Cross-country is well underway is Colorado: The #8-ranked girls' team in the U.S. has already raced #4 and #1, and the results were devastating
Cross-country is well underway is Colorado: The #8-ranked girls' team in the U.S. has already raced #4 and #1, and the results were devastating
Like the stock market, high-school running in the Rockies has stubbornly risen in value since the housing-market crash no matter what else has gaily unraveled around it
Thirteen years ago today, Milesplit’s Colorado affiliate published an article about the just-completed Liberty Bell Invitational at Heritage High School in Littleton.
To be precise, “back in the mid 80s” was the year 1984, meaning that Lize Brittin’s course record stood for 26 years. If it was a soft record, then an unlikely string of runners with recognizable names must have all suffered off-days at Liberty Bell between 1985 and 2009, including the Kaltenbach sisters of Smoky Hill (Megan ran 17:36.0 in 2002, Katelyn 17:42.2 in 2003); Katie Follett of Fort Collins High, who was 8th in the 3,000 meters at the 2018 World Indoor Championships (17:44.0 in 2005); Natosha Rogers of Dakota Ridge, who has represented the U.S. at the last two World Athletics Championships in the 10,000 meters and competed in the 5,000 meters at Worlds this summer as well (17:50.4 in 2008); and Kelsey Lakowske of Boulder High, who was 6th and 4th at consecutive Foot Locker National Cross-Country Championships (17:35.2 in 2009). Fulton herself has run 4:03.03 for 1,500 meters.
The record has since been pushed down into unlikely territory, and already had been when I wrote about the history of this meet four years ago. Lize is now 29th on the all-time list of performers on the Liberty Bell layout, with nine girls having run under seventeen minutes.
But perhaps more remarkable than that is what Air Academy of Colorado Springs did last weekend there:
Not only did Air Academy record a top-five average time faster than the course-record time was until 2010, they did so with Bethany Michalak—who ran 17:00 at Liberty Bell two years ago, broke 10:00 for two miles on the track in the spring, and is generally Isabel Allori’s equal—having a terrible day.
The lopsided team score above is deceiving, as is the fact that Mountain Vista’s #1 runner was only 15th in the race, as Air Academy was ranked #4 in the nation in Milesplit’s 2023 preseason poll, while Mountain Vista was ranked #8. (Milesplit has yet to release boys’ preseason rankings, suggesting that when these come out, they won’t be preseason rankings.) Mountain Vista may have had an off-day, but it’s clear that even a great one would still have left the squad no match for Air Academy.
Some additional light was shed on the status of the Mountain Vista girls when they traveled to Lyons—a consummate “foothills” town about fifteen miles north of Boulder—yesterday for the St. Vrain Invitational. There, they faced—on Milesplit paper, anyway—an even more potent adversary: #1-in-the-nation Niwot, which was in effect opening its season following an intrasquad-scrimmage-like district meet on September 6 in which Niwot claimed the first thirteen places.
The first thing you might notice when you glance at the St. Vrain results below is that Mountain View claimed five of the first fourteen places (and though you can’t see this, its #6 runner was 16th). If so, that’s probably because “Mountain View” has over twice as characters as “Niwot,” the school that easily won the meet, scoring 23 points to Mountain View’s 40.
Mountain Vista would have stomped the top girls’ team in almost every U.S. state in the country deep into the late-summertime soil with this effort. Against Niwot, those same girls had no hope.
A look at the top all-time boys and girls on the Lyons course and a quick study of those’ runners track performances (converting these to sea-level times where applicable) suggests that the New Hampshire state-meet course at Derryfield Park in Manchester runs slightly faster than this course does. Derryfield is rough, but it’s also about 200’ to 300’ above sea level. This implies that the Niwot girls might be able to sweep the top five places in a meet pitting them against every current girls’ team in New Hampshire right now, and Mountain Vista might be able to do the same thing. These are both just obscenely good teams.
Niwot is a 4A-classification school, while Air Academy and Mountain Vista are both 5A schools. So the next time Niwot will face either of the other teams in a championship setting will be at the NXN Southwest Regional meet in Mesa, Arizona three weeks after the Colorado State Championships, which are scheduled for October 28 at the Penrose Events Center in Colorado Springs.