The Colorado and New Hampshire state-championship meets are tomorrow

It's otherwise kind of an open weekend on the racing front

Last week at this time, a real housewife was probably being ejected onto the streets of some upscale American subdivision, and I was taking stock of the Colorado and New Hampshire high-school cross-country seasons by way of an early look at what tomorrow’s races might look like. This churnage was in anticipation of Colorado’s nineteen regional meets, from which eighty boys’ and eighty girls’ teams advanced to tomorrow’s 2A, 3A, 4A, and 5A state-championship races, and the Capital Area Championships in Concord, New Hampshire, an interesting event with relatively little consequence.

I didn’t preview Colorado’s four 2A regional meets (at which the top five teams qualified for tomorrow) or its five 3A regional meets (from which the top four teams advanced). So I won’t review those races either. The five 4A and five 5A meets resulted in one definite upset victory, although that’s going by Milesplit rankings that consistently overlooked the team that pulled it off. But although there were no big surprises otherwise, Milesplit’s top 25 features one 5A Colorado boys’ team (#23 Valor Christian) and five Colorado girls’ teams, including 4A Niwot, ranked #2 in the country, and the 5A foursome of Valor Christian (#10), Air Academy (#11), Arapahoe (#14) and Cherry Creek (#19). Therefore, these regionals by definition boasted some superior racing.

The 4A Region 3 races must have been fun to watch (results). The Niwot boys, though failing to post the perfect 15-point score the girls did, were dominant in taking five of the top nine places. And you just don’t mess with a kid named Rocco, even if he probably weighs about 110 pounds. In winning a Colorado State 4A Regional Championship as a freshman, Culpepper was 2 minutes and 19 seconds ahead of the next finisher in his grade.

You’ll recall that sixteen years ago at this time, Addison Ritzenhein’s and Rocco Culpepper’s now-dads were preparing for the 2006 New York City Marathon, which was Ritz’s debut at the distance. There, Ritz would finish 11th (in a time three seconds faster than Brigid Koskei’s current women’s world record) while Culpepper would drop out at 20 miles with distress of the belleh.

The 4A Region 1 boys’ race was remarkable for how close it was among the top four teams.

The Valor Christian boys swept the top three places at the 5A Region 5 meet...and lost by five points to Rock Canyon, which put seven runners between VC's #3 and #4. They really haven’t looked like a top-25-in-the-country team all season. In the girls’ contest, Bethany Michalak’s squeaker of a win over Brooke Wilson mirrored their teams’ fortunes, as nationwide #11 Air Academy “upset” #10 Valor Christian by scoring 35 points to VC’s 45 (results).

Michalak avenged a nine-second loss to Wilson at the Desert Twilight Classic in Arizona on September 30. And 17:07 at right around 6,000' is worth about 16:28 at sea level.

In 5A Region 2, #14 Arapahoe was beaten pretty soundly by unranked Mountain Vista (results). Looking at how Mountain Vista raced earlier this season, this wasn’t a huge surprise. And in 5A Region 1, the #19 Cherry Creek girls topped their closest rival by 22 points (results).

Obviously, the 5A girls’ race tomorrow at the Norris Penrose Event Center in Colorado Springs will be a spectacle, a flesh-and-blood footrace formatted at 1.25X streaming speed, with five ranked Milesplit teams among the twenty schools entered and at least one more that probably should be ranked. (The rankings I’m referring to here were published just before last weekend’s races,)

My pick for the individual winner is Pomona’s Emma Stutzman in a somewhat close race over Wilson and Michalak, while I expect Mountain Vista to continue its momentum from regionals and beat all five ranked teams. Its seventh runner was ahead of Arapahoe’s fifth last weekend. It’s too bad 4A Niwot can’t be in the same race as these girls.

In New Hampshire, little new information has appeared since my last post. The Concord boys easily won the Capital Area Champs. Individually, though, it was Gilford’s Patrick Gandini in a blowout (results, although you should consider watching Gandini DESTROY the field in the video below first).

Gandini, a senior, is looking to win his third D-III state title this weekend. His mother won five titles in a row for the same school in the early 1990s, and with startlingly consistent performances—there was only a nine-second difference between her slowest and fastest times in those five races:

Wernig's finishes at the statewide Meet of Champions, then held on the same Derryfield Park course as the state meets, in that span: fifth in 19:49, fourth in 19:24, did not compete, third in 19:17, and null (the 1995 MoC was cancelled owing to weather). At the New Englands in those five seasons, she was 18th, 11th, did not compete, fourth (at Derryfield Park in 18:58, her fastest time there), and 11th.

Gandini will be a heavy favorite tomorrow, and if he wins, he and his mom will have combined for eight individual state cross-country titles for the same high school. Perhaps other mother-son duos have matched this feat, but it seems unlikely, even permitting different high schools to be involved.

Also, it's a good bet this kid—who, according to sources and from just the way he looks when he competes, could have excelled at various other sports—took up cross-country running specifically because his mom, not his dad, was successful at it. Such stories are becoming more common, with teenagers becoming as likely to have mothers who were standout high-school and college athletes as they are to have had big-time jock dads.

Videos of the six D-I, D-II, and D-III New Hampshire State Championship races will be posted to NewHampshireCrossCountry.com’s YouTube channel by Sunday morning at the latest, with history as a guide. That site has previews of the meets here.

Colorado’s season is done after tomorrow, with the state’s panoply of outstanding individuals and teams getting ready for a Nike Cross Nationals (NXN), Garmin RunningLane, or Champs Sports series race. New Hampshire, however, has a Meet of Champions a week from tomorrow, with the New Englands one week later.

I am hearing rumbles that the course to be used for this year’s MoC, the Alvirne High School layout that hosts the Battle of the Border, is not a full 5,000 meters. It “looks” about 50 meters short to me, which is actually a lot—around 10 seconds for the faster boys. More than that, though, I’d like to see the MoC on a difficult course in the middle of the state instead of on the fastest one available within sight of the Massachusetts border. But I’ll save that monotribe for next week.