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Do IT this week: Layering
By Jonas Fortune
Beacon Journal sports writer
POSTED: 07:02 p.m. EST, Nov 13, 2009
KENT: There were just nine weeks between the beginning of the school year and the Mid-American Conference Cross Country Championships last weekend in Athens.
It was the 14 weeks before that during the summer when the Kent State men's team got set up for its undefeated season and its first MAC championship in school history. Now the team is headed to the NCAA Great Lakes regional meet Saturday in Bloomington, Ind.
''They were on a mission after last year's cross-country season,'' coach Mark Croghan said. ''They really put in great efforts over the summer in preparation for the cross-country season, and it sounds like there was a lot of accountability there: guys talking to each other, making sure they were doing the right things.''
Throughout the summer, the team would meet around 7:30 a.m. Saturday at the Peninsula Lock 29 trailhead for a 15-mile run.
The team wasn't always alone. Local competitors training for marathons usually run there, too, creating a competitive setting and a good experience for the upcoming season.
It definitely paid off for senior Aiman Scullion, who became the fifth Kent State runner to win the individual title at the MAC championships and the first since 1991.
''That's been the goal ever since I came to Kent State,'' Scullion said. ''I realized this year what kind of work it really takes to be a MAC champion. I've worked hard all four years I've been here, but it has to be everything. You just have to live the life of a runner and you can't miss a beat.''
The effort has rubbed off on younger teammates, too. Red-shirt freshman Michael Heller, a Stow graduate who earned second team All-MAC in his third year of competitive running, said he never missed a long run this summer because of the help of his older teammates.
Heller, the son of Kent State Senior Associate Athletic Director Bob Heller, also credits the long runs as one of the reasons for his success.
''The summer is where most of the work gets done,'' Scullion said. ''It is hard to do on your own, so when you have a group of guys and go get breakfast after or whatever, it makes it a lot easier.''
The summer workouts do take discipline, though. Juggling work and family and other obligations with the running forced junior Scott Hilditch, a Woodridge grad, to look elsewhere for his offseason workouts.
''I felt like I had to get out of here,'' he said. ''There were just so many things to focus on here that I had to get away from to focus on running.''
So Hilditch, who admires his teammates' ability to focus in the area, found a friend with a room to rent in Colorado, where he could train and live in the altitude. It took him about two weeks to get acclimated, he said. He never adjusted to running uphill in the climate, but it all paid off when he returned to school.
''The first couple days I got back, I was able to run ridiculously fast for a long time and I felt fine,'' Hilditch said. ''If I would have raced the MAC championships the day after, I would have won by 40 seconds.''
Hilditch finished third overall in the MAC championship last weekend and has finished in the top five in every race this season.
''We just want to build on that,'' he said of the MAC championship. ''We don't want that to be the peak of it. We want to go into regionals and run really well. Take a shot at a national berth and then maybe we can do something special there, too.''
Jonas Fortune can be reached at jfortune@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Varsity Letters high school sports blog at http://www.ohiomm.com/blogs/varsity_letters/. Also on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ABJ_Preps.
KENT: There were just nine weeks between the beginning of the school year and the Mid-American Conference Cross Country Championships last weekend in Athens.
It was the 14 weeks before that during the summer when the Kent State men's team got set up for its undefeated season and its first MAC championship in school history. Now the team is headed to the NCAA Great Lakes regional meet Saturday in Bloomington, Ind.
''They were on a mission after last year's cross-country season,'' coach Mark Croghan said. ''They really put in great efforts over the summer in preparation for the cross-country season, and it sounds like there was a lot of accountability there: guys talking to each other, making sure they were doing the right things.''
Throughout the summer, the team would meet around 7:30 a.m. Saturday at the Peninsula Lock 29 trailhead for a 15-mile run.
The team wasn't always alone. Local competitors training for marathons usually run there, too, creating a competitive setting and a good experience for the upcoming season.
It definitely paid off for senior Aiman Scullion, who became the fifth Kent State runner to win the individual title at the MAC championships and the first since 1991.
''That's been the goal ever since I came to Kent State,'' Scullion said. ''I realized this year what kind of work it really takes to be a MAC champion. I've worked hard all four years I've been here, but it has to be everything. You just have to live the life of a runner and you can't miss a beat.''
The effort has rubbed off on younger teammates, too. Red-shirt freshman Michael Heller, a Stow graduate who earned second team All-MAC in his third year of competitive running, said he never missed a long run this summer because of the help of his older teammates.
Heller, the son of Kent State Senior Associate Athletic Director Bob Heller, also credits the long runs as one of the reasons for his success.
''The summer is where most of the work gets done,'' Scullion said. ''It is hard to do on your own, so when you have a group of guys and go get breakfast after or whatever, it makes it a lot easier.''
The summer workouts do take discipline, though. Juggling work and family and other obligations with the running forced junior Scott Hilditch, a Woodridge grad, to look elsewhere for his offseason workouts.
''I felt like I had to get out of here,'' he said. ''There were just so many things to focus on here that I had to get away from to focus on running.''
So Hilditch, who admires his teammates' ability to focus in the area, found a friend with a room to rent in Colorado, where he could train and live in the altitude. It took him about two weeks to get acclimated, he said. He never adjusted to running uphill in the climate, but it all paid off when he returned to school.
''The first couple days I got back, I was able to run ridiculously fast for a long time and I felt fine,'' Hilditch said. ''If I would have raced the MAC championships the day after, I would have won by 40 seconds.''
Hilditch finished third overall in the MAC championship last weekend and has finished in the top five in every race this season.
''We just want to build on that,'' he said of the MAC championship. ''We don't want that to be the peak of it. We want to go into regionals and run really well. Take a shot at a national berth and then maybe we can do something special there, too.''
Jonas Fortune can be reached at jfortune@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Varsity Letters high school sports blog at http://www.ohiomm.com/blogs/varsity_letters/. Also on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ABJ_Preps.
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