Mosqueda’s 10K Record Caps Incredible Year

November 21, 1987 

Sylvia Mosqueda of Cal State Los Angeles won the individual title at the 1987 NCAA Division II Cross Country Championships in Evansville, Indiana, by 24 seconds in 16:57. That remained the largest margin of victory in meet history until seven years later.

May 1, 1988 

Sylvia Mosqueda set a blistering pace at the U.S. Women’s Olympic Marathon Trial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She opened up a 1½-minute advantage through five miles and continued to lead through 17 miles before dropping out not long after. It was noted by Christine Brennan in the Washington Post that “(Eventual winner) Margaret Groos and the others completely lost sight of Mosqueda along some stretches of the hilly, tree-lined course.” (Mosqueda was pulled out of the race by her coach after noticing her toes had ripped through her shoes, which rubbed her feet so raw that her socks filled with blood.)

June 1, 1988 

Sylvia Mosqueda, still just days after recovering from a two-week battle against chicken pox and the flu, dominated the 10,000-meter final at the NCAA Division I Outdoor Track & Field Championships at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. She took the lead with 21 laps to go and pushed the tempo on her way to a 16-second win, as well as the collegiate record and meet record of 32:28.57.

“The night before the race, my coach (Gudrun Armanski) took me out to the track and told me, ‘You can be champion, if you want,’” Mosqueda recalled to the USTFCCCA earlier this month. “I don’t know if I truly believed him, but I trusted my training. Our game plan was to run the first mile in 5:10 and then do whatever I wanted to from that point on.”

“I wish somebody would have recorded it on video. Now that I’m 54-years old, that race has always stood out in my mind. I can close my eyes and envision the entire 10,000 — just as it was. I would love to know if it looked that way to everybody else, too.”

Mosqueda, who enters her second year as head coach of the cross country and track & field programs at Pepperdine University in 2020, saw her records last for quite a few years.

The collegiate record of 32:28.57 held strong until 1994 when Carole Zajac of Villanova went 32:22.97 at the Penn Relays, while her all-time best at the NCAA final site remained atop the chart for 24 more years after that.

Back in 2018, Sharon Lokedi of Kansas led a squadron of sub-32:30 women at Hayward Field. Lokedi won the NCAA title in a 32:09.20 MR and five other women dipped under Mosqueda’s mark as well: Dorcas Wasike of Louisville – 32:11.81; Karissa Schweizer of Missouri – 32:14.94; Alice Wright of New Mexico – 32:17.92; Charlotte Taylor of San Francisco – 32:17.95; Anna Rohrer of Notre Dame – 32:26.24.