This is XC coach Mark Wetmore's 18th season as head coach of CU cross country. He is in a special category all of his own as the only D1 NCAA coach to have coached a woman's team national championship team (2000, 2004), a woman's individual national champion (2000), a men's national championship team (2001, 2004, 2006), and men's individual champions (1998, 2002, 2003) all at the same school. Five of CU's 18 NCAA national championship team titles have been delivered by Mark Wetmore. He has coached 10 athletes to individual NCAA national titles: Adam Goucher, Alan Culpepper, Sara (Gorton) Slattery, Kara Grgas-Wheeler,Jodie Hughes, Jorge Torres, Dathan Ritzenhein, Renee Metivier, Jenny Barringer and Emma Coburn, who have combinedfor 19 NCAA individual cross country, indoor and outdoor championships.
Wetmore won the conference championship 25 times with thirteen men's conference titles and a dozen women's titles, including the men's and women's sweep of the Pac 12 last year.
These accomplishments are all the more special when recognizing that CU teams do not recruit runners from other countries. You won't find Ethiopian or Kenyan ringers on the team, just good old home grown American talent, many of whom are from Colorado and the surrounding states.
And, consider this. There are no scholarships for Cross Country. If a school wants to have a CC team, they have to build it out of the 12.7 men’s and 18 women’s Track and Field scholarships. With a roster of a little over 20 men and 20 women, there is not a lot of scholarship money to spread around. The majority of the runners have partial scholarships or are walk-ons. Few have full rides.
Wetmore is a bit of a scientist in his approach to coaching. He tailors a training routine at the individual level. The general philosophy involves having a huge density of training, with the top runners putting in one hundred mile weeks in advance of cross country season. There is a fine line between gaining maximum mileage and minimizing injury. CU runners toe that line pretty closely.
The cross country season itself is fairly short. There are 6 only meets. The Rocky Mountain Shootout and an open/alumni and time trial are the home races on the south campus. This is followed by a pre-NCAA invitational, a Pac 12 championship, a regional championship, and if all goes to plan, the national championships in late November.
During the season, the athletes are coached to peak for the national championships. The science of peeking involves a measured amount of distance runs and sprints that builds on top of the density of long mileage that each athlete has built up over their careers.
The races themselves are typically run on golf courses or on courses specifically designed for cross country racing, and usually include gravel and grass surfaces with various hills, tight corners, and straight aways. The men run 8 kilometers and the women run 5.8 kilometers.
CU competes against other Cross Country powerhouses such as Wisconsin, Oklahoma State, Washington and Stanford.