The Oklahoma State University Cowboys have won three of the last four NCAA titles in men’s cross country. If they notch a fourth title this fall, as many fans and coaches predict, they’ll cement their place among perennial powerhouses like Colorado, Stanford and Wisconsin. But unlike these storied programs—many of which have taken more than a decade to amass their wins—the Cowboys’ ride at the top is only a recent phenomenon.

What’s behind their meteoric rise?

In this exclusive series, Running Times joins the Cowboys through the 2013 season as they try to defend their 2012 NCAA title.

Part I: Sangre Road

Dave Smith can’t sit still. It’s 6:45 a.m. on Aug. 18, 2013, the first day of cross country practice in Stillwater, Okla. There are 97 days until the Cowboys run at the NCAA championships. But Smith is anxious. He’s crouched over the back seat of the team van, scanning the horizon. Somewhere in the distance of Sangre Road, just northwest of OSU campus, the men are in the seventh mile of a 10-mile tempo run. This is the first big test of the year. If only Smith could see them.

“Where the hell are they?” he asks, craning his neck around. There’s nothing in the distance but gray dawn.

[Photo: The Oklahoma State men begin their NCAA title defense with hilly tempo runs on Sangre Road.]

“Sangre is the barometer,” Smith says, sipping at his coffee. Usually he’s biking alongside the runners on the road, but today he’s driving ahead of the pack, parking at mile marks to catch splits. He’s wearing a black Oklahoma State sweatshirt pushed up over his forearms, a matching black cap pulled low over his green-gray eyes. “This is where you learn how to master the art of staying focused while you’re uncomfortable,” he says.

His eyes dart up the road.

You can see them now, coming up over the rise. Every one of them shirtless, wearing black shorts that cling to them in the muggy heat. The lean muscles of their quads slide up and down beneath their tanned skin. There are 16 of them, the leaders strung out five abreast on the clay road.

He glances down at his watch, which he forgot to start, and asks his assistant coach, former Wisconsin All-American Bobby Lockhart, for the seventh split: 5:44. “They’re running slow,” Smith says. The aim was 5:30s. He shrugs it off. “They look good.”

The pack turns up a steep two-tiered hill overhung with hackberry and oak. The footing is loose and rocky. Mile 8 is the hardest of the day. They pass rows of corn and big muddy cow fields, the pea gravel on the road crunching under their feet. As they climb, they stare into the red reef of sunrise peeking out before them.

From behind his coffee mug, Smith points out a gap forming near the rear of the group. Two runners are struggling to hang onto the pace up the hill. “Stay cool, keep the group together,” Smith says to no one in particular.

The runners seem to hear him. Almost imperceptibly, four men near the front start to drift back to swallow up the two stragglers. You can see their heads turn, their mouths encouraging the two young runners on. The pack passes two brine-water tanks, which assistant coach Sean McCabe says are used for a nearby fracking operation, and makes a hard right uphill onto the homestretch of Sangre.

The road flattens out. In a minute, the group is whole again. In two, they’re back up to pace.

But it’s still slow. Surprisingly slow, in fact, considering the Cowboys are the defending NCAA champions in men’s cross country. Last year they won their fifth straight Big 12 title and their third NCAA title in four years, avenging a 2011 loss to Wisconsin, beating the Badgers handily 72 to 135. You wouldn’t know it by the stopwatch just now, but this is arguably the most dominant cross country team in recent history. Week 1 of the 2013 coaches’ poll has the Cowboys on top. Add to that a new $10 million track facility (the result of a land swap with the university for the space of their old track) and a healthy slice of last year’s blue-chip recruits—including NXN third-placer Luis Martinez and 4:01 miler Matthew Fayers—and expectations are high.

Even so, Smith isn’t sweating today’s 5:44. As long as he knows his guys are calm and running together, his anxiety is under control. “I don’t care how fast they run on Sangre,” he says with a shrug. Truth is, the Michigan State alum—and 1993 Big Ten champ in the 10K—just doesn’t put a lot of stock in workout times. “People always ask me, ‘What’s your best workout?’ or ‘What do you guys do?’ or whatever.” His eyebrows arch and he shakes his head. “They don’t get it.”

Suddenly, his look turns philosophical. “Reducing anxiety is a bigger part of coaching,” he says, measuring his words. “A few seconds or miles here or there over the course of a season—that doesn’t matter.” Over his shoulder, the pack of 16 is rolling down the road. “What collegiate runners really need to learn is how to deal with stress—how to stay calm, how to stay together.”

That’s what Sangre Road is for.

See part II, The First Real Test, for the results of the Cowboy Jamboree, OSU’s first race of the year.

In 2012, Dave Smith coached his Cowboys to their third national title in four years.

Smith’s conservative, collectivist philosophy of training doesn’t exactly fit the mold of perennial powerhouses. At many of the old school programs that have historically dominated cross country, workouts are legendarily grueling, designed specifically to separate the wheat from the chaff. Twelve-mile tempo runs from 5:30 down to 4:30; eight by 2K at 5:50. Those who can hang, hang, and those who don’t, don’t belong.

