If you get winded jogging a couple miles by the lake, try racing with two snowshoes buckled to your feet, at an altitude of nearly two miles of sea level.

“Snowshoeing is harder than running,” said freshman Casey Shea. “You are carrying weight on both feet, so with every step your muscles are picking up that much more weight.”

Shea would know how the sports compare. Along with being apromising new addition to the women’s cross country team, as a high school junior Shea won the 2002 Colorado state snow-shoeing championships in both the 600-meter middle distance and four-kilometer-long distance competition. The championships were held at an altitude of 10 thousand feet in Leadville, Colo., the town with the highest altitude in North America.

The difference between training in the thin air of that altitude and racing in the Midwest may be one reason Shea has performed well for the Wildcats thus far this season. In both last weekend’s Roy Griak Invitational and the Sept. 19 Spartan Invitational, Shea was the only freshman to finish in Northwestern’s top five..

“When I came here, for the first three weeks my recovery time was better than it would be in the altitude,” Shea said. “It’s worn off already.”

Growing up in Evergreen, Colo., a mountain town between Denver and Colorado’s ski areas, Shea has run in her share of adverse conditions.

Last spring, for example, when a blizzard dropped six feet of snow in the Denver area, she had to run in tire tracks, caged in by three feet of snow on either side. Most winter days, though, the Evergreen High School cross country coach would lead the team in either snowshoeing or cross country skiing.

Shea said snowshoeing is a better, and more interesting, way to train during the snowy Denver winter.

“Snowshoeing poses new challenges and gives you a real, offbeat cross country feel,” Shea said. “You have to react to new circumstances and conditions. The snow in some places might be two or three feet deep. Sometimes you have to make a path through powder, sometimes there is already a path on packed snow.”

Along with inconsistent conditions, snowshoeing offers other obstacles. It’s physically impossible to run straight up a steep hill in snowshoes, Shea explained, so you have to walk up the hills and then run on the way down– all with a combination of metal, rubber and spikes strapped to your feet.

But sporting her plain old racing flats, back at sea level and battling Mother Nature in only wind and rain, Shea has become one of NU’s

This weekend, hopefully before any snow falls in Chicago, NU will be competing locally at the Loyola Lakefront Invitational.