Samford’s cross-country team started their season with their first meet at Jacksonville State University at the Foothills XC Invitational 2025 on Aug. 29.
Both the men’s and women’s teams ran a 5K and placed highly overall. The men’s team placed third with an average time of 15:41.46 and the women’s team placed fourth, averaging a 18:32.45 race.
Although the season did not officially start until their first meet at the end of August athletes maintained their fitness levels with training throughout the summer.
William Jordan, a junior on the cross-country and track teams, talked about several of the workouts that members of the team were required to complete throughout their break.
The team did long workouts, long tempo workouts and double threshold workouts. Those double threshold workouts had the athletes complete longer workouts in the morning and shorter ones in the evenings.
“We get just a good amount of volume at certain paces during the day, and it’s just slowly stacked over the summer season as we prepare for in-season training,” Jordan said.
Samford’s head cross-country coach and assistant track coach Wes Penberthy talked about his personalized trainings for each athlete and their record keeping on Strava (an app that tracks workouts and trainings) to ensure that each member of the team was maintaining their fitness during the off season.
One of the techniques that Penberthy and Jordan mentioned for race days was pack running. The purpose of the pack run was to have athletes of similar fitness levels run together to maintain pace and prevent mental fatigue.
“I think it’s a great thing if you can do it [pack run]. It’s not always feasible just because of those kinds of factors [fitness levels, etc.] and, you know, even kind of the size of the meet and the size of the course kind of plays into it too,” said Penberthy.
Fortunately for the team, a pack run was accomplished during the first meet with all five of the male runners finishing within 15 to 20 seconds of one another.
When discussing teams that they are looking forward to facing, the Power Conference teams were mentioned, such as Alabama, Auburn and all the Southeastern Conference schools.
Furman University is another school that Jordan and Penberthy alike are excited to face due to their position in the top 30 nationally ranked teams. Because they are not typical opponents throughout the regular season, they are expectant to see what the competition will be like at the conference meeting.
“We are keeping all of our top five scorers from last season, and so we think we have a good chance of placing very high at the conference meet and scaring them [Furman] too,” said Jordan.
Despite the optimism, there is still a struggle the team faces: injuries to teammates that happened over the summer. Penberthy and the assistant athletic trainer Cameron McKinley, both have worked with the injured runners to recover and have created specialized trainings for each athlete.
“It [the injuries] definitely makes it tougher for everybody, you know? I mean, thankfully, I think we’re kind of through the worst of it already. Everybody’s kind of starting to come back from some of those,” said Penberthy.
Samford will next on Sept. 26 at Florida State University.
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