Abbey Green came up just short in her latest attempt to win a Maryland state cross country title, a rematch with Annapolis senior and 2015 Footlocker finalist Maria Coffin. Yet in the end, the Walter Johnson junior said she could not have scripted the race much more perfectly.

In the state 4A race at legendary Hereford — a three-mile cross country venue so tough, they say, even Centro couldn’t break 16 minutes — Green and Coffin left 152 other harriers far behind in becoming the first two girls to cover the course in less than 18 minutes.

Even as Coffin broke free of Green in the final mile, maintaining a small lead up the race’s final hill, Green’s stride was still strong. It looked for a second like she might even rally. And after crossing the line in 17:54, five seconds back of Coffin, her repeat runner-up complete, Green took some time to catch her breath before walking back towards the finish – again, like last year, waiting eagerly for her teammates to join her.

Katrione Kirsch was the first to come through, placing 7th in 19:38. Then came Sadie Keller, Janet Scott, and Sophia Scobell, all finishing in the top 25 positions as Walter Johnson claimed its fourth 4A title in a row.

“You can just see it in their faces coming in,” Green said. “They’re just pushing, trying to get every last girl that they can get. They’re all just really fighting for each other and for what we’ve worked really hard for.”

Asked about her own effort, even then Green led with more praise for others. “I think Maria should be so proud that she got the course record on her last run here. “[And I’m proud of] myself that I was able to get a much better time than I did last year. That was my goal coming into here.”

Winston Churchill Senior Julia Reicin led the chase, finishing 3rd in 19:06. Paint Branch junior Yasmine Kass was 9th in 19:43; Northwest had the top freshman in Helena Lee, who was 12th in 19:54.

Meanwhile, sophomore Jessica Trzeciak, in 6th, led T.S. Wootton to a runner-up finish, the team’s highest ever, said coach Kellie Redmond.

Heading into today’s championships, Sophomore Madeline Grainger was the team’s only athlete who had ever even run at Hereford. She had qualified last year as an individual as injuries ravaged her teammates.

Today, Grainger was Wootton’s No. 4, placing 27th overall in 20:46. And while Wootton had put up a stronger 2nd place showing in the Montgomery County meet, Trzeciak, the team’s top runner, ended up placing higher in the state meet, proving Redmond’s point that her team has been “progressively better all season.”

“We knew we’d have some strong competition but we executed the race plan exactly as planned,” Redmond said. “They ran great, they ran tough, and they were super inspired beforehand.”

In the 3A race, Nandini Satsangi paced Poolesville to a fifth place showing. It wasn’t the result that the team was hoping for, or the result that Sandini, who had the fastest seed and finished 9th, would have envisioned after winning her regional meet by nearly a minute. No one, however, should think Satsangi had an off day. Rather, it was a gutsy effort.

The Friday after regionals, Nandini irritated a tendon in her foot, she said. She did not run at all between then and the state meet and wasn’t sure if she would be able to complete today’s race. She never doubted, on the other hand, that she would try.

“It was the last race of the season … and it’s states,” she said. “I was just going to go all out.”

Nandini, as it turns out, was going to have to spend some time in the pool, anyway. Her next season isn’t indoor track; it’s swimming.

Boys’ races

Hereford’s rarely broken 16-minute mark went down in the 1A race when Smithsburg senior Will Merritt ran 15:54. But 4A champion Rohann Asfaw (16:04) and 3A winner Ryan Lockett (16:00) were close. Lockett, a Poolesville junior, was runner-up to Richard Montgomery senior Asfaw at the Montgomery County meet.

In winning a state title, Lockett demonstrated some playful swagger, celebrating in his final steps by taking his left hand and pointing at his right forearm like NBA star D’Angelo Russell – “ice in my veins,” said Lockett, who coincidentally also wore long shorts.

“Honestly, I knew that I could outkick anyone at the end, so I was pushing the pace,” said Lockett, who ran neck and neck with River Hill Senior Rahul Reddy into the final straight (Reddy finished two seconds back).

Lockett was joined in the lead pack by senior teammate Andrew Lent, whose 4th place 16:12 was a considerable improvement over his first appearance at the state meet when he finished just inside the top 100. Poolesville finished 4th behind River Hill, Linganore, and Reservoir.

Lent said his senior-year training was jumpstarted by Lockett’s transfer to Poolesville from Gonzaga. They developed a pattern of keying off each other in races, as well. “I would come up to [Lockett]; he would see me coming and go a little faster,” Lent said.

Asfaw’s victory, though slower, was more decisive. He got out slow in the 4A race, too slow by his own standards.

“I found myself stuck in the pack,” he said. “It was a huge pack, and I had to weave my way through for the first mile.”

Even Richard Montgomery’s coach, Davy Rogers, was a little concerned initially, he said. But when he saw Asfaw coming back in the baseball field towards the famous dip, Rogers saw what he needed to be sure that Asfaw was in control: his arms were relaxed.

By the final stretch, the race was all Asfaw’s. This was even an more impressive time when considering that Asfaw is not yet tapering. He’s chasing a dream to compete at Nike Cross Nationals in December.

“It would have been great to break 16,” Asfaw said, “but I am definitely much more happy to get the win.”

Dulaney repeated as boy’s 4A champions and Northwest placed 5th, led by Junior Chase Osborne‘s 24th-place finish in 16:59. Albert Einstein junior Simeon Mussie cracked the top 10, finishing 8th in 16:42. And Bethesda Chevy-Chase junior Adam Nakasaka, mirroring his Montgomery County meet strategy, hung with Asfaw as long as he could and hung on for 2nd in 16:12. His team was sixth.

At mile two, when the pace slackened, Nakasaka even pressed forward into the lead en route to running nearly 40 seconds faster than he had as a sophomore.

“This is a state championship,” he said. “Anything can happen. That was my thinking all day.”

Loudoun Valley boys and Lake Braddock girls dominated their races while defending their Virginia state titles, while the James Madison boys and George Marshall girls won their first-ever championships.

Kate Murphy broke the Great Meadows course record when she won her second straight 6A title, running 17:08 to beat Libby Davidson‘s 17:12 mark from 2014 and finish well clear of Rachel McArthur‘s 17:50 second place finish and making Lake Braddock’s team race four on five against everyone else. That’s all despite putting less emphasis on cross country, just months after competing in the U.S. Olympic Trials and world junior track championships, and not racing with the record in mind.

