtney Jaworski. A middle-distance specialist for the track team, the 2006 graduate raced for four years with the cross country team and became the Quakers' best fall runner.
According to Powell, Jaworski was the runner that took the crossover the furthest to become a standout on both squads.
But the workouts that Kaijala and his teammates are doing, and that Jaworski did so successfully before them, are by no means an assurance of success come spring season, nor are they a prerequisite for it.
2003 Quakers graduate Sam Burley didn't seem to need the extra work.
"Burley was the NCAA champion in the 800, and he never raced cross country," Powell said. "He just didn't care for the sport at all."
But Kaijala, like his crossover teammates, has decided to take to the trail to find success on the track. It may mean grinding out tough results now before he can reap the benefits down the line.
"It's quite frustrating, for me especially," Kaijala said. "I'm used to winning, I love winning. I have to remind myself that I'm looking for bigger things in the future and this is kind of just the path to get me there."
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