The Northwestern women's cross country team will race not once but twice this weekend, as the Wildcats send a group to the Notre Dame Invitational for a Friday afternoon race and another group into the city Saturday for the Sean Earl Lakefront Invitational (hosted by Loyola-Chicago).

"Our theme with both races is the same," said head coach Amy Tush. "We need to keep the spread among our scorers lower, and we need to race like we practice. We've been having great workouts, and that needs to translate into great efforts in these meets."

Northwestern will send its muscle to the Notre Dame race, a 5-kilometer meet which features the third-ranked Fighting Irish as well as No. 2 Stanford and five Big Ten schools in addition to the Wildcats. Tush sees the race as a good barometer of where the 'Cats stand in the conference one month before the Big Ten Championships in West Lafayette.

"The biggest goal for Notre Dame is to have our competitive focus and keep it," she said. "I think we lost it at the Griak last weekend, and this is another big race for us. Last week our split from our top runner to our fifth runner was almost a minute, and we'd like to get that down to about 45 seconds.

"The course is a flat, fast one, and it has perfect footing. There is no reason we can't have all eight of our runners under 18 minutes."

On Saturday, the rest of the team will participate in the Sean Earl Lakefront Invitational, which is also a 5K and will be run at Montrose Beach Park in Chicago.

"Our goal on Saturday is to have them improve their times from a few weeks ago," said Tush, referring to the Midwest Open in Kenosha. "It'll be the same thing as Friday's meet -- we need to keep our first and fifth runners closer to each other.

"The biggest thing in both races is believing," said Tush. "At the beginning of the year we made a vow to have no regrets this season -- to have the confidence to be the very best we can be. This is a big weekend toward making that happen."

NU Runners at Notre Dame Invitational (5K)
Friday, Oct. 4 * 4:15 p.m. * South Bend, Ind.
Emily Blakeslee (Jr)
Nora Colligan (Jr)
Laura Evans (Sr)
Rachel Evjen (Sr)
Kyna Forkins (So)
Diana Hossfeld (So)
Nicole Kuznia (Sr)
Karen Rogers (Sr)

NU Runners at Sean Earl Lakefront Invitational (5K)
Saturday, Oct. 5 * 11:15 a.m. * Chicago, Ill. (Montrose Beach)
Jessica Anderson (Fr)
Emily Bauer (Fr)
Kalysta Harmon (Fr)
Nicole Kalogeropoulos (Jr)
Beth Kobeszka (So)
Catie LaBracke (Jr)
Lindsay McAlister (Fr)
Melinda Ratz (So)
Ashley Roberts (Fr)
Caroline Speirs (So)
Alessandra Vavas (So)

Karen Rogers will run at Notre Dame this weekend