“I think I raced twice before the conference meet so I wasn’t sure if I was in cross country shape,” she said. “I needed to not compete for a while. It puts a little stress on you and it’s nice to have a little rest. Getting back in was kind of a grind.”

It was going to be a grind, because McArthur was coming back to cross country after missing the 2015 postseason with a quad tear that left her unable to defend her 2014 6A title.

“I couldn’t just chill because Rachel definitely wanted to race, but I think I ended up running my best cross country race of the season,” Murphy said, with the caveat that she hasn’t raced much yet, with a focus on the Nike Cross Southeast and, with any luck, national meet.

The pair pulled away early as Murphy reeled McArthur in from a fast start. They came through the mile in 5:20, with a 10 second lead over Cosby sophomore Rachel Northcutt. Murphy took a slight lead through two miles in 10:56, with Northcutt nearly 30 seconds back, then gradually pulled away from McArthur before putting her away in the series of hills in the third mile.

“It wasn’t any one move, but a few times I threw in a surge down a hill to see how she’d respond.”

“Normally I’m physically ready to race but not mentally,” McArthur said, “but I was focused this time. My mind was so in it. But then the hills… It wasn’t a devastating loss, but I learned a lot about how I handle hills late in a race.The course definitely gets a lot harder at the end.”

The two have committed to top collegiate distance programs — Murphy to Oregon and McArthur to Villanova and while the prospect of the pair racing tooth and nail, like the state 800 meter championship, was appealing, cross country just isn’t their priority anymore.

“Cross country, I still want to do well, but track’s my main focus, and I didn’t expect to run a peak performance this season,” McArthur said.

Murphy said it was a matter of proportion.

“It’s a lot more time to suffer,” she said. “Especially since it’s been so hot this fall.”

South Lakes junior Olivia Beckner was running her first state meet after two years of injuries, but she made the most of her opportunity, running 18:04 for fourth place and nearly catching Northcutt (18:01).

“I closed on her for a while, but she pulled away,” she said. “I need to work on my turnover, but I think this was my best race of the season. I’m looking forward to coming back next year, now that I’ve had a real cross country season.”

Lake Braddock scored 46 points to outdistance Oakton’s 107, with James Madison in third with 113. West Springfield was fourth with 133 and Patriot fifth with 149, with Cosby (156) edging Chantilly (161). The Bruins had all seven runners in the top 35, with the scoring five in the top 30 overall — Sam Schwers in sixth, Taylor Kitchen in 10th, Emily Schiesl in 15th and Sarah Daniels in 29th. They’ll head to Cary, N.C. for Nike Cross Southeast in two weeks.

The Bruin boys lost their bid for a third-straight 6A title when James Madison finished three points ahead, 63-66, for the Warhawks’ first title. Lake Braddock was winning by the same margin at the second mile, but a strong stretch run, including senior Patrick Murphy outkicking LB’s Evan Chase, fueled the comeback. Sean Grimm (seventh overall), Zach Holden (11th), Murphy (18th), Chamberlain Zulauf (21st) and Kevin Murphy (38th) scored for Madison. It follows a win over Braddock — and Oakton — at the regional meet, which showed the Warhawks what was possible.

“We knew we had to run well, because it was going to be tight with Braddock,” said coach Craig Chasse. “If we didn’t run our A game, we weren’t going to win. We weren’t running scared, but we didn’t want to be complacent.”

He credited consistency among this varsity runners and the variety of challenges they faced throughout the season.

“Back in June, we had a meeting and we decided this was going to be our year,” Chasse said. “We got permission to go to Kentucky and race St. Xavier, we went to Great American,we raced some tough teams. When we won the Milestat Invitational, I knew we were in position to win.”

The challenge, Chasse said, was to not slow down during turns and keep their effort up on the 1,000 meter finishing stretch.

“It’s a tough balance on that stretch to not leave anything on the course but not run out of gas before the race is over,” he said.

Lake Braddock’s Conor Lyons came up just a little short on that stretch, losing second place to Cox’s David Scherrer (both finished in 15:23) and within reach of winner Peter Smith of Oscar Smith High School, just a second ahead.

“I was conservative the first two miles but really worked the last mile,” he said. “Last year I went out too fast, but this year there was a good lead pack and unless it broke up, those guys weren’t going anywhere.”

He made up five seconds on Sherrer in the last 1.1 miles.

The Northern Region teams swept the team standings, with Chantilly (118), Oakton(137), West Springfield (144) and Patriot (146) filling in third through sixth places.

Chantilly senior Brandon McGorty, an 800 meter specialist heading to Stanford next fall, got out fast.

“Last year I got caught up in a pack and I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again because it was tough to move up,” he said. “Fifty meters doesn’t take take much out of me, after a few second people caught up with me but it didn’t take anything out of me.”

He finished fourth in 15:39, one second ahead of Oakton’s Ahmed Hassan.

“This over a 30 second PR, so I’m pumped.”

Like the James Madison team, McGorty used a win at the regional meet to motivate him at states.

Just as in the 6A race, the 5A race featured two past winners — the 2015 winner in Tuscarora junior Emma Wolcott and George Marshall junior Heather Holt, who won as a freshman in 2014.

Holt didn’t want to give anyone else a chance, so, as has been her custom this season, she took off early on and had the race to herself after the halfway point.

“I could hear them breathing right behind me,” she said. “I knew I had to go, I just wanted to get away from them and focus on my race. I’ve learned to accept that I’m going to have nerves and I don’t let them throw me off as much. I’ve learned to accept that I’m going to have nerves and I don’t let them throw me off as much.”

That they didn’t, and she was able to put 22 seconds on Albemarle’s Ryann Helmers by the second mile on her way to a 29-second margin to win in 17:18.

Wolcott moved up through the race to finish third in 18:01.

Holt’s low scoring position helped Marshall to its first-ever team title, with 53 points, thanks to Ava Bir (ninth), Hannah Smith and Sophie Tedesco (14th and 15th) and Jenna Robbins (17th). Tuscarora trailed in second with 107 points, Broad Run was seventh with 184, Potomac Falls was one place back with 200 points and Thomas Jefferson was 10th with 226. They were sixth in their first state meet appearance in 2014 and fifth in 2015.

Smith is a senior; Tedesco is a freshman. They both saw dramatic drops in their times from the Great Meadows Invitational in August.

“My first race was almost 23:30,” Tedesco said. “But then I started running faster in practice so the race pace didn’t feel as tough and I was able to keep improving.”
Smith said she transitioned into a more committed runner this year and credited Tedesco’s company on her upward trajectory.