Smith, who has a doctorate in pharmacology, doesn’t see it like that. The way he figures, there are a lot of stories about great workouts but only a few about great races. “Look, in the NCAA, everyone is fit, everyone is talented,” he says. Which means you can’t simply expect to out-train everyone else and win.

“It’s the emotional approach to racing,” Smith says, “the mental preparation that distinguishes teams now. The team that approaches the race with the most calm, selflessness and poise—they win.” For Smith, that starts out on Sangre.

He glances out the dusty rear window. Lockhart calls out the next mile: 5:21. Smith is unmoved. He scans the pack for signs of distress. Nothing. “The first year that we kept everyone together on Sangre,” he says, “instead of getting out there and trying to drop each other and run as hard as possible—that’s the year we got third.”

Smith calls that year, 2007, the turning point. When he took over for the retiring Dick Weis at the start of the 2006 season, Smith felt like the program was at risk of backsliding into irrelevance. The Cowboys had labored through a decade of finishes in the midteens. Their last title: 1954. There was little to indicate a resurgence in Stillwater. The future looked bleak.

The natural response: Smith hammered his guys. He cribbed workouts and philosophies from other winning programs, what he thought would put OSU in their ranks. “I felt like I had to win in Stillwater,” he says. “So I over-coached it, over-structured it; I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” They were 10th at the national meet that November. Smith knew he needed to change.

Going into the next season, Smith, who admits he’s a naturally anxious person, decided to ease back—on everything. “I knew I was forcing it,” he says. Smith cut back on the weekly workload, gave his guys a lot more autonomy over their mileage and intensity, and focused on developing team chemistry. There was one hard and fast rule: No less than seven men can finish a run on Sangre. “Cross country runners have to trust each other,” he explains. “If they have that, everything will be fine.”

That fall, his blue-collar group finished third at nationals, the highest finish for OSU since 1995. “I worked all season—am working still—on trying to relax,” he says over coffee later that day. Smith’s training may be more laid-back these days, but it’s still hard for him to sit still.

Back out on the road, senior Tom Farrell (ninth at nationals last year) waves at the van and Lockhart slows down. Smith hands the Carlisle, UK, native a green water bottle through the cracked window. The boys pass it around and drink and squirt it on their heads and chuck it in the weeds.

“Everybody all right?” Smith yells out the window. There’s a series of nods from the group as they look around to check on each other.

“There’s a lot of reasons why we can’t win this year,” Smith says to the group. There’s a long pause. “Not least of which is how fricking slow on your feet all of you are!” he yells. Shouts and expletives erupt from the pack. In his best impression of Smith, Farrell says something sarcastic about “running for the team.” Smith eggs them on: “Five forty-four! What the hell! Start running!” A bunch of hollow thuds sound along the side of the van and Smith rips his head back in the window. He flashes a mischievous smile.

“These guys are good.”

They close down the 10th mile of the tempo run in 5:15. The low eastern sun has burned off the morning haze and it’s glistening off the runners’ sweaty legs.

They pass the stop sign that is the terminus for the morning’s workout, and Smith hops out of the van to greet them. Today’s run is a good indicator of this team’s readiness to win, Smith tells the group. After all, the Cowboys return six from the 2012 championship team (the sole graduate, NCAA sixth-placer Girma Mecheso). No other school can match their returning low sticks: Farrell (ninth), Shadrack Kipchirchir (18th) and Joseph Manilafasha (24th). And in addition to recruits Martinez and Fayers, they’ve restocked with transfers Chad Noelle from Oregon (who has run 3:41 for 1500m) and Charles Mathenge from Kenya.

“Just learn Sangre, you new guys,” Smith says, and clambers back in the van. “And watch out for poison ivy.” A group of guys are pissing into the brush on the side of the road. They wave him off and then start the 3-mile cool-down back to campus.

On the drive back to Gallagher-Iba Arena, where the team will ice, stretch and do core exercises, Smith turns to his attention to the real concern over today’s workout. Four of his returning six weren’t even there to run. Missing from Sangre today were Shadrack Kipchirchir, still AWOL in Boulder, Colo.; sub-4:00 miler Shane Moskowitz, who’s at home in Silverdale, Wash.; indoor 3K third-placer Kirubel Erassa, off traveling in his native Ethiopia; and 8:43 steepler Fabian Clarkson, who is not coming back to OSU at all, for undisclosed reasons.

Shaking off the anxiety of those absences and the loss of Clarkson, Smith turns his attention to November. “It’s not good enough to be good enough,” Smith says. “You gotta have guys that buy in—and you gotta be really, really lucky.”

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See part II, The First Real Test, for the results of the Cowboy Jamboree, OSU’s first race of the year.

Noah Gallagher Shannon was a multitime Colorado state champion in cross country and track and ran at the University of Wisconsin. Gallagher Shannon’s work has appeared in Slate and New York Times Magazine, among others. He lives in the mountains of New Mexico.



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