Saturday, October 16, 2004
Today was a long, eventful day. It all started off bright and early at 6:00 in the morning, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. We had our first 10k to run at 9:30 that morning so I had to get up and have a nice breakfast. We were running the at Chili-Pepper Festival, and Coach Gulley thought it a good idea to go over the night before, and spend the night, rather then getting up early and driving all the way there. So, we stayed at a place called Camp Sequoia (not sure on the spelling), with two other teams, Virginia Tech and Boise State. Friday night, we had a nice pasta dinner at the camp then went to the movies and saw Ladder 49, which I thought was a really good, but sad movie.

After we had breakfast we packed up our gear loaded the vans and headed off to the course. When we got there we had just enough time to get our race numbers and time chips attached to our jerseys and spikes, and then we headed out for our warm-up. This was a huge meet; around 35 teams and most all of them were Division 1 schools from all over the country, from Boise to Florida. We were able to finish 17th overall, with out even running our full team. I finished 111th in a time of 32:36 which is around 5:15 miles. We should have placed a little higher but I think we did well considering, the injuries that we had, and the fact that we were so inexperienced at ten kilometers.

Next, we had a lot of good Mexican food that the meet provided the athletes, and we headed back for Tulsa. We had some recruits coming in for an unofficial visit so all the runners went down to coach Gulley's office to meet them, and afterward, we had our Homecoming Football Game.

Our opponent was Boise State, who was ranked 18th in the nation coming into the game (we are ranked something like 103rd) and they were favored to win by 21.5 points. So, we were just hoping that we could cover the spread. Well, let me tell you it was the most exciting game I have ever been at. We had the lead with like 3:00 to play, and they got a touchdown to tie it up, and then stopped us on defense, got the ball back and hit a 50 yard field goal to win 45-42. We were all ready to storm the field and tear down the goal post it we won, but it didn't happen, oh well.

Afterward, we hung out until, about midnight and then went to bed to get ready for our long run the next morning.

Joel Stansloski