Columbia track assistant coach Delilah DiCrescenzo collapsed right after finishing her eight-kilometer race at the World Cross Country Championships. That’s how she knows she did well.
“That’s always a good sign,” DiCrescenzo said with a laugh.
Running for the American national team in Amman, Jordan, DiCrescenzo locked up a 33rd-place finish in the senior women’s race on March 28, second-best on the American team. The former Columbia track-and-field star finished the race in a time of 28:34 on a converted golf course that provided a good challenge for the Chicago native.
“There were very few opportunities to catch your breath, shake out your arms a little bit, and relax your form, because at every stage, you were pushing pretty hard,” DiCrescenzo said.
The eight-kilometer race consisted of four laps, with a 1,700-meter first lap and a 2,300-meter final lap sandwiching two 2,000-meter laps. A significant portion of the race—about 800 to 1,000 meters, in DiCrescenzo’s estimation—was uphill, and so she elected to start conservatively on the first lap and save her strength to challenge the pack over the rest of the race. But the depth of the field and the tough course kept DiCrescenzo from shooting up through the pack.
“I was a bit naïve to think I could move up a lot in a field as deep as this one,” DiCrescenzo said. “Looking at the results afterward, it looks like a lot of runners in the field go out and defend their position throughout the race and there’s very little change for what they run for the first lap and how they finish.”
Although DiCrescenzo normally starts slow, the layout of the course gave her extra reason to believe that she could keep things conservative at the start.
“There was a sharp downhill of about 200 meters or so [every lap], and I thought that was a good place to get rolling on the course and pick up a lot of people,” DiCrescenzo said. “The problem with that is that 200 meters downhill is pretty short, plus coming up that downhill, we turned onto a straightaway into the wind.”
Nonetheless, DiCrescenzo—who came through the first lap in 46th place—was able to move up in the standings as the combination of uphill runs and chilly weather conditions wore down the majority of the runners.
“I guess that just ended up catching up to us,” DiCrescenzo said. “I felt it when I wanted to go on lap three, I didn’t have as much as I thought I would.”
For DiCrescenzo, the toughest challenge came on the fourth and final lap.
“The last 800 meters ... I felt pretty in control throughout the entire race, and then with about 800 to go, I went from feeling fairly well to pretty awful in a matter of steps.”
Further complicating matters was a 300-meter uphill climb at the very end of the lap. Second-place finisher Linet Masai of Kenya lost her lead to overall winner Lorna Kiplagat, also from Kenya, in that last stretch. DiCrescenzo didn’t mince her words when it came to describing her finish.
“The very end of it, there was this very steep finish you only do at the end, and it was the steepest hill I’ve ever run, period,” she said. “And for it to come at the end of the race, I mean, my legs were burning and getting no oxygen, so no doubt about it, the last lap was so difficult and very brutal.”
“It was by far the hardest cross-country course I’ve ever run on,” she added.
But despite that, DiCrescenzo said that she had a great deal of fun in the race.
“As hard as I’m making it out, I really enjoyed the course,” she said. “It was really true cross-country. It didn’t play into a track runner’s strengths, you had to be a very tough, gritty cross-country runner to do well on that course, and I think that was the beauty of that course. I appreciated that.”
Of course, the better-than-expected finish for Team USA—fifth out of a field of 12—didn’t hurt, either.
“We thought that we could be top five but that we’d have to have a pretty good day,” DiCrescenzo said. “I think we’d all say that we exceeded the team’s expectations.”
After taking the week off, which for DiCrescenzo amounts to running 35 miles instead of 70, she will take part in a Puma-sponsored event in Walnut, Calif. Until then, DiCrescenzo will turn in her Team USA windbreaker for a light blue Columbia jacket—at least until her next international endeavor.