“I just ran to have fun before, but I didn’t realize how fast I could be,” she said.

Coach Darrell General said the team running within its character was the key to its season-long success. That went both for their individual tendencies as runners and the athletes’ collective spirit.

“I just wanted it so bad for the kids, they work so hard,” he said. “They get to see where all of that effort goes. It’s unbelievable.”

Holt said there was universal buy-in for the dedication necessary to win the state meet among her teammates.

“Because we set this goal together, it makes us really want to work hard for each other,” Holt said. “We knew if someone was hurting, we just had to run that much harder.”

General approached it from another angle.

“I tell the other girls to pretend we don’t have Heather,” he said. “And we pretend our 2-6 are racing everyone else’s 1-5.”

Their male teammate Patrick Lynch ran a hard last stretch to wrest control of third place from Thomas Jefferson’s Saurav Velleleth in the 5A race, coming from two seconds back at the two mile mark. Lynch finished in 15:34, Velleleth was three seconds back.

“We went out way faster than I thought we would, but when I saw we were sub-10 at two miles (9:56), I knew this was going to be the race where I finally dropped a good time,” he said. “It was the perfect race for me. I was trying to stay on Saurav and I caught him with 10-15 meters to go.”

He has a lot of confidence in his kick, but the race environment injected a little adrenaline, too.

“It’s states, you gotta go for it,” he said. “This is the competition you want to run a good race with.”

Douglas Freeman senior Waleed Suliman won the race for the second year in a row in 15:13, the fastest time of the day by a second.

Edison junior Yared Mekonnen also saved his strength for the end, but on a longer scale. He suffered from food poisoning on Wednesday and was in bad shape for a few days.

“I just drank a lot of water and Gatorade, at a lot of rice and other bland stuff,” he said. “Anything to get my strength back.”

Sure enough, on Saturday morning he was ready to go

“I thought we’d be 5:05 at the mile and we were 4:50,” he said. “That definitely got me by surprise, but I felt good and just sat on guys in the top 10 and when we’d crest each hill in the third mile, I’d go for it.”

He wound up fifth in 15:43.

Tuscarora was the top local 5A team, in third with 125 points behind Deep Run (76) and Glen Allen (105). Thomas Jefferson was fifth (159), Edison edged by Lee-Davis in tie for eighth (166) and Marshall edging Hickory in a tie for 10th with 195. Four teams scored 165 or 166.

Loudoun Valley’s girls finished second, for the second straight year, behind junior Natalie Morris‘ runner-up finish in 18:19, behind Liberty Christian Academy senior Noel Palmer (18:04), who was third at the Glory Days Invitational.

“I tried to go with Noel when she passed Libby (Davidson) and I didn’t really stick with her long, but that got me into second place (in the second mile) and I never gave it up,” she said.

The Vikings scored 88 points to trail E.C. Glass’ 36 points. Jefferson Forest (135), Rock Ridge (143) and Loudoun County (156) finished fourth through sixth.

Morris’ twin brother, Peter, took top honors for the family, winning the 4A boys title in 15:14,  a second off of Suliman’s time. That made Loudoun Valley’s path to a repeat that much easier, as did Colton Bogucki‘s fourth-place finish in 15:37 and Jacob Hunter‘s 15:53 sixth-place finish. Jacob Windle was 20th and Chase Dawson was 29th.

“It’s awesome to see all of this work pay off,” Morris said. “Konrad Steck took the lead, I was with him for two miles, and right after that point there’s a downhill before two uphills. I caught up to him there and decided I’d push him on the uphills. I knew that was the time to go.”

The Vikings dominated with 45 points, ahead of Midlothian (90), Freedom (92) and locals Rock Ridge (seventh with 189 points), Dominion (eighth with 207) and Woodgrove (11th with 252).

Loudoun Valley will also head to the Nike Cross Southeast meet.

Sophomore Ryland Pettit was the first Woodgrove runner to break 16:00 — he ran 15:54 — and he ended up overshooting his goal.

“I was ranked 12th, so I was shooting for 11th,” he said.

He ended up seventh. He studied the runners ahead of him and any timehe saw someone falter in their stride, he went for them.

“This was the best race I’ve ever had, not just because of my time, but because I was able to stay focused the whole time,” he said.

Fort Dupont Park offered a cross country course that is challenging, full of character and surprise for any spectators trying to follow the race through the winding trails.

But if the D.C. cross country championship wanted to grow in its fourth year, it was going to need a new home. After three years, spectator-friendly Kenilworth Park had proved itself as host of the DCXC Invitational and thus, the “state” meet had a new course, this time measured out to a full 5,000 meters. With it came some new teams who made themselves at home.

Gonzaga, which had held many of its top runners out of previous state meets, came back and won the boys’ team title, lead by Harry Monroe and John Colucci finishing first and second. Will McCann (sixth), John Travis (eighth) and David Giannini (14th); Amal Mattoo (fifth) and Julian Dixon (seventh) led Sidwell into second place. Gonzaga also swept the top five places in the junior varsity race.

Monroe and Colucci ran together ahead of the pack until about halfway, when Monroe opened up a gap and went on to win in 16:19. Colucci finished 30 seconds back.

“We run our workouts together, so we’re used to starting out our races together,” he said. “After I got ahead of him, it felt a little weird because I’m not used to running on my own. I checked behind me to see how close I was to john; imagined someone running ahead of me to keep me focused.”

The pair finished first and second on the rugged new Lake Fairfax course at the Washington Catholic Area Conference championships, where Gonzaga took second to Good Counsel.

Though Kenilworth Park was flat and fast and he came out on top of what is finally a collection of the district’s best runners, Monroe thinks back to his fourth place finish at the Glory Days Invitational a month prior as his defining race so far this year.

“I was closer to Rohann (Asfaw, of Maryland’s Richard Montgomery) than I ever expected,” he said. The target on Asfaw’s back comes from his finish at Nike Cross Southeast that was one place away from qualifying for the national meet. “I showed I could run when the course was muddy, and I am looking forward to trying to race him again (in three weeks).”

The Georgetown Day School duo of Josh Shelton and Jackson Todd remembered that race. Shelton went down in the first minute of the race. A half mile in, Todd, in the midst of a comeback from an IT band injury, saw his teammate run by “with a look of fury in his eyes.”

