Crimson Runners Must Beat Brown, Army At Heptagonal Meet in New York Today

Army and Brown will be the teams to watch this afternoon at the cross country heptagonals over the five-mile Van Cortland Park course in New York City at 3 p.m. Army lacks an individual star equal to the Bruins Bobby Lowe, but has considerably more depth.

On the basis of comparative scores registered over the fall, the Crimson figures to take sixth place, but should be able to do at least one shot better than this.

Most of the teams in the meet--the Ivies, plus Army and Navy, boast at least one good runner fast enough to take the race if he had a good day and everyone else had a bad one. The most likely winner, other than Lowe, is Dartmouth's Tom Laris. Crimson runner Mark Mullin, however, beat Laris by almost ten yards after a step-for-step duel over five miles in this fall's Harvard-Dartmouth meet.

Mullin Posts Near-Record Time

The Crimson's big problem this week has been recovering from the all-out effort and subsequent let-down of the Yale meet. The times of the first five Crimson finishers were all better than that of any previous Harvard runner, and it was learned several days after the meet that Mark Mullin's 23:28.9 was the third fastest time ever posted on the course in the eleven years it has been open. Unfortunately, Yale's Bill Bachrach, the winner then, and a strong contender for the individual honors today, had the second fastest time in the course's history.

Team by team, the order of finishing will probably be something like Army, Brown, Yale, Navy, Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, Princeton, Penn, and Columbia. The top four will almost certainly be the top four whatever happens.

In the middle group, Cornell should not be able to repeat the triumph it scored earlier this season over an uninspired, sickness-ridden Crimson team.

Yale's chances for a team first place depend not only on a high finish by Bachrach, but also on the performance of Bob Mack and Tommy Carroll. Mack and Carroll were third and fourth in the Harvard-Yale-Princeton triangular.

Besides Lowe, who pulled the rather incredible stunt of winning the 3-mile and the 3000-meter steeplechase within 20 minutes of each other at last spring's ICIA meet, Brown will be depending on three sophomores--Tom Gunselman, Bill Ibby, and John Jones.

Army Last Year's Winner

Army's best man is another John Jones. The Cadets won the title last year, with 33 points over Yale's 76 and Navy's 88, while Harvard was finishing seventh with 160 points.

The Crimson will be using its usual top seven against these teams, and except for the psychological aspect the varsity is in as good shape as can be expected this late in the year.

The cold that kept Ed Hamlin out of practice all last week has let up enough so that he can work out. Jed Fitsgerald's leg is better than it was before the Yale meet, and all the other runners are in perfect shape, except for Fred Howard, who is suffering from a tender Achilles tendon.

There is no freshman meet.