T-Bird Women to Race in Half Marathon

The T-Bird women's half marathon team will compete in the 2024 NJCAA Half Marathon at Dorey Park on Tuesday, Nov. 12 starting at 9 a.m. EST in Richmond, VA.

Last season in 2023, Damaris Chewon won the individual half marathon national title as she guided the T-Birds to a third-place podium finish in Huntsville, Ala.

The Thunderbirds will have seven runners competing in the race in Francesca Alvarado, Ines Mrabet, Hadil Chiha, Tyfane Martins, Daphne Kausz, Lisel Ndlovu, and Emilly Silva.

This will entirely new territory for the six runners as none of the above have completed a half marathon before.

"At this level, a lot of people, a lot of these runners, have never ran a half marathon before," NMJC women's half marathon head coach Jeff Becker said. "So we're kind of equal to some of the other teams, except for if you had sophomores coming back."

"What I always tell them about the half marathon is we train for cross country, and the half marathon is more about just to see who's tough. Who wants another trophy," Coach Becker said. "I think we've got another shot at bringing home another trophy. It's not going to be easy, but I think we can do it."

The messaging for the women is to have the same mindset and gameplan that saw so much success in last year's race.

"It'll be kind of our same game plan we had last year where we start them out a little bit conservative," Coach Becker said. "Even if it's at a conversational type pace like what Morgan and Vanessa had last year. They kind of had a conversational, comfortable pace where it felt like a training run, and then as it went along, they just kind of saw how they felt. When they felt good, that's when they started pushing. You don't want to go out too fast on this, especially if you haven't run it before."  

Live results for the race can be found here. There will be no stream.