NEW YORK, Nov. 8--The varsity cross country squad went down to its first defeat of the season this afternoon in the Heptagonal championships at Van Cortlandt Park. The Crimson finished third in the ten-team meet, behind Cornell and Navy.

It had been expected beforehand that Mike Midler and Dave Eckel of Cornell, and the Crimson's Pete Reider would finish among the top five runners. Harvard's hopes for victory were thought to depend on its placing at least three men ahead of the third Cornell finisher.

As it worked out, Midler took second, Eckel third, and Reider fifth. But the all-important third man for the Ithacans, Nat Cravener, was seventh, well ahead of the varsity's Dave Norris, Dyke Benjamin, and Jim Schlaeppi. These three finished eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth.

Cornell's two remaining scorers were sixteenth and seventeenth; Eddie Martin of Harvard was twentieth.

When the team scores were, at length, compiled, Cornell emerged a clear winner with 45 points to the Crimson's 61. Navy, the pre-meet dark horse squeezed into second place with a score of 58.

Army Fourth

Army was fourth with 112 points, followed by Yale (119), Columbia (172), and Brown (173). Still further behind were Princeton, Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth.

Brown's Ed Sullivan was the race's individual winner. He led right from the start and was never headed thereafter. Reider and Jose Iglesias of Columbia, who eventually took fourth, kept at Sullivan's heels for the first mile, but fell back somewhat when the race moved into Van Cortlandt's infamous hills.

At the two mile mark, the Cornell runners, Midler and Eckel, moved into second and third places, with Iglesias dropping back to fourth, and Reider to fifth. The order of the top five did not change over the last half of the five-mile race.

Sullivan widened his lead to about 100 yards with a mile to go, but slipped and sprained his ankle coming into the final straightaway. He eased up somewhat and finished about 30 yards in front of Midler in 25:28.3.

Illness Not Blamed

All in all, it was definitely a disappointing afternoon for the Crimson runners, but they offered no excuses. They did not attribute their defeat to the persistent run of illnesses which has victimized key members of the squad all fall. Even had Reider, Martin, and Willy Thompson the team's three convalescents at the moment), been in top shape, it does not appear that the varsity could have beaten its strong, well-balanced adversary from Cornell.

Coach McCurdy afterwards pointed to the performance of the Big Red's Cravener as the crucial one; but he also pointed out that even if the varsity had placed its trio of Norris, Benjamin, and Schlaeppi ahead of the Cornellian, it would still have come off second-best--by a single point.

"They got position on us early and ran an aggressive race all the way--that was the whole story," McCurdy said.