The Colorado and New Hampshire state meets are in six days
Catching up with regional-meet action in the Rockies and the ongoing malaise at my alma mater
A week ago, I wrote about the progress of the three Colorado girls’ cross-country teams ranked among the top four or five teams in the nation: Niwot High School (#1 in both Dyestat’s and Milesplit’s October 12 polls), Air Academy of Colorado Springs (#2 in both polls), and Mountain Vista High School, or “Vista Nation,” of Highlands Ranch, a south Denver suburb characterized by well-off religious people and an insane level of accomplishment by high-school cross-country athletes. Highlands Ranch (population 107.000) is also home to Rock Canyon High School, Valor Christian Academy, Thunder Ridge High School, and even Highlands Ranch High School, most if not all of which have enjoyed recent turns on both the boys’ and girls’ sides at or near the top of the Centennial State’s harrier-squadrons.
All three teams ran in their regional meets on Thursday. Colorado staged nineteen such regional championships this fall, four for 2A-classification schools and five each for 3A, 4A, and 5A schools.
Mountain Vista struggled the most, with its fifth girl placing seventh overall.
It is of vague interest at best that the top-five averages of these teams are in the reverse order of their nationwide rankings, since these courses all differ in layout. But they also differ significantly in altitude.
Niwot competed at the North Area Athletic Complex in Arvada, which sits at a mean altitude of around 5,900’ above sea level. This imposes a penalty of about 3.7 percent compared to sea level, meaning that Niwot’s top five would have averaged about 17:15 on the same course at sea level in the same weather conditions.
Mountain Vista raced at Lincoln Park Golf Course (no relation to Linkin Park) in Grand Junction at a much more forgiving altitude of about 4,600’ above sea level. This creates a 2.5-percent average performance decrement versus sea level and a sea-level-converted top-five average of around 17:17.
Air Academy competed at Monument Valley Park in Colorado Springs at an altitude of around 6,000’, making the Kadets’ penalty of a piece with that of Niwot’s. The team’s resulting converted top-five average is about 17:20.
17:15. 17:17. 17:20. Without fretting about which team might have turned in the best intrinsic performance, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate how fast these times are for high-school girls. Any team in the country that boasts even a single 17:20 girl is boasting a genuine studette by any standard.
As weak evidence of this, here are the results of the boys’ varsity race at the 2023 Capital Area Invitational on Thursday at Merrimack Valley High School in Concord, New Hampshire (altitude roughly 300’ above sea level):
I write about the CAC every fall, which surely has nothing to do with the fact that it’s probably the most significant race I won in high school. I wrote about it almost four and a half years ago while on a road trip with Rosie and still blogging on Google’s Blogger platform (I doubt anyone has seen the version of the post auto-imported to Substack in August 2020 yet) and again last year after the 2022 CAC races were history.
The section below from last year’s post is mostly accurate, although significant portions of Belknap County are now represented in the Capital Area Championships:
The Capital Area Championships is not a real championship race; it’s loosely equivalent to a Merrimack County Championships organized by people with a rough idea of what a globe is for, though originally it was meant to capture people likely to read, or be aware of, the Concord Monitor.
In covering the 2023 Manchester Invitational held four weekends ago, I noted that Concord’s cross-country teams were in a competitive shambles. In conjunction with this commentary and my registering some unreservedly pointed comments on the Strava account of Concord’s top runner, this outreach has earned me yet more opt-in opprobrium from a new angle.
While it’s fair to question why a semi-random adult would address a high-school sophomore the same way he would someone with a more mature mindset, this kid has been putting his eager but haphazard training for all to see on Strava for a couple of years, and his own coach and mother have been green-lighting an obvious (to most experienced observers) pattern of unfocused and occasionally reckless exploits. After my comment contribution, his mother went straight to “I’m sorry your life didn’t work out as planned” while identifying herself as a mental-health professional, which led me to recall an important maxim, maybe even an inviolable rule: Any woman who poses for online photos while wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat on backward is not worth engaging at all. Spin the hat around, and in at least three-fourths of cases, the associated persona resolves to something less caustic, too.
I can fully understand why she needs to stand up for her cub against apparent aggressors, but the cub has no one with any brainpower or motivation telling him what to do when he is plainly talented, deeply in love with running, and perhaps most importantly deeply in need of running.
After this exchange, a coterie of cretins of unknown size and associated with Concord’s team—kids, parents, who knows—created over a half-dozen troll accounts and left close to 100 comments (most of them now gone) under that Manchester Invitational post consisting chiefly of single lines of song lyrics. I also got a couple of blocked-number calls at the same time, including one with a brief voicemail carrying the noise of whinnying teenage boys in the background.
A Strava page was even created in my honor, although this appears to be gone now:
That’s not my or to my knowledge anyone’s real address, but I can see what I sparked here. I’ll own that, but the kid is both getting dismal guidance on the ground and dismissing any input he receives that contravenes his own outlook (I’m not the first to try advising him, which is why I didn’t bother with my usual gentle approach, and I suspect I’m not the first to catch hell from his mother, either).
