October 2026 Alumni Update
Bison,
When we traveled to Ithaca in the fall of 1973 to run against Cornell, we stayed in a lodge on the university golf course, which was the site of the cross country course. The lodge was vast, with spacious rooms and several floors, elegant in a pastoral way, the setting of a country estate in a classic English novel, Wuthering Heights, perhaps. It was Tudor in architectural style, with a steep roof and gables, leaded glass windows, and vintage Tudor walls, beige with dark half-timbering. I knew the lodge wasn't built in the 16th century, the period of Tudor architecture. Yet it exuded a sense of tradition, which characterized Cornell Cross Country and Track & Field itself, at the time more than a century old, with an illustrious history of championships and titles, of legendary coaches and famed Olympians.
As a freshman several weeks into my time at Bucknell, I found it hard not to envy that tradition, at least at first. If Bucknell had such a tradition, I found little evidence of it in Coach Art Gulden's office in Davis Gym, which was in no way Tudor in architectural style. I saw no weathered, black-and-white photographs of Olympians from decades ago on the walls. I saw no tarnished NCAA plaques with illegible plates on the shelves. Gulden was only thirty-one years old and starting his fourth year at Bucknell. When I was in high school on Long Island, I'd run in the New York State Indoor Track & Field Championships at Cornell in its ancient fieldhouse, amber light sifting through chilly air. I saw many championship banners hanging from its rafters. I saw no championship banners hanging from our rafters, because if we had any banners to hang, we had no rafters from which to hang them, having no fieldhouse.
If Cornell had inherited its tradition, Bucknell had to create its tradition, the latter a challenge doubling the challenge of competing itself. We had to invent the tradition and run in the tradition at the same time. As said, I found it hard not to envy Cornell's runners, a chip on my shoulder every time I stepped up to the line with them. And I'll confess I drew particular satisfaction from beating them as a team, which we routinely did, a petty thought in retrospect; the Cornell runners we ran against were not to blame for having a century-old tradition. Yes, I knew tradition could be a double-edged sword, at once providing the confidence of historic accomplishments while imposing the expectation of historic accomplishments. And yes, I knew inventing a tradition, double-edged or not, would be honorable and aspirational, enabling generations of Bucknell distance runners to thrive, rising above rather than succumbing to historic expectation to make history themselves, as they should, like the storied 1999 women's cross country team chronicled by Carly Graytock Shea '00 in her eloquent piece that follows, the only women's cross country team in Bucknell history to compete in the NCAA Championships.
Still, a whisper of envy. But again, only at first. Because it didn't take long to realize we also had a tradition, one as rich as any Cornell could claim. It wasn't a tradition borne of history, because we had little history to that point. Nor was it a tradition reflected in many championships and titles, because we had few. Nor was it a tradition evidenced in legendary coaches and famed Olympians, because Gulden wasn't yet legendary, although he'd soon be, and because we had no Olympians. It was instead a tradition borne of principle, which has other expressions. The principle of running fifteen miles a day in double workouts when runners at other schools were running nowhere near as far. The principle of training and racing as a team when runners at other schools didn't even understand how to do so, much less why to do so. The principle of racing faster with each passing year, because the team would be better for it, because improvement was a paradigm of the program, and because it made no sense not to, given all the hard work we were doing. If nothing else, we had a tradition borne of principle. And principle doesn't take a century. It just takes character, the character of knowing and valuing how much you have, when you seem to have so little.
--Robert Braile '77
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