Two weeks before they head to the Big 12 Outdoor Championships in Columbia, Mo., the ISU men’s and women’s track and field teams will travel to Fayetteville, Ark., and Palo Alto, Calif., the Arkansas Twilight Invitational on Friday and Payton Jordan Invitational on Saturday.

“It’s just another opportunity for the athletes to have a competitive meet,” said head coach Corey Ihmels. “I think we haven’t totally started turning our attention to Big 12’s but that will start to happen slowly.”

A number of Cyclones that are in position to qualify for the NCAA regional meet will be on the track in Fayetteville for the Arkansas Twilight Invitational. The men’s 4×100 meter relay of sophomore Clint Martin, junior Amara Sama, freshman Pat Lewis and sophomore Bryce Colston look to improve on their season-best time of 40.47 seconds. Sophomore 400-meter hurdler Kianna Elahi and senior thrower Britta Christofferson will also look to improve on their NCAA regional qualifying performances from earlier this season.

“We’re going to be very specific about what we are trying to get done [in Arkansas] after running a lot of relays and a doing a lot of different things at Drake,” Ihmels said. “I think it will serve its purpose and hopefully we come out on the other end just as healthy as we went into it.”

ISU senior and nine-time All-American Lisa Koll will highlight action on the track in Palo Alto as she will run for the second consecutive week after anchoring the women’s distance medley relay team to a Drake Relays title last weekend. Koll will run the 5,000 meters at the Payton Jordan Invitational on the same track where she set the collegiate record in the 10,000 meters earlier this season.

“It gives her an opportunity to do a 5K and its going to be a stacked field, a very high-level field,” Ihmels said. “Her 5K school record isn’t very good [15:59.29] and we have a couple girls on the team that will probably be approaching that by the time the season’s done so she’d like to lower that this weekend and make it pretty hard to tackle.”

Also running in the 5,000 will be sophomore All-American Betsy Saina and freshman Aliphine Tuliamuk.

Competition at the Arkansas Twilight Invitational will begin at 9 a.m. on Friday and the Payton Jordan Invitational will get underway at 3 p.m. on Saturday.