For cross country runners, summer is a time to build a solid foundation that will help the teams to reach their goals of winning the men’s and women’s conference championships, said coach Erin Howarth.

Q: How do the teams prepare during the summer for the upcoming season?

A: The summer basically for us is a chance to build your foundation. So you don’t spend a whole lot of time doing a lot of quality workouts.

We just spend a lot of time putting in great mileage doing a lot of supplementary stuff like core stability, weight training and plyometrics and hurdle drills and all of the things that will just really build our bodies to be strong and get ready for all of the quality work that we’ll put in once the season unravels.

Q: What makes a good cross country runner?

A: I’d say mostly there’s the mental side and the physical side. And when you’re recruiting runners, and I’d say athletes in general because any coach would say this, you really want to make sure that you’re seeing that competitive edge, if they really love that sport if they really love to run or if it’s something that they do because they’re good at it.

You want them to do the best they can but at the same time you want them to have that do or die type of attitude.

So I think mentally that’s a huge part of cross country success, being able to do whatever it takes to win and race like a champion.

Physically the people that get injured the least are the ones that end up having their best careers in college.

If you can get 18 months of training under your belt without any interruptions of injury or illness, which is very difficult to do, you’re going to have a huge breakthrough season at the end of that time period.

Q: What motivates a good cross country runner?

A: A good cross country runner doesn’t need a lot of motivation, to be honest.

The one runner that comes to mind on the team right away, Brad LaRocque, he doesn’t need any motivation. You just tell him what he needs to do that day and off he goes and he does it to the best of his ability.

Again that comes back to love of the sport. If you really recruit the people who love the sport, you really don’t have to spend that time motivating them.

Q: What’s the most difficult part of cross country?

A: I think that’s twofold too. Physically it’s keeping your athletes injury free.

I haven’t seen the newest research that’s been done but I know that in high school the most recent research shows that cross country is the highest injury-ridden sport of any sport.

That’s over football, soccer, hockey, all those sports that you think are much more injury ridden but because ours is such a repetitive sport, you do the same thing a bazillion times a day, we tend to get injured.

I think that just keeping your athletes injury free is probably the number-one most difficult thing because everybody’s different. You have some people that can handle 100 miles a week and some who will never be able to run over 50 and you have to find out what that limit is for each individual person.

I think mentally, what drives each person in terms of being confident, how can you best give confidence to each athlete? I think mentally finding out what gives them the most confidence and keeping them injury free are the two most important things.

Q: What are your goals for the teams for the upcoming season?

A: We have some pretty lofty goals. We have got a lot of youth on the men’s side. We have eight incoming freshmen on the men’s side.

On the women’s side, all of our women, but anywhere from 2-6 are returners so we’ve got a lot of veterans.

Both goals on both sides are always going to be to win the conference championship.

That’s going to be really difficult because Eastern Kentucky is always extremely good and always ranked a lot higher regionally than we are, but we are only getting that much better year in and year out.

So, our goal is to win the conference championship and then at regionals, which is two weeks later, we want to finish anywhere between twelfth and fifteenth.

Ultimately, we just want to do better than we did last year but I think we’ll undercut ourselves if that is our only goal because I think we surely will.

Q: What are some things from last season that you want to improve on for the next season?

A: Last season was my first year so I think I was just kind of thrown into it in August and I was just taking it day by day.

I didn’t really get to give them their summer training. I didn’t really get to learn what the goals should be for the team. I kind of made them based off what I learned about the team but wasn’t positive those were good goals.

So I think this year I’m excited because I’ve been able to give them their summer training, I know what they’re doing to prepare for the season.

I know that they should be ready on August 17 and if they’re not then its their own fault, they didn’t put their time in, and then when we get to see what kind of shape everyone is in we should be able to improve every single meet that we go to.

Not only team place-wise but time-wise I want to be able to see everybody take at least 30-60 seconds off their time on each course.

On top of that I want the team experience to be that much better, spend a lot more time ensuring that the team dynamic is positive and that everyone is supporting one another and remember that this is all about team rather than how I did today. I think that got away from us a little bit too, toward the end of the season last year, on the men’s side especially.

I’m excited just to be able to have the time to pay attention to more of those kind of things than I did last year starting in August.

Q: What makes cross country a great sport?

Cross country is, to me, the greatest sport because it shows truly what you are about.

It’s an individual sport yet it’s a team sport, and all sports are going to be like that in some sense, because you have the stats and all that stuff that goes along with your individual performance, but there’s no other sport where you’re running against just the clock.

You can’t blame it on the ref, you can’t blame it on the coach, you can’t blame it on your teammates for not passing you the ball.

You can’t blame it on anyone but yourself when you cross that line and you either finish second or you finish last or you finish first or third. So in that sense I think it’s a beautiful sport because it’s all about what you put into it.

Jordan Boner can be reached at 581-7942 or