Two members of Southern New Hampshire’s men’s cross country team made the right choice when faced with sudden and unforeseen circumstances during the New England Cross Country Championship October 10 at Boston’s Franklin Park.

Midway through the third mile of the eight-kilometer course, junior captain Michael Smith came across a Boston University runner who seemingly had passed out and was unconscious on the ground.

“I saw him lying motionless and stopped to see if he was all right because he was face down,” said Smith. “When he didn’t respond initially, I yelled to try and wake him.”

As Smith helped the runner up as he regained some consciousness, teammate Tyler Parks, who had been just seconds behind Smith, ran over to help within the deep woods of the course.

“He was not conscious until we both got a hold of him and started asking what his name was and if he knew where he was,” said Parks. “He told us his name but could not remember where he was until we told him.”

With one of the runner’s arms over each of their shoulders, Smith and Parks carefully took the runner to the nearest medical tent. With the runner unable to walk on his own, the two Southern New Hampshire student-athletes escorted him to an ambulance.

“He was running a time close to 28 minutes for the five miles,” said Smith. “I found him at 29 minutes, so he had probably been on the ground for three or four minutes. When I got there, probably more than 100 other runners had passed him while he was lying there.”

As a result, neither Smith nor Parks finished the 47-team, 300-participant race, meaning that only five members of the seven-man Penmen team finished in a contest where a minimum five are required to finish to qualify in the overall standings.

“Tyler and I really didn’t think about the standings until after we brought him to the ambulance,” said Smith. “It just made sense to us to stop and help even if it had meant it would disqualify us as a team.”

The unconscious runner turned out to be fine, apparently having passed out from dehydration.

When Director of Athletics Chip Polak returned to his office Tuesday morning after the Columbus Day weekend, he had a message on his phone from Benjamin Horton, a runner from Saint Anselm who saw Smith and Parks assist the BU runner. He wanted to let Polak know the school should be proud of the duo after carrying out a task much more important than the competition itself.

“I wanted to commend them,” said Horton in his message to Polak. “I thought they did a great thing.”

“This is what true sports is all about,” Polak said. “In an era where sports are greatly demeaned in so many ways, this goes to show that helping another human is more important than winning a race. For them to sacrifice their own positioning in a race to help somebody else was truly a selfless act.”

Michael Ghika is a sports information student assistant at Southern New Hampshire.