Though he finished the race, Shelton limped away from the finish line. Todd, too, was out for a few weeks before both returned for last weekend’s MAC championship, when Shelton and Todd finished third and seventh. They both improved to finish third (Shelton, in 16:54) and fourth (Todd, in 17:15).

“I’m disappointed, I wanted to do a lot my senior season, I had a lot of races to look forward to,” Todd said. “Being able to come back at race here, though, is pretty great. We just kept our cool early on and ran strong second halves of the race.”

Todd raced the Fort Dupont course last year in the rain but felt afterward like he had been put through a wringer.

“My hips and IT bands felt awful the next day,” he said. “It’s a cool place to run, but those trails are so narrow and half of it is broken up concrete…this is just a much better place to have a championship race. You just worry about running fast.”

And Todd ran almost 20 seconds faster for fourth, coming off of an injury, than he did for second last year.

On the girls’ side, Page Lester made her debut at this race after the National Cathedral School sat out during her freshman and sophomore years.

She and Georgetown Visitation freshman Megan Lynch jumped clear of the pack early on.

“I put in a few moves in the first loop to see how she’d respond and she stayed on me,” Lester said.

After a mile and a half, Lester started pushing the pace consistently and shook free of Lynch and went on the win in 18:12, a minute ahead of Lynch, the same order as a week prior at the ISL championships. Lester thinks she has a new racing strategy.

“I just relax early on and not try to go out too hard,” she said. “It turns out it’s a lot more fun that having people pass you because you killed yourself in the start of the race. I was doing that for a long time.”

That’s how she’s treated her season, after taking part of August and all of September off of running while she recovered from a stress reaction. And while being injured wasn’t great, it gave her a break between triathlon season and cross country.

“Usually just go from one right into another and by the time championship season starts, I’m getting tired of it,” she said. “Now I feel ready for more.”

Lynch left soon after her race, but GVS coach Kevin Hughes said that despite being primarily a lacrosse and basketball player, she has adapted well to cross country.

“She can run all day long,” he said. “I knew she had some endurance from those other sports, but not like this. She’s been a great leader for us this season.”

Lynch was followed by Michaela Kirvan and Michelle Horner in fourth and fifth places, Lauren Cormier in 17th and Brennan Dunne in 20th to win the team title over Wilson, which was led by Zakyrah Haynie and Arrington Peterson in sixth and seventh.

Cady Hyde, a St. Johns freshman, finished third in 19:28, a week after winning the WCAC individual title.

“I knew Page and Megan would go out hard, so I just wanted to hold back and work the second half and see if I could catch Megan,” she said. “I was close, I think I was about six seconds behind her at one point, but she pulled away.”

 

 

Rohann Asfaw and Abbey Green both sewed up their individual Montgomery County championships with plenty of room to spare last year, and there was no indication anyone else racing would have made up much ground, but for a few miles on Saturday, Adam Nakasaka made things interesting.

The Bethesda-Chevy Chase junior hung on Asfaw’s heels for two miles, before falling off pace and eventually being passed by Poolesville junior Ryan Lockett who put seven seconds on Nakasaka to finish second in 15:53 on Gaithersburg’s Bohrer Park course.

“I didn’t think I could beat Rohann, but I thought top two wouldn’t be too bad,” Nakasaka said. “I stayed a little behind him to get out of the wind, but I don’t think that helped all that much.”

Nakasaka had little left for a kick to fend off Lockett, but despite falling to third, he wasn’t disappointed.

“I might have gotten second if I had gone a little slower, but I’m glad I went for it,” he said. “I wanted a gutsy race. I’m not upset.”

Though Asfaw was trying for Chase Weaverling‘s 15:24 course record from 2012, he settled for just running a second faster than his own winning time from 2015 — 15:33. The culprit was likely having trained through the race.

“Everything is focused on Nike Cross Nationals and regionals,” Asfaw said.

The Richmond Montgomery senior was one spot from the national meet last fall. His miss in his record attempt was bound to come up later in the weekend, when he headed to the University of Virginia — where Weaverling is a junior — for a recruiting trip.

Further back in the pack, as dominant as Asfaw’s lead was in the third mile, the Northwest Jaguars were running in a formidable set of small packs, with runners finishing in 13th, 14th, 17th, 19th and 24th places to score a 50 point win over Bethesda-Chevy Chase with 87 points.

Northwest coach Robert Youngblood told his team to let Asfaw, along with Nakaska and B-CC teammate Josh Fry, go on ahead.

“We don’t have that dominant front runner,” Youngblood said. “I told them we could win another way. We have these packs of two and their jobs are to go after each team’s second runner, their third runner. If we do that, and close up our time gaps, we could have a chance.

Let the elite runners go out there and we could win it with a team effort.”

Jaguars’ anonymous gray uniforms reflected that approach. Their success this year is the culmination of Youngblood’s four-plus years with the team, which sported five seniors among the six varsity finishers. Northwest also laid claim to first place in both junior varsity races and three of the top four of the upperclass junior varsity race.

On the girls’ side, Walter Johnson won its third straight county title and Green improved on her course record by running 17:46 to win by almost 50 seconds over Pain Branch junior Yasmine Kass, who in turn had a four-second lead over Poolesville sophomore Nandini Satsangi.

“When I’m out there by myself, I just try to pretend there’s someone ahead of me,” Green said. “Anything to keep me focused. I didn’t have any real time goal in mind because I knew it would be weird with all the wind, but I did want to be faster than last year because I just missed 18 minutes (when she ran 18:04).”

WJ coach Tom Martin was encouraged by senior Katriane Kirsch‘s eighth place finish in spite of asthma problems that beat her up in the second half of the race.

“She powered through it, and it’s good to see your team respond to adversity,” he said. “That’s something we can fix. They’re training pretty hard right now so I didn’t expect them to be sharp, but I’m happy with how we did and are in a good place heading into regionals (Nov. 3).

WJ had a solid lead over T.S. Wootton, 54 points to 109, with Bethesda-Chevy Chase in third with 121.

There was big news spreading at the DCXC Invitational, after the elementary school races. Two girls were eager to share it.

“I got second place!”

That wasn’t even the big news.

From her friend: “I got ice cream!”

Both were treated with equal praise by coaches and teammates and that, in large part, speaks to the promise lying ahead for young cross country runners.

In a sport where participants are definitively ranked — someone is first and someone is last — the big challenge for coaches is to keep kids in the sport, developing their skills but staying patient and keeping runners engaged.

