Both a 30-year-old 1,000-meter state record and one of the three boys chasing it tumbled this weekend at the New England Indoor Championships
The one strategic problem not even the cagiest competitors can solve is the precarious, all-too-common presence of other runners in their races
The 2024 New England Indoor Championships were held on Saturday evening at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center in Boston. After the New Hampshire State Championships on February 11 saw two Division 2 boys come within fractions of a second of one of the oldest and (by logical extension most impressive) indoor state records on the New Hampshire books, Zak Wright’s 2:27.38 over 1,000 meters in 1994, the boys’ 1K the other night at the Reggie promised to be the marquee distance race of the meet.
Actually, two races. Although Bedford’s Jacob Redman won the New Hampshire Division 1 1,000-meter title three weekends ago and held a seasonal and personal best of 2:28.91 headed into the New Englands, athletes were seeded on Saturday according to their performances at their six respective state-championship meets. Because Redman also ran—and won—the 1,500 meters at the Division 1 State Championships, he didn’t go all-out in the 1K and settled for an easy 2:34.14 victory.
Unfortunately, this performance left Redman seeded in the second of three 1,000-meter heats at the New Englands, with New Hampshire Division 2 winner Lucian Gleiser of Hanover (2:27.62) and the runner-up in that contest, Jamie Lano of Coe-Brown Academy (2:27.71), the first two seeds in the third, and theoretically fastest, heat.
The heat featuring Redman starts at the 3:24:58 mark of the New Hampshire Track and Field video below. It was to Redman’s literally incalculable benefit that this heat boasted another runner with thinly veiled mind-blowing credentials, junior Andrew Thornton-Sherman of St. Johnsbury Academy of Vermont. This kid, in addition to having run 800 meters in 1:51.84 outdoors last spring and in 1:54.94 on February 24 to win the Ocean Breeze Invitational, is also a 38.84 300-meter hurdler and a strong cross-country runner.
Redman held back early, as is his wont, and passed through 400 meters in second place to Thornton-Sherman in around 59.5. The pair gradually drew away from the rest of the overmatched field over the next lap, with Redman moving into the lead right at 600 meters (~1:29.4).
Redman then appeared to surge around the turn—in this wacky event, it’s genuinely often hard to tell—but Thornton-Sherman covered the move and challenged Redman for the lead heading into the final lap. The pair’s mutual 800-meter split of 1:58.8 off a 29.4 fourth lap seemed to place the moving odds of a 2:27.3 or better by at least one of these runners at around 50/50, as this would require at least a 28.5 closing circuit.
Unfortunately, most readers still probably still have the information provided in this post’s headline in their heads, so the suspense was really never there. Redman held off Thornton-Sherman by a clean 0.31 seconds with a 2:27.20, cleaving 0.18 seconds from Wright’s post-moldering mark.
The New Hampshire boys in third heat (which starts at the 3:28:35 mark of the video) already knew before Valentine’s Day what their basic job would be on Saturday. But with Redman’s triumphant gallop, that task had taken on special urgency, as a new state record was now not just an inviting possibility for Gleiser and Lano but a requirement to win the event at this meet.
The first two high-contact laps passed in around 29.5 and 28.5. Glesier was in sixth and just entering the home straight of lap three, about 550 meters into the race, when the runner behind him appeared to stumble and reflexively flail one arm forward. This scrawny but fast-moving limb struck Gleiser, who lost his balance and tumbled to the infield, effectively ending his race.
The leader hit 600 meters in 1:29.0, meaning that the front of the field had run around 31 seconds for lap three. “It will be…not good,” scolded a tall, portly old man with tangerine skin and unlikely hair from the back of the bleachers. This instance of comparative jogging had put a 2:27-anything in mortal peril. I was watching this live, and I thought about slamming my laptop shut and slinging it right through the glass of my living-room window like a rectangular frisbee.
But you just never know what sort of remote excitement might redeem an entire group of dawdling minors and re-brighten my day, so instead I kept watching the race. Soheib Dissa of Newtown High School of Connecticut wound up edging the ever-ferocious Lano for the heat win, 2:28.93 to 2:29.00 (results).
When Russell Brown of Hanover ran 1:50.85 for 800 meters in the spring of 2003, he broke a 35-year-old outdoor New Hampshire record. (The previous record, 1:52.5 by Gerard Pregent of Keene, was ancient enough to be a hand-timed 880-yard—or true half-mile—record, and converts to ~1:51.8 for 800 meters.) Brown ran 1:50.16 later in 2003 and still holds the record, with no one else having even eclipsed Pregent’s time (far too old for Milesplit to be aware of).
This means that, since 1968, Brown is the only New Hampshire high-school runner credited with a sub-1:52 for the 800 meters or its long-retired, 4.67-meter-longer predecessor. It would be insane—bannable misinformation, really—to even pretend that at least all three of the 1K boys’ stars of the 2024 Granite State indoor season heralded above don’t have a 100-percent guarantee or better of breaking 1:52.0 by mid-June.