Senior NC State cross country star Joanna Thompson will start the first race of her final season with the Pack at the WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary this weekend.
Thompson has been nothing short of spectacular over the course of her running career at State, achieving All-ACC honors and NCAA All-Regional honors in each of the three seasons that she has run with the Pack.
In Thompson’s last race of 2013, she placed 36th at the NCAA National Championships, giving the Tennessee native her very first designation as an NCAA Cross Country All-American.
However, when asked about her season goals, she emphasized her team rather than expectations to add more personal accolades to her illustrious repertoire.
“I definitely have a lot of goals,” Thompson said. “I think we have a really strong team this year from an all-around perspective.”
Prioritizing the team comes just a year after the Pack narrowly missed out on nationals, with Thompson qualifying for the individual championship.
“Last year there was a little bit of team disappointment at the end of the season, because I managed to qualify as an individual for nationals but our team just missed making it,” Thompson said.
Thompson described running without her teammates as “nerve-racking” and “bittersweet.”
“It’s always really exciting when you make nationals, but to then not have my teammates there was this moment of excitement and then this moment of sadness,” Thompson said.
Teams must place first or second in their respective regional races to qualify for nationals. The Wolfpack finished 3rd at the Southeast Regionals behind Virginia and William & Mary.
The Pack’s final chance came at the possibility of receiving one of the 14 at-large bids given at the end of the season. However the race’s selection committee denied the Lady Pack’s bid, and the season was over.
“I think this year the team goal is to get everybody to nationals so that we can all share that experience,” Thompson said.
In the last 10 years, Indiana State University has hosted the Division I Cross Country National Championships nine times. The NCAA won’t change the routine this year as the championships are slotted to return to Terre Haute, Indiana, in 2014.
Before Thompson’s All-American performance last year, she finished 77th on her first go-round as a freshman. As a team, the Lady Pack finished 24th that year.
The LaVern Gibson Championship Cross Country Course in Terre Haute is well-known for its treacherous nature.
“We like to call it Terre Hell,” Thompson said. “It’s almost always raining. The course is wide open, but it’s full of these rolling hills and it’s very, very sloppy.”
In last year’s race, the runners battled a sub-20-degree wind chill before crossing the finish line.
“There were girls wiping out everywhere, so that was a little scary,” Thompson said. “They also had to move the start line up by a hundred meters because the place they had initially placed it flooded. I actually had to tape my spikes to my feet to keep them from getting sucked off in the mud.”
It certainly is a gritty scene as runners cross the finish line, but Thompson would like nothing more than to share this experience with her teammates.
On her own part, Thompson is determined to hold nothing back when challenging her competition.
“I think this season I am really just focusing on running every race as hard as I can, so whatever anybody else does is their business,” Thompson said. “If they beat me, they are going to have to work hard to do it.”
