FAYETTEVILLE — Eric Fernandez wanted to win in the worst way.
Unfortunately, he proved it.
Vowing as a 2009 sophomore to help the Razorbacks regain the SEC Men’s Cross Country Championship that Arkansas lost in 2008 after an incomparable, uninterrupted 34-year run of conference cross country crowns, Fernandez suffered a stress fracture to his legs while training too much too hard.
Fernandez and then injured, but now current senior captain Duncan Phillips both redshirted and didn’t travel to Oxford, Miss., when heavily favored defending champion Alabama by its fifth man escaped Arkansas at the 2009 SEC Cross Country Championships.
Fernandez wanted badly to win it both for John McDonnell, the 40-time national champion coaching legend who signed Fernandez out of the St. Louis suburb of Ballwin, Mo., shortly before retiring, and even more for Chris Bucknam the coach succeeding McDonnell before Fernandez reported to the UA.
So no injury hurt Fernandez like it hurt sitting home as Arkansas lost.
“They lost by only five points,” Fernandez said. “I remember myself and Duncan Phillips sitting back here when we saw the results and we both just looked at each other and it was like, ‘We have both just lost the meet for the team. Damn, we should have got it.’ ”
Bucknam cast no blame. The injuries came from the heart, heart the coach knew ultimately would deliver.
And Fernandez has delivered. The McDonnell recruit enthusiastically sticking with the new coach who enthusiastically stuck with him is reason one Bucknam’s Razorbacks reign as favored defending champions running this morning’s SEC Cross Country Championships in Knoxville, Tenn.
Fernandez was Arkansas’ second man home to now graduated senior Dorian Ulrey when the Hogs placed five in the top 10 and clobbered Alabama, 34-62, in last year’s SEC Cross Country meet at Columbia,S.C. This fall he has been Arkansas’ first runner home every meet on the nation’s 15th-ranked team.
The SEC Indoor Track 5,000-meters runner-up last winter, Fernandez last spring scored16 team points seconding both the 5,000and 10,000 for the SEC Outdoor champion Hogs.
“He’s a stalwart for us,” Bucknam said.
A junior in all three sports having redshirted indoors and outdoors as a track freshman in 2009, Fernandez still trains zealously but now also wisely.
“His running I.Q. has raised 10-fold,” Bucknam said. “He listens to his body more and when to pull up the reins. It’s like a horse race, you’ve got to know when to coast and when to start using the whip.”
Or the pool.
Aqua-jogging, which Fernandez initially began last year rehabbing from the stress fractures but continues to mix in his training even with them healed, and an anti-gravity treadmill stress his fitness without stressing fractures.
They enable him to stress winning another championship as a team and aim to win his first individual conference championship for the coach whom Fernandez wants so badly to win.
“When I have to put it on the line, I have to do this for Coach Bucknam,” Fernandez said. “Because if it wasn’t for Coach Bucknam and this program, I wouldn’t be at the level I have achieved so far.”
Sports, Pages 16 on 10/31/2011