Marshall Women\u2019s Cross Country Feature<\/p>\n
By Owen James, Training Coordinator<\/p>\n
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (WMUL-FM) \u2014 Rachael Withrow found out she was named Sun Belt Conference Women\u2019s Runner of the Week the same way many fans did: a social media post.<\/p>\n
Although the announcement caught her by surprise, her performance the Friday before at the Thundering Herd Invitational more than justified the honor. Withrow ran an astonishing 16:11.2, beating her competition by a minute and a half and obliterating the course record by 50 seconds. Her time was also the fastest 5K in the Sun Belt Conference through the first week of competition.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Withrow\u2019s performance] met my expectations, but also kind of blew me away because I was thinking I’d been very happy with anything sub-17, which had been a course record, and yet we almost broke 16,\u201d Caleb Bowen, cross country head coach, said.<\/p>\n
So how does one follow up such an impressive win? Simple: by doing it again. Withrow finished the Queen City Invite with a time of 16:18.9, again beating the next-best runner by more than a minute.<\/p>\n
However, Withrow\u2019s start in the green and white means more to her than her recent success alone. For the Winfield, West Virginia, native, transferring to Marshall after three years at Bowling Green is a return home.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got to wear the jerseys with the West Virginia on them, and I really like that jersey just because I feel like that means a lot to represent your home state, especially just being in Ohio before,\u201d Withrow said.<\/p>\n
A return to West Virginia also means a reunion with some familiar faces from Withrow\u2019s time at Winfield High School.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere, it’s kind of surreal to get to be teammates with some of the people that I raced against in high school, like Destiny [Berryman] and Ellie [Hosaflook],\u201d Withrow said. \u201cI raced against them a lot in high school, and so we had that friendship already. And then just kind of getting to train together now, it’s really surreal. Just the full-circle moment, especially kind of going back to those courses that we did race in high school and revisiting that. It’s been a lot of fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sense of familiarity has made Withrow\u2019s return home about more than just nostalgia. Withrow said Keith Roberts, director of track and field and cross country, and Bowen have helped make Marshall feel like a family.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s definitely been a lot of fun and just exceeded, like, whatever I could have hoped for,\u201d Withrow said. \u201cJust coming into the program, I think that Coach Roberts and Coach Bowen have really created that family atmosphere where I really just love going to practice every day. Love getting to race with the girls and do workouts with them, and then just being back home.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Rachael Withrow, there really is no place like home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marshall Women\u2019s Cross Country Feature By Owen James, Training Coordinator HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (WMUL-FM) \u2014 Rachael Withrow found out she was named Sun Belt Conference Women\u2019s Runner of the Week the same way many fans did: a social media post. Although the announcement caught her by surprise, her performance the Friday before at the Thundering Herd<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,1902,5],"tags":[100,69,28,138,1061,1828,1606,236,23,212,51,96],"class_list":["post-5371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-cross-country","category-wmul-sports","tag-fm88-sports","tag-huntington-wv","tag-marshall-university","tag-marshall-university-athletics","tag-owen-james","tag-owen-james-fm88-sports","tag-owen-james-marshall","tag-sun-belt-conference","tag-thundering-herd","tag-thundering-herd-athletics","tag-wmul","tag-wv"],"acf":[],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5372,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5371\/revisions\/5372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/wmul\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}