Dereck Barnes has been coaching the Fairfax Police Youth Club for three years, after his daughters noticed of how much he liked to run and asked to do it himself. And soon, he had been recruited to coach. He was on the cross country team at Methodist College in North Carolina, so he came in with a lot of experience, but he still needed to refine it.

“I knew the art of running, but I didn’t know the science,” he said. “Getting a coaching certification helped me a lot.”

More than at any other level, a youth coach’s role is to hold the athlete back.

“The magic is encouraging, them, explaining why we do the workouts,” he said. “We don’t do any type of intensity until they hit puberty. We’ll run up some hills, but we won’t go any anaerobic work.”

Three times a week, FPYC practices in some Fairfax County Park where the runners can stay on grass.

“We teach them to run by feel, learn the sport, respect the sport,” Barnes said. “There’s plenty of time for them to work on speed. We just want them to enjoy running.”

As a child in Fayetteville, N.C. Barnes ran Junior Olympic track events and was impressed by the levels of organization to the sport and the chance to run against and meet other athletes from across the state, region and country.

“Back then, soccer was pretty disorganized, too,” he said. “It’s gotten its act together and that’s why it’s so popular. If track can get to that point, we’ll draw people in.”

His older daughter, Aiko, is a fan of long distances — she enjoyed running the Junior Olympic 3,000 meters in track and longer cross country races. Even so, she’s still a sucker for flash.

“I was inspired by Usain Bolt,” she said. “But I like to run longer. I try to pace myself when I run.”

She sounds decidedly mature in telling that she sells her friends on running by saying “it’s fun and good for your health.”

At DCXC, she and her sister Aoi got a kick out of making funny faces in the New Balance photo booth.

As for Aoi, “I love to compete,” she said.

In D.C,’s Tenleytown neighborhood, Janney Elementary School has had a team for three years, now co-coached by Jenny O’Connor. Though she was a soccer player in her youth, she has run road races, including the Boston Marathon, and her fellow coaches are triathletes.

There’s a little more pressure because with a volunteer coaching staff, managing athletes’ safety forces coaches to make cuts to keep the team manageable.

“Every year there are more kids trying out,” she said. “We hate cutting kids, but we have to keep them safe.”

Her son, Seamus, took up running after seeing how much his parents enjoyed it.

“I manage running with my soccer practices,” he said. “I haven’t gotten tired of it yet.”

Kathryn McKinney has been coaching at Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in Woodley Park for five years. Like the Janney coaches, she’s a volunteer. And even though her athletes have finished running, she’s sticking around to see two former runners, now freshmen at Wilson High School, race later in the day.

“I hope they wind up with a life-long love of running,” she said. “We try to keep the program competitive but fun.”

One way she does that is by keeping plenty of records by which kids can gauge their improvement. The one-mile uphill run in the zoo is a staple of the program, and kids love to look back and see how they did in different “zoo miles.”

“We have kids coming in with all different kinds of experience,” she said. “Some of them have parents who run. Some of them have never played a competitive sport before.”

Vincent Kamani is one of them. Now an eighth grader, he joined the team last year after a lot of soul searching.

“I thought about if there was an apocalypse, I’d better be able to run,” he said. “It seemed like the best sport to get into shape.”

He was the top finishers on the Oyster-Adams team, taking eighth place at DCXC.

Kamani had a rough first year adjusting to that level of exercise, but after training trough the hot 2016 summer, he felt something click.

“Now I can run a lot faster than I thought I could,” he said. “Now I don’t run because I want to be okay in an apocalypse, now I just don’t want to lose.”

McKinney tries to keep the workload, as light as it is, from intimidating her athletes.

“We’ll run a mile to Rock Creek Park and a mile back, so everyone who comes to practice does at least two miles, and they don’t even notice it,” she said. “I’ll have them to scavenger hunts, things that take their mind off of the running.”

And it’s been working. For a school of roughly 170 people, the team sports 50 runners.

“We have almost a third of the students in the school on the team,” McKinney said. “That means they’re having fun and want to keep running. That’s good feedback to have.”

Her son, Alexander Walch, runs on the team. He prefers the 800 meters, so when he starts high school he may just opt for track, but even so, cross country has been teaching him lessons.

“I’m a lot better than I used to be,” he said. “I found out I like competing, and I didn’t used to like competing. Back when I played soccer, I would be the kid doing cartwheels on the field.”

Kamani said he can transfer the mental focus he has developed from running to anything else in his life.

“It’s all about where is your mental state,” he said. “Every race is a question of if you really want ‘it’ and how serious you are about it.”

Whether you’re first or fifteenth on the cross country team, you run. Hard.

“Every single day I see everyone run until their lungs are on fire,” said Fernanda Yepez–Lopez, a senior at Walter Johnson, in Bethesda.

It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t been one of the top seven scoring members of the Wildcats team, which will be shooting for its fourth consecutive Maryland 4A title this fall. Yepez-Lopez and her teammates attend daily practices, do strenuous workouts several times each week and wear the same uniform.

A successful team needs that, and breeds that. More personalities means more fun in a sport where a lot of the conditioning is done at a conversational pace and friendships can develop over the course of all the miles. Who knows where hidden talent lies the first time a runner stands on the starting line, but more importantly, who knows what they will learn about themselves and their friends in the dayin, day-out life of a cross country runner.

Jacqueline Zito, who is starting her junior year, said that at another school she might be among the top seven runners on the team, and so would some of her friends.

“I don’t think we’d give (WJ) up for anything,” she said. “All the varsity girls are so supportive. And they’re so sweet; it’s not as though they are boastful. There’s a varsity and a JV team, but there’s a really cool family vibe going on.”

That means, like with older siblings, lessons come from more than just mom and dad, or in this case, coaches Tom Martin and Ashley St. Denis. And sometimes those lessons resonate more personally because they come from peers.

Victoria Pannullo remembered her first practice last year as a freshman. “We did the warm up and I was exhausted after that. Then we did a two-mile jog on the track. I was so tired. And it was incredibly hot. After that, I threw up. There was one girl, who I didn’t even know, and she came over to me and told me it was going to be alright and running will get easier.

“It was so miserable. I came home from that and said, ‘Do I even want to do cross country? That was so hard.’ But everything has been better since the first practice.”

One of sophomore Helena Abbott‘s favorite cross-country memories is the entire team getting together to talk and do core exercises in a big circle after a workout.

