NXN: Colorado girls bring it big, Newbury Park boys shrug off the "collapse" of the Young twins
The Northeast boys were a mixed bag on a day of horizontal flags and dream-smashing tee placements
(If you want to watch these races, the girls’ starts 1:15:40 into the video on this page and the boys’ goes off at 2:44:15.)
"Success doesn't test you; you have already won. Failure doesn't test you, your competition is completed. It is adversity that tests you, when events seemingly conspire to remove you from the contest altogether. Now your education begins."
Eight minutes and ten seconds into the boys’ race at the Nike Cross Nationals (NXN) in Portland, Oregon yesterday morning, co-leader Leo Young shot his twin brother Lex a look. It bore all the suspicious markings of Time to go?
With the duo past the halfway point and aware that teammate Aaron Sahlman (203) was shadowing them along the fairways and over the tees of Glendover Golf Course, perhaps Leo believed it was worth taking a risk. Newbury Park would win the race no matter what, and maybe the Youngs really wanted to keep the individual title in the family as well, as Nico Young won the race three years ago, the last time society allowed the NXN series to proceed.
Neither Young was aware that each of them was carrying a self-destruct mechanism onto the fairways yesterday, which the gusty winds may have helped trigger. Whatever the case, at around 10:10 into the race, Lex Young began dropping back. But Leo remained on the attack, putting in another move to establish a seemingly insurmountable lead with less than 800 meters remaining.
The announcers had handed Young the win with 500 meters to go. But at around the 14:00 mark, Young faltered, right when Sahlman, who’d been absolutely blasting up the short but steep climbs to the mini-plateaus of the tees, put in a devastating move.
Sahlman took the lead 14:10 into the race. Whatever the distance was from that point to the finish, Sahlman covered it in 34 seconds while Young—still in third with about 120 meters and one agonizing straightaway to go—took 48 and fell back into eleventh place.
Because the graphic on the left of the screen obscured Sahlman’s move, by the time the leaders were all in the lens again and streaming into the stretch, it looked like Leo Young had been ambushed and possibly stolen. Lex Young, meanwhile, would slip back all the way to 35th place. That meant that the pre-race favorite or at least co-favorite for a national title wound up fourth on his own team yesterday.
But Newbury Park was never close to “in trouble.” Most of the boys toward the very front were not representing teams, and even had Sahlman and the two Youngs gone 1-2-3, it wouldn’t have made things much uglier for every other team. NPHS totaled 66 points, 42 of them by their fifth runner, to give them an 86-point margin of victory. (RESULTS; TEAM SCORES)
The three New Hampshire boys in the field, on average, did very well. But unfortunately, the standard deviation in performance was quite wide. Byron Grevious, technically a Connecticut resident (and maybe the only one in the race) but a Phillips Exeter Academy student, was the second junior in the race with a 12th-place finish. Patrick Gandini of Gilford High as usual led with his intestines while allowing his head a proper supporting role, winding up 39th after streaking through 1.3K in 18th place and falling back to 47th with 1K to go. This kid has a wonderful attitude, was made for cross-country running and is going to make some NCAA coach very happy over the next few years.
Aidan Cox put himself in a position to mimic his top-ten finish at the Garmin RunningLane Championships last fall, hitting the mile in 4:34.8 in 10th place and just off the lead. But he struggled after that, winding up 92nd. That was still in the top half of probably the strongest U.S. high-school boys’ cross-country field in history.
The girls’ individual race carried little to no drama. Irene Riggs of Morgantown, West Virginia went out hard, briefly looked like she might pay for it, and ran to a “comfortable” 14-second win. This Stanford-bound girl broke Katelyn Tuohy’s course record at the NXN Southeast Regional in 16:02.1 on November 26. Remember when Tuohy was a once-in-generation talent? So good that Matthew Futterman of The New York Times was castigated by pre-Woke feminists for this 2018 story? (I’m kidding. Much of Futterman’s job is to write red meat for pretend female sports fans, then calmly ignore whatever nonsensical opprobrium comes his way. Such is the price Futterman pays for being one of the few true reporters still clinging to the Times payroll.)
Riggs was followed in second and third by Brooke Wilson and Bethany Michalak, who are well-acquainted. Michalak, representing Air Academy of Colorado Springs yesterday, beat Wilson by 1.6 seconds at the Colorado 5A Region 5 Meet on October 20. Nine days later, Wilson ran what may have been one of the best-ever races by an American high-school girl to win the Colorado 5A state title. On November 26, Wilson and Michalak went 3-4 at the NXN Southwest Regional, with 2.8 seconds between them this time.
Yesterday, after Wilson and Michalak finished 0.8 seconds apart, both in exalted and wobbly jubilation, they embraced. On the day, Wilson, who runs for Valor Christian Academy, was technically representing only herself, while Michalak was also part of the team race and was anxiously awaiting the appearance of her mates.
The two of them reaching for each other as a girl with a thermonuclear I WILL EAT YOU game face is finishing captures a great deal of the atavistic nature of the sport. After months and months of this tiring shit and stomping around a golf course in rough December winds, these girls reminded the world that harriers compete with, not against, each other.
The only real demons out there are internal, and those who assist in the individual slaying of those demons by extracting the best from their competitors are the angels.
Niwot High School came into this race with a chance to win. They fell 18 points short of Saratoga Springs (running as the Kinetic Track Club thanks to the sport’s arcane rules, first drafted in hieroglyphics) to get second, as high as anyone making form-charts was willing to speculate they would finish. But I think that they would win this race against the same runners in the same conditions three in every five times. I don’t think anyone but Addison Ritzenhein ran close to her best race. (RESULTS; TEAM RESULTS)
Air Academy wound up seventh in the twenty-two team field. And look at where girls from Colorado—which accounts for 2 percent of the country’s population—placed:
2) Wilson
3) Michalak
14) Isabel Allori (Liberty Common High School, Fort Collins)
17) Emma Stutzman (Pomona High School, Arvada)
18) Ritzenhein
25) Ella Hagen (Summit High School, Breckenridge)
39) Tessa Walter (Air Academy)
48) Bella Nelson (Niwot)
An unexpected fond moment came when Sophia Kennedy crossed the line in seventh place. Kennedy is the daughter of Bob Kennedy, who won the Kinney National Championship in 1987 and graduated the same year I did. Kennedy grew up near Columbus, Ohio, where I have long had relatives on both sides of the family. He won an NCAA cross-country title as a true freshman at Indiana and did it again as a senior. He was the first American to break 13:00 for 5,000 meters.
I was obviously never at Kennedy’s level, but he was a contemporary, and some of his career breakthroughs accompanied my more modest ones in time. I ran most of my personal bests in 2004 at 34, which is about when Kennedy’s career was approaching its coda. This was one of the most gratifying interviews I ever did, and frankly, it was almost all because it was a huge honor to talk to Bob Kennedy.
Galen Rupp, by the way, is an informed and lively commentator. It’s too bad he was instructed by his bosses to maintain the personality of wet cardboard as a Nike Oregon Project member, because he’s quite different when allowed to be himself.
There were other races this weekend, too, including two crazy ones in Spain. To be unable to get to that subject just yet after having an enjoyable time with this one is a pleasant problem to have.
(All screen grabs are from RunnerSpace.com’s free webcast.)