Here is a spate of recent activity from this account:
Tuesday - 5K race, less than all-out
Wednesday - 12 x 1000m fast
Thursday - 11 miles in two runs
Friday - 4 x 200m fast
Saturday - Battle of the Border 5K, 16:21, 8th
Sunday - 17 miles at sub-6:00 pace
As a freshman, this kid ran 15:05 for 5,000 meters on the track against open competition in the spring, but elected not to run track for Concord High. That kind of time should have him contending for a state championship now at age 15 or 16, or at least pretending he’s after one. Instead, he keeps showing up stale for races and getting thumped by inferior kids who are far better prepared, then reporting that he is stale for exactly this reason with no apparent awareness of this disclosure.
Not once in the history of distance running has anyone like this succeeded in the longer term. Meanwhile, people I know in Concord, old goats who very much know better, continue cheering on this kid’s extravagant training runs while pretending his comparative race-day flops are actually great races.
Some people fail to understand that all the earnest motivation in the world doesn’t create immunity from criticism. In fact, it’s these absolutely obsessed-with-running kids who need the most guidance. When they appear out of nowhere in a sea of chittering feel-good, sniping-prone goobers, they succeed only to a point.
A teenager can get away with almost daily interval training in ways older people cannot, in the sense that they're far less likely to become injured. But the costs of regular overtraining always reveal themselves in the second halves of races, when an athlete is most taxed and cannot hide from his mistimed excesses. That’s exactly what’s going on with this kid. Anyone can see it. If I’m the asshole who points it out because everyone else is too in the thrall of unfettered self-guided self-obliteration frames as heroism, fine.
The next time someone from the Concord cross-country community decided to go on a doxing mission or falsely accuse me of making fun of someone’s disability in a drive-by comment, they might want to consider the fact that the Concord High boys’ cross-country team is historically awful. It placed six out of ten teams and lost to two Division III teams on Thursday, and the Tide would be absolutely stomped by the girls of Niwot, Air Academy, or Mountain View. It would be one thing if they simply lacked the horses to do better, but this is not the issue.
No shade to Gilford—a carpetbagging squad at this meet that is actually closer to Quebec than to Concord, according to some—or Hopkinton High, the alma mater of podcaster Ali Feller, who recently saw one chronic illness layered atop another yet has somehow found a way to use Instagram in a positive, if somewhat eye-misting, manner. But these are tiny schools, and any D-1 team getting trounced by either is sad, perhaps even apocalyptic.
A boys’ team with a top-five average of 18:51? At a school with 1,700 or so kids? If the team’s training this week is going to look like it normally does, maybe the CHS athletic director should let the soccer team fill in next Saturday at the New Hampshire D-I State Cross-Country Championships.
If all of this seems too harsh, well, I have a sense of urgency when it comes to talented younger people squandering their potential because I highly doubt the world will be as recreation-friendly in a few years as it is now, at least not to all of the same people who might have at one time enjoyed the sport on better terms. Ideally, the hairy-assed, explosion-obsessed retards in the Middle East—all of them—will shortly settle their thousands of years of bloodthirsty, savage differences, and I can briefly move the threat of worldwide war from the top of my list of reasons to get every idea I have, good and bad, out there while I still can or care to.
Even if the world is somehow a place where the majority of Earthlings can thrive in ten years, I’m not interested in knowing what it will look like—even in the face of heartwarming stories like a kid moving from 46th in the 2022 varsity race to 7th last week despite slowing considerably.
It appears that some of these male invaders of girls; sports teams are no longer even bothering to change their names. And it is obvious that such stunts will continue until enough people summon the nerve to reject this shit when they see it on the ground, since the parents of kids doing this aren’t intervening and employees of schools know they’ll be canned if they sat one adversarial word about this incursion of full-force foolishness.
Few of the hypoxic simps out here would have the nerve to do this, but New Englanders are known for being more direct. I hope a few such outspoken souls go to the New Hampshire state meets (although Proctor Academy is a prep school, so Niko here won’t be running in the NHIAA state-championship meets to be held in the next two weekends).
Perhaps I am oversimplifying, but in an “anything goes, including more wars” world, I don’t really have it in me to value what deranged leftists and lazy, ignorant coaches think of my rhetoric about the world’s chipped and broken facets. I’m not trying to piss anyone off; I’m just trying to act exactly how I imagine a replacement-level Aspie acting in similar situations, though certainly not every time.
The Wokish have had a good three-year run of grifting, canceling, lying, preening, chortling, whining, and posturing. It’s time for them all to affix their lips to wide-bore shitpipes and start sucking on whatever flows into their maws from the cold plumbing of basic sanity.
Anyway, New Hampshire Cross-Country and Track and Field, formerly two sites and recently combined and relocated to nh.staterunning.net, has posted photos and a write-up of the Capital Area races, which includes links to YouTube videos of the action. I will probably offer a preview of the New Hampshire state meets this week, and might make some wild guesses as to what will happen in the Colorado 4A and 5A State Champs ninety miles to the south on Saturday. I am considering going to the event, but only if I can bring someone along capable of preventing me from chatting up too many of the parents.