The Penn State women's cross-country team will be back on the Blue Course at noon tomorrow for the National Invitational. The Nittany Lions will host UCLA, Central Michigan, Navy, St. Francis and Loyola (Md.) in the small meet.

This weekend's meet begins a very critical period for the Lions. Next weekend they will head to Ames, Iowa for the Pre-National, site of the NCAA championship meet. They will then have a week off before the Big Ten Championship meet.

Coach Beth Alford-Sullivan feels this will be a good meet for the Lions to start that stretch run.

"It will be good to start the month of October with a meet like this," Alford-Sullivan said. "It's a small meet with good competition. We're sending all of our runners, but there will probably only be 60-65 runners in the race. We'll see some people competing one on one with the race not as packed up, and we'll see how our runners deal with that type of pressure. Everyone's position matters. We'll also get to see how we stack up against some good teams."

"It'll be the first time we really have to go to the well, run hard, and race to place well."

The Lions have been in a hard training cycle since the William & Mary Invitational to gear up for these two weeks, but will start trying to freshen up as the week comes to a close. These two meets will do much to determine the type of momentum Penn State will have going in to the Big Ten Championships.

"I think the next two weeks can really put us in a poised position for the Big Ten meet," Alford-Sullivan said.

"The team will need to draw a lot more in pressure situations, but I think they will respond and that will really build their confidence for the coming weeks."

Senior co-captain Beth Buchheit thinks the Lions may have to surprise themselves to get their momentum built for the important meets.

"There are a lot of teams in this meet and in Pre-Nationals that are about on our level," she said. "If we could just pick someone off we didn't think we could beat, that would boost our confidence so much. Even this week, I think it would be important for us to hang tough with Navy.

"They are in our region, and they're one of the teams we're going to have to beat in the regional meet if we're going to qualify for nationals."

Despite the importance of the coming weeks, the mood at practice has not yet changed.

"Our goals and our race strategy are certainly getting more defined," Buchheit said. "Coach is going to start telling us in practice what we're going to have to do to beat some teams in the Big Ten, but right now its still to early to start getting uptight. It'll be a long year if we start doing that."

Junior Stacie Bouchard doesn't think it's time to get uptight either, but she feels it is time for the runners to pick up the pace.

"Coach has emphasized from the start of the season that starting with this meet, everything was going to become a bigger deal," she said. "But I think we've just been aware of that the whole time. I don't think we're going to start getting real intense and uptight in practice unless we don't do as well as we should in this meet. Hopefully we'll all step it up, though.

"We've been doing a good job running as a group, but that group has to move up. We all have to start running beyond ourselves a little bit."

The Lions will be back to running 6,000 meters in this race, and will stay at 6K until the 5,000 meter Big Ten championships.

"The Big Ten coaches decided to stick with the traditional 5K," Alford-Sullivan said. "We decided to go with a 6K so we'll be ready to rock n' roll at the Big Ten."