Finishing strong

Seniors Scott Clayton, Mark Granshaw and Sean Macmillan near the end of their college careers. Scott Clayton, Mark Granshaw and Sean Macmillan are no strangers to the emotional highs and lows of collegiate running. They have watched their team -- called "snake bitten" by coach Charlie Powell -- suffer injuries, illness, transfers and retirements that would make anyone want to wave the white flag. Nevertheless, the three senior cross country runners will be there on the starting line Saturday as the Quakers race to qualify for the national championships for the first time since 1971. That these three have persisted is even more impressive given the burden of expectations with which they were saddled when they came to Penn in the fall of 1996. That season, Penn welcomed seven freshmen onto a roster that had finished last in the Heptagonal Championships in 1995. Each of the seven was a state or district champion of some type in high school and within the first few races of the season, they established themselves as strong contributors to the team. Three years later, as the Penn seniors stepped to the line at their final Heps, the promise of that first fall remained an unfulfilled prophecy. After finishing seventh their freshman year, they had gone to fifth and then back to sixth the following two seasons. Especially troubling was Macmillan's string of injuries and illnesses that kept him from even starting the race once in his first three years. This year, however, the prophecy was finally fulfilled at Heps. Driven by Macmillan and Clayton's top-five finishes, Penn finished third in the nine-team field on October 29, its best Heps performance in decades. There were only three seniors on the course at Heps for Penn but there were more cheering from the sidelines. As much as they were teammates, they were and still are friends. Of the original group, the only one missing was Joe Campagna, who transferred from Penn. "I can remember as freshmen when we had our super-group and we were ready to take on the world," Macmillan said. "We said that by the time we were seniors we would be kicking everyone's ass. "Now that there are three of us left, it's time to group together for one last chance. It's interesting to see how many people we have lost. I wouldn't have considered myself to be one of the last people." Of the three who remain, Macmillan has clearly had the most ups and downs. Much of his sophomore season was lost after he skewered his shin on a fence on a summer training run, and he fell ill just days before Heps his junior season. It's easy to see why he was ready to quit on more than one occasion. "Sophomore year, a race at Lafayette, I ran the worst race of my life and I walked off the course, sat down on a bench and said, 'That's it, I quit, I am never running again," Macmillan said. "I would have been the first one to quit. " Powell recalled one occasion on which Macmillan said he was quitting the team. "One day he came in to quit and I just told him to leave and that I would see him at practice at 3:30," Powell said. "He walked out the door and was at practice." Macmillan even threw all of his running shoes in the trash one day to signal the end of his career. Given his track record, it's not surprising to learn that he eventually fished them out and put them back on his feet. "It is a real credit to Sean to overcome [his setbacks]," Princeton distance coach Mike Brady said. "Given the stresses of an Ivy League school, it is easy to pack your bags and move in another direction." Clayton and Granshaw have had their doubts as well, but haven't collected the number of self-imposed pink slips that Macmillan has. "Every now and then, there are certain times when you know they are hooked," Powell said. "For some reason, Scott has always seemed like he was hooked. Mark Granshaw is as solid as the day is long. Sean has that emotional rollercoaster." Of the original seven, four -- Campagna, Jason Greene, Jon Krol and Jim Miranda -- did choose to leave the team, but they did not leave the group. Of the six still on campus, they are all friends. Miranda and Greene even live with Clayton, Granshaw and Macmillan. "It was a tough decision but I didn't have the same focus they have," said Miranda, who left the team during his sophomore year. With ROTC and a heavy academic schedule, Miranda already had a full plate of activities, which he has since added to by coaching youth soccer. Still, Miranda throws on his shoes for an occasional run, saying it is like old times when they are out on the road together. "We have to deal with their decisions as friends besides the fact as teammates," Clayton said. "As teammates, it sucks. You lose a guy who is really talented, but if his head is not in it, then it is not something that you would want to deal with anyway. Each of us had to make a personal decision." With the force that was going to conquer the cross-country world diminishing in size, it was time for the remaining few to get serious. Clayton said that it was during sophomore year that he hit the point when he knew he was committed. Deciding to stick with the sport did not mean that they had found peace with their role as mentors for the team. Last season, the challenge was to form a unified team from a group of talented runners -- a task that proved difficult. The idea that running is a personal sport -- the idea so often held by outsiders but rarely by the athletes themselves -- crept into the team last year as runners started doing their own workouts and looked out for their own personal interests. "Last year, we started out well and I don't think certain guys knew how to handle that," Granshaw said. "People weren't sure if we were good enough to win as a team, so maybe they were more worried about individual aspects." "At the beginning, we cared about the team, but as the season wore on we got the attitude of 'forget about them, lets just run for ourselves,'" Macmillan said. "We knew that we did that wrong and coach knew that we did that wrong. We knew that if we wanted to do anything individually, we would have to do it as a team." The older runners also wrestled with the lifestyle choices some of their younger teammates were making. Having been no strangers to the Penn party scene their freshman year, they wanted to help the new guys avoid making some of the same choices. Trying to get them to trade in dates and drinking for nights at home in front of the TV, however, did not pan out as an effective strategy. "We just wanted to come in and say, 'You are not allowed to do anything,'" Macmillan said. "Everyone on the team hated us, which is totally understandable. You can't tell someone, 'Don't go out, you can't drink,' considering I think we broke the record freshman year." Last spring, during the outdoor track season, Powell finally put into words what everyone knew was going on. He said he walked in, told everyone he was through watching the team split itself apart, and that was that. "It was all things that we knew needed to be changed for the most part," Granshaw said of the meeting. Sophomore Matt Gioffre, the Quakers' No. 3 runner, certainly noticed a difference. He pointed to the summer as one big difference, saying that his captains called him regularly to check on his training progress this summer, whereas last summer he didn't hear from the Penn captains once. By the time summer team training camp rolled around, "We knew we had a good thing going," Gioffre said. With the success of Heps now two weeks in the past, the challenge is to qualify for nationals. Not only are Clayton and Macmillan favored to advance, but the entire team has the depth to qualify for one of the at-large bids in the field of 31 teams. "We are one of the top 30 teams in the country," Powell said. "It all depends if everything goes true to form -- which hardly ever happens -- we should make it in." That is the goal. After three years of running largely as an aggregate of individuals, the seniors can finally say they are running as a team. "We have a lot of good guys on the team, and I like seeing them improve as well," Macmillan said. "Especially in the case of Matt Gioffre. In the last year I've seen that kid grow so much. I'm jealous as hell of him.? I want to take his eligibility." All three seniors admitted that it is odd to think that this is the last race and that four years had passed so quickly. Having finally beaten the demon and finished in the top three at Heps has been great, but to their coach -- who stresses the journey-like process of improving in the sport -- the biggest accomplishment has been that they made it to the end of four years. "Because the sport is an entire lifestyle, very few people really stick with it all the way to the final levels. It is easier to do something else," Powell said. "It is easier not to have to get up at 7 o'clock every morning. It is easier not to run 80- to 90-mile weeks three, four years in a row. "They have the chance, out of literally hundreds of thousands of high school runners, to be in the top 250 people. That is a huge weeding-out process."

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