“Immediately, everyone looks out for each other once you join the team,” she said.

Encouragement from a teammate convinced Pannullo to give the team a chance. She has gained the perspective that “you’ll have good days and bad days of running. And they are both important.”

She now relies on hard workouts to give her confidence in races by telling herself, “You finished that really hard workout; you can finish this race.”

Even on hot and humid race days, “you get through it,” Zito said, and walk away “knowing that you can do it even though it looks so difficult at the time.”

Yepez-Lopez and Zito have also both found that running helps them balance the stress of high school.

“Running really helps me channel out all the negative vibes,” Yepez-Lopez said. Zito pointed out that, “High school is full of pressure and social status and phones, but when you’re out running, that just goes away.”

There still is some competition, because when time matters, running reveals itself to be a true meritocracy. The politics of playing time are null and void. Zito often finished races last season within seconds of two other teammates. At some races, the order in which they finished would determine who would compete at an upcoming invitational. They raced hard against each other, but they also encouraged each other through the race and remained close friends regardless of their finishing order. Zito remembered a race when she thought she could not “move a step farther” and felt so grateful to hear her teammate’s voice beside her saying, “‘come on, we’ve got this.'”

Some girls on the team are striving for one of the top seven spots. For many others, it’s not realistic, at least this year.

Walter said, “the only person I’m racing against is myself and I’m pretty sure I can beat me.” She notes that many girls join the team “just for the love of running.” Abbott agreed that many of the girls on the team are motivated to run because “we really like the sport.” But they still set goals and run hard to attain them.

“We always go out and give it 110 percent,” Abbott said.

It means something when Yepez-Lopez sees every runner “putting (herself) on the line to achieve something.”

“Every time we run, I see everyone is struggling,” she said. “Everyone is pushing themselves. If you are not pushing yourself to the extent that everyone else is, you’re letting them down.”

Through the pain, the girls have fun and become close friends. “Even when we’re all tired, we still have enough energy to laugh together,” Yepez-Lopez said.

The success of Walter Johnson’s top runners is a source of pride and motivation for the entire team. Walter said that training with the top seven runners has inspired others on the team to believe that if “they work as hard they can be just as successful.”

“Even though it isn’t the JV team winning all the titles, we still feel a sense of pride since it’s still our runners going out there and winning. … I know it’s impacted me in this way.”

Pannullo said that the whole team contributes to the success of the fastest girls because, “Everyone on the team is trying to push the person in front of them to run faster.” And Zito agreed that, at the end of the season, it feels like “we all did it together.”

In an act that Walter described as “an amazing display of sportsmanship,” the two runners who consistently finished right behind the top seven girls last season and just missed qualifying to run at the regional meet organized the team to make posters for those racing at regionals. One of the girls who organized that effort, Emma Pannullo, was disappointed that she was not racing herself but still traveled to the race to cheer on the team.

Each of these girls plans to continue running after they leave Walter Johnson. Zito said that running helps her feel “stronger mentally and physically.” She hopes, even, that she can replicate “the wonderful bonds” forged with her teammates on the Walter Johnson cross-country team.

Rohann Asfaw put to rest one of the great debates from the Summer Olympics: Diving doesn’t make a difference.

Locked in a struggle for first place at the Glory Days Invitational, Richard Montgomery’s Asfaw heaved himself toward the finish line at the end of a muddy climb in hopes of edging out Alec Schrank. But unlike Shaune Miller beating Allyson Felix for the 400 meter gold, Asfaw was coming from behind, and his lunge couldn’t match the push Schrank’s feet had on the slippery ground. The pair crossed the line at 16:04, but Schrank kept the meet’s individual title in the Millbrook family. Tyler Cox-Philyaw, now at William and Mary, won last year’s race.

“I thought it would work,” Asfaw said. “It had to have been better that the ground, I wasn’t getting any traction.”

The boys’ race was a return to the true meaning of cross country after many teams spent the last two weekends racing flat, fast and in one case, short, courses at the DCXC (3.07 miles) and Great American invitationals. Finish in front of someone else — that’s all that matters.

Schrank wanted no part of the lead in the first two miles, he just wanted to save as much as he could for the end. Asfaw thought there was a chance for a fast race until a first mile split north of 5:00 changed his mind for him.

After three miles running largely neck and neck, the pair split to the grassier edges of the course torn up by eight races and a day’s worth of rain, wrapped around a long u-turn and saw no solid ground in the last 50 meters.

“I looked at that mud and I realized that could be my downfall,” Schrank said. “One bad step could be the difference between winning and coming in 20th.”

The pair had a little cushion, but not much, just three seconds on George Marshall’s Patrick Lynch. Lynch had run just seven second faster for a flat, dry 3-mile course earlier in the week, so the rebound was both surprising and welcome.

“This was what I needed,” he said. “I’ve had a season of pretty awful races, getting back from pneumonia. As a confidence booster, just racing people, being up there in the pack. It’s just about being tough.”

He had been beaten down by bad races as he tried to work his way back from illness, and saw the field pass him by last weekend at a fast Great American race in North Carolina.

“I’ve mentally collapsed in the middle mile the last few races, so staying strong today was important,” he said. “I almost wiped out coming down a hill, but I just kept following Rohann, he kept moving to the grassy parts wherever he could find them.”

Dulaney, last year’s Maryland 4A champion, notched its third straight win, five points ahead of Gonzaga, which edged WCAC rival Good Counsel by 10. Matt Owens lead Dulaney in ninth.

The girls’ race was less tense, after Heather Holt (18:03) ran away with a 33-second lead over Page Lester, who was running her first race race, at the end of her first week back running, after an early August stress reaction took her out of her running shoes for seven weeks.

“I enjoyed it,” Lester said. “I felt like my legs were still strong even though I wasn’t running.”

She simply eliminated running from the triathlon training she does year-round, and eased in and listened to National Cathedral School coach Jim Ehrenraft‘s rationale that simply finishing the race would be a victory. She took it out a little slower than she has in the past.

“I go out super fast, but after 800 meters I’m a little worn out,” she said. “Taking it easy worked — I felt a lot better than I usually do, but I don’t have my kick back, yet.”

Holt just wanted to get through the race on her feet, and with a healthy margin had the luxury of taking a little more care in her steps.

“The mud made it easy to remember to pick my feet up,” she said.

Noel Palmer, a senior from Liberty Christian Academy made the trip up from Lynchburg and finished third, all while enjoying cool weather.

