The women’s cross country team fell short of expectations and had what redshirt junior Carrie Zografos called a “frustrating” season. However, Zografos has maintained a positive outlook and an ever-present smile throughout the fall term.
Zografos, a psychology and Spanish double-major, hails from Portland, where she ran 300-meter hurdles at Central Catholic High. She spent the first two years of her collegiate career at Colorado, and it was there that she began the transition to longer distance running.
As a freshman, Zografos ran hurdles for the Buffaloes track and field team, but she began to see less improvement than she wanted compared to the other runners on the team. Her sophomore year, Zografos made the move to middle distances on the track and tried out for the Colorado cross country team, a squad with a highly touted reputation. She made the team, but struggled to keep pace with the top runners on the squad.
“It was pretty easy that year actually because I did whatever my coach told me to do,” Zografos said. “When he said to go run 10 miles at this pace, I’d just do it and not really think about it. But I was so far behind all those other girls.”
Zografos kept working, though, and at the end of the season, when the top-seven runners had gone to nationals, she won an open race which included all the other Colorado runners ranking her as the eighth runner on a team that placed No. 8 nationally. Carrie credits her win and her improvement throughout her sophomore campaign to Colorado coach Mark Wetmore.
“My coach had a lot of faith in me and put a lot of confidence in me so I ran well,” she said.
Despite her progress at Colorado, Zografos moved back to Oregon to be closer to home.

Last year for the Oregon cross country team, Zografos ran as the No. 8 harrier on the team, but after an excellent training summer, she came back much improved this fall.
Most of Zografos’ summer was spent in rural Mexico, where she had to train in a location that was less than ideal for an American female. Her training grounds were a park that took her about five minutes to circle. She would train for more than an hour covering the same ground over and over with locals staring and yelling at the foreign girl who was there every morning.
“It was really hard to get out and do it,” she said.
But thanks to her dedication at the park, Zografos has led the Oregon team in every race in which she has run this season. But head coach Tom Heinonen said the pressure the team has put on Zografos may not be the best thing for her.
“It really was unfair to Carrie to be placed in the position of being the top runner at Oregon, because our team normally has been so much stronger,” Heinonen said. “It is a heavy burden for her to carry when she is such a novice in cross country and in distance running.
“The lack of success of our team has weighed heavily on her.”
Zografos is not alone in her relative inexperience in distance running on the women’s cross country team, and Heinonen is the first to take the blame for having a crowd of middle distance runners on the long distance team.
“We just weren’t able to land the big-gun high school runners who could step right in and help us out, so we’re asking people who run a lot shorter distances to try to run cross country for us,” Heinonen said.
But Zografos has maintained her motivation throughout the season primarily through memories of the training she put in this summer and her love of running.
“I really love to run. I really do. But this season has been hard because I feel like I’m not supposed to be a six-kilometer runner,” she said.
Through the pitfalls of the season, Zografos has retained her hope and her charm. She also has volunteered twice a week at the Brattain House in Springfield, where she is helping children and working on her goal to be fluent in Spanish.
“When you talk to her you see just a buoyant personality,” Heinonen said. “She’s so much fun to be around.”
The NCAA Western Regional Championships on Nov. 10 remain for Zografos and the harriers, and they are looking at the race as a chance to pull it all together and close the season on a positive note.