A contingent of distance runners from the Iowa State track and field team will travel west this weekend to take part in the 45th running of the Stanford Invitational. Held annually at the Cobb Track and Angell Field facility in Stanford, Calif., the meet welcomes athletes from collegiate and high school ranks to compete.

Iowa State men and women are coming off of an opening weekend to the outdoor season that saw multiple runners at both the Texas State Bobcat Invitational and Raleigh Relays in North Carolina. Overall, the weekend was highlighted by a handful of personal records.

All six of Iowa State’s entries for the Stanford Invite will be making their debut in the 2022 outdoor season. Two notable Cyclone athletes will be Cailie Logue and Thomas Pollard, who will be competing in the 10,000m run.

Logue enters her final outdoor season with Iowa State as an 11-time Big 12 Champion on both the track and cross country course. In February, she earned the “high-point” award at the Big 12 Indoor Championships by earning gold in the women’s 5,000m and silver in the 3,000m and one-mile events.

She also earned All-American honors during the cross country season this past fall when she finished fourth at the NCAA Championships, helping the Cyclones to a ninth-place performance in the team standings.

Logue’s competition in the 10K will include Colorado sophomore Emily Covert, who was named a second-team All-American in March when she finished 10th in the women’s 5,000m run at the NCAA Indoor Championships. Like Logue, Covert will be making her outdoor season debut at the Stanford Invite and also earned an All-American nod in cross country when she placed 31st at the national meet.

Pollard’s entry into the men’s 10,000m run comes on the heels of a pair of strong indoor and cross country seasons. At the Big 12 Indoor Championships, he scored seven points for the Cyclones by placing third and eighth in the 5,000m and 3,000m, respectively. He also earned top-ten finishes at the Husky Classic, Razorback Invitational and Cyclone Open in events ranging from the mile to 5,000m.

Pollard’s final cross country season for the Cyclones saw him collect his first All-American honor in the sport when he finished 21st at the NCAA Championships in a 10K personal-best time of 29:20.4. Pollard was Iowa State’s second-highest finisher behind Wesley Kiptoo, helping the Cyclones to a runner-up performance in the team race.

Like Logue, some of Pollard’s opponents this weekend will be familiar, as many of those athletes who compete during the cross country season run in the long-distance events on the track. The 10K field will include Northern Arizona’s Abdihamid Nur, who helped the Lumberjacks win their fifth national championship on the cross country course in the last six years by finishing seventh overall to earn first-team All-American honors. Nur also won gold in the 3,000m and 5,000m at the indoor national meet in March, beating Pollard’s teammate, Wesley Kiptoo, in both events.

The field also includes Oklahoma State’s Alex Maier, who placed 16th in the 5,000m in March to take second-team All-American honors. Maier also beat Pollard in that Big 12 3,000m championship, as well as helping the Cowboys edge out the Cyclones in the distance medley relay.

Joining Pollard in the 10,000m is fellow senior Ryan Ford, who will be competing in his first-ever track meet for the Cyclones. Ford joined Iowa State this past fall and also competed during the cross country season, taking 47th at the national meet in November. He transferred to Ames from Tennessee-Martin, where he won the outdoor 5,000m title at the Ohio Valley Conference meet and was named the conference’s “Male Cross Country Athlete of the Year.”

Rounding out Iowa State’s entries for this weekend are the trio of Kelvin Bungei, Gable Sieperda and Nehemia Too, all three of whom are set to run in the men’s 5,000m.

Too is coming off of a strong finish to the indoor season where he earned second-team All-American honors by helping the Cyclones finish sixth in the distance medley relay at the national championships. Too, along with Jason Gomez, Frank Hayes and Alex Lamong, ran a time of 9:28.62 to record the fourth-fastest mark in Iowa State history. The quartet also broke the school record at the Arkansas Qualifier in February, running a time of 9:24.07 to break the old mark by over three seconds.

Sieperda set a new PR in the 3,000m at the Razorback Invitational, running a time of 8:07.65 to finish 18th. The Rock Rapids, Iowa, native narrowly missed out on an All-American spot in cross country, as he finished 41st and missed the cutoff by just one place.

Bungei, like Ford, transferred to Iowa State, having recently competed at Iowa Central Community College. He will be making his outdoor track debut for the Cyclones after recording a series of strong performances at the junior college level, namely, finishing 4th in the 2021 NJCAA Half Marathon Championships in November.

All of Iowa State’s athletes will be running Friday, with the first heat of the men’s 5,000m kicking off at 1:30 p.m. The evening schedule will see the running of the rest of the 5,000m heats, followed by both the women’s and men’s 10,000m events. Live stats of the meet can be accessed here. The meet will also be streamed live on FloTrack.