“Today showed me I need to do a little more work on the hills,” she said. “They’re a weakness but I can make them a strength by the end of the season.”

Georgetown Visitation School freshman Megan Lynch tried to chase Holt early, and paid for it. She wound up in fifth, behind Winston Churchill senior Julia Reicin, Maryland’s first finisher.

“I was a little nervous about all the mud,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve had a hilly course like this before, either.”

She steeled herself mentally after the first mile and sat back in the second mile before charging in the third.

“I wasn’t really sure where the finish line was,” she said. “I feel like today taught me a lot of the things I see in cross country courses while I get used to the sport.”

Lake Braddock’s cancelled trip to the Disney Cross Country Classic in Orlando meant more of the team would be racing at Glory Days than earlier planned, and they handily won over Marshall. Taylor Kitchen and Sarah Daniels paced the Bruins in seventh and eighth place.  Northern High School from Calvert County, Md. was third.

It started by accident, but before every race, Aaron Liiva makes sure he dabs a little bit of marinara sauce on his spikes.

He doesn’t use any particular type of sauce — although the Blake senior mentioned he’s partial to Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand. Usually, he just makes a point to save some of the sauce from his pre-race spaghetti.

It began earlier this year when Liiva spilled marinara sauce all over his uniform right before a race. But that day, he ran a 40-second PR. Since then, he’s added the ritual to his long list of pre-race routines, which also include placing an oak leaf in his right sock and wearing the same bandana.

“I have a lot of pre-race rituals,” Liiva said, pointing to his bandana. “I started wearing the bandana, so I don’t want to not wear the bandana because it might be bad.”

The field at Saturday’s DCXC Invitational was full of traditions and superstitions, but food was a common theme.

Matthew Owens, a senior at Quince Orchard, said the team always goes to the same restaurant — Noodles & Company — before each race.

“We’ve been doing it for so many years. It was done before we came in, so we decided to continue it,” he said, adding that he usually gets the Wisconsin Mac & Cheese. “I’ve done well when I’ve had it.”

Owens’ teammate, Rene Mugabo, opts for 24 Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets.

“One time, my brother took me before county and I did really well, so I just kept eating it,” he explained.

Across Kenilworth Park, spectators could quickly tell which teams use music, huddles and team cheers to prepare to toe the start line.

For the last year, the Westfield boys have started each race the same way.

“We say, ‘Are you ready to get nasty?’ then we are like, ‘Yeah, we are!’ And we get a banana and throw it around,” said senior Colin Affterton, adding that they’ve dubbed “Cooking By The Book” — a rap remix of a song from a kids’ show — as the official team song.

Whether any of it helps them run faster is up for debate.

“We just have a lot of fun doing it,” he said.

The Blake girls have a similar ritual.

“We’ll scream, ‘Who are we?’ and the answer is, ‘Blake XC!'” said Claire Jacobs, a junior.

Eric Bartley, also a junior at Blake, gets hyped up before every race by listening to “Our Song,” by Taylor Swift.

“It’s actually a great song,” he explained. “I get in that moment where I feel like I can run forever.”

On the flip side, Bartley’s teammate, Jack O’Grady, has his go-to playlist of hard metal.

“It’s really intense stuff,” said O’Grady, adding that he always listens to the same songs in the same order. “I have to be kind of angry to run fast.”

For others, the start line offers a brief moment of calm before the excitement of the race.

“We always circle up and have a pre-meet talk and then we’ll say a prayer before we start,” said Logan Ali, a sophomore from Hempfield Area High School in Greensburg, Pa.

“Our coach always says to close our eyes and pictures ourselves as the champions,” said Junho Kim-Lee, a senior at Sidwell. “That’s something our coach has always done. And I like how he does that. I think it really helps to take a moment to think about how you want to run.”

Kim-Lee recalled how the tradition helped him in the early days of his cross-country career.

“I remember at my first race as a freshman. My whole body would be shaking. Even the day before, I couldn’t think. My thoughts would be scrambled,” he said. “But now I’m a lot more confident at the start line. It just helps focus on how you want to run.”

And then there are the runners who stick to their tried-and-true rituals out of fear changing them could be detrimental.

“I always wear the same tshirt and shorts the day of the race and I always bring an extra pair of socks and change into them like 10 minutes before the race,” said Sidwell senior Jordan Chernof. “It worked out once and now I’m too scared to change it up.”

“First, I have to crack my [right] hip. I can run without doing it, but it’s just something that I feel like I have to do. I started doing it my junior year and that’s when I started getting good at this,” said Maya Jacobson, a senior at Quince Orchard. “I’m also convinced that if I don’t wear this bracelet, something really bad is going to happen. The one time I didn’t wear this bracelet I put myself in the slow heat of the mile of indoor track and I ran really slow.”

For some, they rely on mantras and quotes to get them to the finish.

“I always think of this quote that my mama taught me,” said Blake senior Andy Otero. “It doesn’t really apply to cross country. It applies to when you’re being chased by a bear. It’s ‘Run faster than your friend.'”

Ella Pearlman-Chang and Talia Lehrich, both freshmen at Woodrow Wilson, have only been on the team for a month, but they’re already thinking about establishing their own rituals for their high school cross-country careers. At Saturday’s race, they donned hair ribbons and matching temporary tattoos wrapped around their right arms.

“Our tradition is to do fun stuff before races,” Pearlman-Chang explained.

And then, of course, there are those whose only ritual is to not have any rituals.

“I don’t really believe in superstitions,” said Jason McFadden, a junior at Quince Orchard. “I don’t believe there’s anything you can do that’ll change the race other than train before. I don’t believe in those little charms. I found that tricking myself into thinking that these little things will make a difference kind of psychs me out and just makes me more nervous than I already am.”

A rapidly cooling evening primed Kenilworth Park for fast races at the DCXC Invitational, conditions that D.C.-area cross country runners have ached for all season. Heather Holt‘s 16:56 and senior Saurav Velleleth‘s 15:01 times on the 3.07-mile course were just the fastest of likely hundreds of personal records, even adjusting for the slightly short course.

 

Now in its third year, DCXC played host to the four-class varsity race structure that pitted runners against opponents from their graduating classes, and let nearly 1,400 runners compete in varsity-level races.

Races started at 11 and lasted until 6:30, with elementary school, middle school races combing with high school races to total 2,381 finishers, of whom 2,095 were high schoolers.

