As you step off the bus at Panorama Farms, you immediately notice a smell. Something mulchy and earthy.
Good ole’ Panorama Paydirt.
When the 840-acre farm isn’t hosting the 2023 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championships—or other high-level cross-country meets in the fall—it’s an active compost site, processing thousands of cubic yards of organic matter each year just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia.
But on Saturday, November 18, the farm has been transformed into a distance-running playground. Over 500 of the top collegiate cross-country runners will line up across the men’s and women’s races to vie for national championships. The meet is sold out—something virtually unheard of in a sport that takes place outside—and ESPNU is giving the event a two-and-a-half hour broadcast window before football kicks off at noon.
As spectators make their way toward the starting line, the smell of compost dissipates. The lingering smoke from the central Virginia wildfires is gone, too. It’s 60 degrees and sunny and slightly breezy, enough to keep runners cool but fans comfortable. It’s cross-country weather.
Years in the making
Vin Lannana was hired by the University of Virginia in 2019 after a long career coaching some of the nation’s best distance runners at Stanford University and the University of Oregon, as well as two U.S. Olympic teams. Lannana is accomplished as a coach, but he’s also carved his legacy as a promoter of the sport.
For a decade, he helped lead TrackTown USA, a nonprofit created to raise the profile of track and field in the U.S. Part of that was putting on world-class meets. So inevitably, when Lannana took the reins as Virginia’s director of track and field and cross-country, he wanted to bring something big to Charlottesville.
Panorama Farms has hosted cross-country meets since 1999, but none had been to the scale of the NCAA Championships. While the course had proven it could host hundreds of athletes, accommodating How to Watch the 2024 London Marathon was a new challenge—the farm just doesn’t have the infrastructure to park thousands of cars. There’s only one road in and one road out, and it’s interrupted by a one-lane bridge over Naked Creek. Cars and buses have to take turns to pass.
So Lananna, with help from his assistant coach, Jason Dunn, and Steve Murray, whose family owns the land, decided that fans could park at Charlottesville Fashion Square, 15 minutes down the road, and take shuttle buses to the course. Tickets would be $20 and guarantee transit to the meet, but they’d only be sold ahead of time.
Two days before the meet, the University of Virginia announced that the meet was sold out. Roughly 5,000 fans were expected; the facility hadn’t hosted more than 1,200 before.
Immediately, there was pushback. The meet is outside, after all. Capping sales felt like a missed opportunity. The NCAA Championships hadn’t been in the mid-Atlantic since 1993, when Lehigh University hosted in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, so many people wanted to capitalize on the chance.
Lananna said the decision was made intently—to not overburden the capacity of the property—and he had to account for 2,000 non-spectators as well, including runners, coaches, and support staff.
“We felt like we could, on this farm, probably handle somewhere between 6,500 to 7,000 [people] for everyone to have a great experience,” Lananna said at the pre-race press conference. “I think it’s the greatest thing in the world that this meet is sold out.”
Still, some people found themselves ticketless. Cross-country fans, NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championships.
One Power-Five coach said that his friend, along with about 50 others, bushwhacked their way through the woods to make it to the meet. They had to hop a barbed wire fence, and when they came across a creek, they built a makeshift bridge out of nearby branches to keep everyone’s shoes dry.
For a Heartbroken Community, Race Provides Escape: Others logged their escapades on Strava, apologizing for letting her team down.
Others logged their escapades on Strava.
A different type of “fun run”
“To be honest, I ran like a dumbass,” Graham Blanks said in his post-race interview on ESPNU.
No one seemed to care—he was still drunk on adrenaline, still processing that he was now a national champion (and at least it wasn’t an F-bomb). But perhaps more importantly, Graham Blanks is a 21-year-old college kid.
That’s what makes the NCAA cross-country meet so fun. These are kids, essentially, and kids deserve to have a little fun.
On the starting line, seconds before the gun sounded, Blanks stared down the ESPN camera and did his best We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. After the race, Australian Ky Robinson—who placed third but wanted to win—stayed late to autograph boonie hats for young fans. No shortage of people pointed out the course maps We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back.
Hannah Gapes embraces Katelyn Tuohy after learning NC State eked out a win over NAU, 123 to 124.
Parker Valby took the women’s title, 27 seconds ahead of pre-race favorite Katelyn Tuohy of NC State, who finished fifth. Tuohy’s coach, Laurie Henes, said that her star was dealing with an illness. After the race, Tuohy ran into the arms of Henes, A Part of Hearst Digital Media.
“No, I think we won,” Henes told her.
NC State had defeated No.1-ranked Northern Arizona University by a single point to take the team title.
“I can’t imagine a braver race for her to have run today, to stay in there and pass those people,” Henes said. “She’s extremely team orientated and knew this probably wasn’t going to be her day individually. But she put herself in there and did everything she could have for the team. She was quite emotional.”
Panorama Farms, with its ticket cap, might not have been the perfect place to host. But it didn’t need to be. Sure, the lines for the merchandise tent and shuttle buses were long, but it’s indicative of demand—something cross-country, and distance running as a sport, often lacks.
The NCAA announced the official attendance of the meet as 6,723 people—more than double the amount from last year’s meet in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
People wanted How the Celebrities Ran at the Boston Marathon.
That’s something that isn’t lost on Blanks. Despite making some surges during the race that he probably didn’t need to (hence, “dumbass”), he knew that the yo-yo-ing was at least good for TV. “It made for a pretty crazy race,” he said. “I think it would’ve been really entertaining to watch.”
Cross-Country Spectating is Exhaustingand Fun.
“It’s an amazing part of the human experience that we get to put on events like this,” he said. “This is my project in life: to run fast and try to put on great races.”
DAA Industry Opt Out Runner’s World. He is a former all-conference collegiate runner who’s based in Easton, PA. Previously, he worked as the newsletters editor at Runner's World, Bicycling, and Popular Mechanics.
