Midseason cross-country report
If you care specifically about New Hampshire and Colorado runners, why, you're in the right-enough place
To me, the beginning of October has always signaled the onset of meaningful cross-country racing. Besides a formal calendar transition and non-pine forests looking more aesthetically creative, the high-school season is at least halfway complete for most American kids who won’t be moving past their state championship meets.
It’s too late to dismiss the early-season flops of key performers as pure outliers; some coaches are facing the fact that teams that were supposed to be six deep in 2022 are at best four deep for reasons both inscrutable and obvious, with these squads unlikely to see their fifth or sixth runners knock a minute of their current 5K time before the end of the month. (The fact that such things do happen, thereby scuttling the hell out of form charts, is what makes cross-country both excoriating and beautiful.)
The three New Hampshire divisional state meets are on the 29th, a week earlier than usual. I mention New Hampshire a lot because it’s the size if Israel, yet generates far less worldwide news, a situation I plan to look into. The four divisional Colorado state meets are also on October 29th; I mention that state a lot because running and oil are all it has going for it at this stage, and only one of these facts bears promoting.
I wish I could have casually called up a plane’s-eye view of my own neighborhood when I was a teenager. The one here was taken in October by a Google pilot a few years ago. My old house, now serving as a group home for mentally challenged adults, is in the lower left.
The apple orchard—that’s the thing on the right that appears to show a more systematic growth and restriction of vegetation than the rest of the image—was in its formative, pre-commercial stages in the 1980s, and I made endless trips up and down its quarter-mile-long north-south slope, scattering the deer eager to plunder from the massive buffet enterprising humans had evidently planted for them to enjoy.
After a while, I didn’t even think of this as “hill repeats.” It was just doing the kind of continuous run anyone serious about an upcoming cross-country season needs to do regularly. You can even see the gold glint of the New Hampshire State House dome from the 560-foot summit of this vital hill, the base of which now includes a store where excellent pies are sold. I may visit the place in a few weeks.
I recently speculated that this is a down year for New Hampshire high-school running, with parity the standard across all three divisional classes. This makes for exciting surprises at championship races, even if the teams involved are never later memorialized for their blazing-fast performers. And nothing has changed since the Manchester Invitational, although the one weekend of racing since was unlikely to provide significant shake-ups.
Milesplit had Coe-Brown senior Aidan Cox at #6 individually nationwide in its pre-season poll, but in its next poll dropped him to #16 before he had even raced and then dropped him to #25 after he won the Manchester Invitational by about 200 meters and missed Ben True’s 19-year-old event record by three seconds. Cox is not having the kind of season many expected, but he’s ahead of where he was last year at this time. I know these rankings are laughably subjective, but I still think Milesplit enjoys derogating Cox because his father is among those who have helped render Milesplit—a company owned by sucklords—a marginally less relevant enterprise with the introduction of NewHampshireCrossCountry.com.
That site is where you’ll find a preview of today’s Battle of the Border, a meet in Hudson, N.H. featuring teams from southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts. Among the New Hampshire teams present will be Bishop Guertin, a parochial school in Nashua, New Hampshire that in some years has more varsity runners who live in Massachusetts than not.
Concord, my alma mater, will be competing at the Ponaganset Covered Bridge Classic in Rhode Island today instead. That's where this year’s New England Championships will be held on November 12.
Although Colorado doesn’t seem to be packing the same level of team punch in 2022 as it did last fall on both the boys’ and girls’ sides, the place is still a madhouse of talent. Below is one of many ways to starkly establish this.
In 1984, Lize Brittin—who went to two Foot Locker National Championships, was the Midwest Region champion her senior year, and was a classmate of Sheryl Lee (best known as a dead girl named Laura Palmer) at Fairview High School in Boulder—set a course record of 17:34 at the 1984 Liberty Bell Invitational in Littleton. This mark stood for 27 years until Eleanor Fulton, now a sub-9:00 3,000-meter runner, broke it (or at least matched it) in 2011.
Two years earlier, Kelsey Lakowske of Boulder High School, Fairview’s natural rival, had articulated her team’s desire to relocate the individual girls’ record across town.
Lakowske didn’t get “Britten’s” record, but she went on to place fifth at the Foot Locker National Championships that fall (Lize was seventh there in 1984). And just 11 years later, Fulton is only the 23rd-fastest girl in the event's history. Not only is the course record now 16:40, but in this year’s event alone, eleven girls ran under a time that until 2011 had withstood nearly three decades of annual challenges.
I wrote about the Liberty Bell-Colorado youth phenomenon three years ago, when this was still a Blogspot enterprise. Obviously, nothing has discouraged the trend.
The amazing thing about the depth of the 2022 Liberty Bell results is that Niwot High School, currently ranked #2 in the country by Milesplit, wasn’t even there. This is how the Niwot girls performed on September 30 at the Desert Twilight Classic in Arizona at low (though not sea level) altitude:
That freshman boy from Niwot has a reasonably solid pedigree, so expect to hear more from Rocco. No one gives kids names like Cruz and Rocco in anticipation of mediocre exploits.
I would credit these factors, in order, for the explosion of really good high school runners in Colorado, some of which are generalizable to the nation: Starting younger than we* did, better coaching than we had, improved footwear (the Liberty Bell Course is basically a road race) and an unknown (and probably minor) level of doping that the high-school level. With college coasting a fortune, plenty of well-off parents known to be enlisting paid SAT-takers, and “tutors” handling some rich kids’ entire online academic course loads, both the incentives and the resulting behaviors have both been amply demonstrated.
Niwot High School also has recent momentum in its favor. Cruz Culpepper nearly broke four minutes for the mile in high school, and Elise Cranny is one of the top performers on the Bowerman Track Club. In some parts of the country, more kids would rather excel at cross-country than in football. Maybe this because it appears to open more future doors, but I hope the hills and the leaves have a lot to with it, too.