Spectators were treated to 17 different sprints to the finish line.  For the runners, the class races let them see how they compare to their peers. And coaches got a clearer picture of what what they have to work with, especially on boys’ teams, where most top sevens comprise upperclassmen and younger runners develop in JV and freshman races.

Chris Pellegrini saw a lot to like in his West Springfield boys, and not just Chris Weeks‘ runner-up finish in the freshman race. Three — Sam Pritchard, Gian Trujilo and Chris Lozano — finished together at 17:51.

“If they stick with it, we might have something pretty good in a few years,” he said. “They’re all learning what they can do and how close to empty they can get at the end of a race. If Weeks can get to three miles with basically nothing left, he’ll be able to kick into the finish, but he’s still finding that out for himself.”

The Walter Johnson girls’ junior class, led by second place Abbey Green, had Sadie Keller, Sophia Scobell and Janet Scott in sixth through eighth places. When combined with  Katrione Kirsch‘s runner up finish in the senior race, bodes well for the Wildcats, not just this year, when they will try to defend their Maryland 4A title, but next year, too.

Gonzaga and Wootton claimed to top overall team awards for boys and girls, respectively. 

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Freshman Girls

Rookie Megan Lynch, from Georgetown Visitation, stormed to a 16-second win over John Champe’s Bethany Graham, starting with a 5:38 first mile. Graham clawed her way back to within seven seconds at the two mile (Lynch was through in 11:49, Graham in 11:56) before Lynch reasserted her margin over the last mile.

“I just tried to do best,” she said. “This was my second 5k, so I’m still new at this.”

Lynch is a lacrosse and basketball player who picked up cross country for conditioning purposes.

“I was trying to chase her down, but she was too fast for me,” Graham said. “I expect that kind of competition at a race like this though. It was a great opportunity to see where I stood compared to other freshmen.”

Zoe Cachion, from Arlington’s Washington-Lee, snagged the last medal at 25th place.

“Someone tried to pass me but I knew we were getting to the end of the medals,” she said. “She wasn’t going to pass me.”

Though a freshman, Cachion is a seasoned runner, coming from a family of runners and having the opportunity to run with the W-L team as an eighth grader.

“Each time I run is a new experience and a chance to do better than last time,” she said.

Mikaela Vento is visiting D.C. with her Hempfield team from Greensburg, Pa. She was not optimistic during the team’s tour of the course on Friday.

“We thought it was going to be horrible, the sun was beating on us like crazy,” she said. “But when we got here, it was cool and much better.

“I sprinted like crazy and passed four people. My normal time is 32 minutes, but I just got 26-something,” she said, though the Western Pennsylvania courses tend to run a little slower than Kenilworth Park

Out coach has us  do a lot of hills and that really helped with this course because it’s really flat and made it a lot easier than what we’re trained for,” said Vento’s teammate Rebecca McFadden.

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Freshman Boys

Nicholas Karayianis and Chris Weeks raced a week prior to DCXC at the Adidas Cross Country Invitational, where Karayianis, of Maryland’s Winston Churchill, had a 12-second lead on Weeks. This time Weeks closed the gap, trailing by only one second, 16:37-16:38.

“I have a tendency to go out way too fast, but I realized how much I slow down,” Karayianis said. “Tuesday, I went out faster than anyone else and I fell apart, so I realized I’d better take it easier.”

By the middle of the race, he knew that was paying off, because he was in control.

Weeks was encouraged by the improvement he made in a week.

“I knew the last few days things were going to go pretty well,” he said.

Gonzaga’s Cullen Capuano benefited from his teammates’ experiences over the last two years racing here.

“They said to just keep a steady fast pace instead of trying to surge,” he said. “The uphills and downhills weren’t long enough to make any more there.”

Speaking of hills, William Gay, from Champe, still remembers how his quads and calves killed after the climb in mile three at Oatlands seven days earlier. Not so this week.

“I feel a lot better,” he said. “This was a chance to just run fast.”

Isaiah Luckey, of Woodbridge leaned into the punch that comes in the middle of a cross country race.

“It was good the first half, but my legs started burning in the second half,” he said.

Rather than take that cue to slow down and lick his wounds, Luckey sped up and ultimately destroyed his PR by roughly a minute.

“I had to go fast…I felt people catching up to me, ” he said. “Last time, I went out too fast. This time I let them go and chased people down.

“I love it, man.”

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Sophomore Girls

Ava Hassebrock finally got a race that satisfied her, running 18:12 for a 13 second margin. Though the Tuscarora sophomore has a frustrating start to her season, trying to improve on her freshman outing that saw her finish fifth at the Virginia 5A championship, she credited her mental toughness and attitude in propelling her to a win over Poolesville’s Nandini Satsangi, with whom she had dueled over the first two miles. The pair finished in the same order in the 2015 DCXC freshman race.

“When I had about 400 meters left, I felt like she was close, and I told myself I couldn’t let her pass me again,” she said. “That attitude made all the difference. My coach always tells us it’s a mental game and everything starts there.”

That said, she admired the duck feather Satasangi tucked into her hair.

“I love ducks,” Satasangi said. “I have so many duck stuffed animals at home. I always wear a feather in my hair.

“This is the best race I’ve had all season, and it’s all thanks to the competition here.”

McLean’s Caroline Howley was making her season debut after missing most of September with a knee injury that forced her onto an Alter-G treadmill.

“I wanted to go out and see what I could do,” she said. “I finished a few seconds from my best time last year, which was a lot faster than anything else I did, so I feel pretty good. And my knee didn’t hurt.”

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Sophomore Boys

Josh Shackelford had high hopes for swinging into D.C. from Gloucester County, Va. and winning the sophomore race.

“I don’t win all of my races, but I finish pretty far in the front,” he said. “I felt like against other sophomores, I’d do pretty well.”

He did, but he had to settle for third place between two new Montgomery County, Md. rivals who learned a lot about each other in the closest finish of the day, when Aaron Bratt (Walt Whitman) and John Riker (T.S. Wootton) both ran 15:37, with Bratt getting the edge in a lean.

“It was really tough,” Bratt said. “We got out fast and then didn’t slow down too much.”

That was Riker’s plan.

“I don’t like to kick, so I wanted to make sure we were fast from the start,” he said.

Riker’s coach Kellie Redmond described him, even as a freshman, as being analytic to the point of writing several-page race reflections.

Bratt said it was the pair’s first time seriously racing each other, but he expected the two to continue to improve together.

Riker agreed.

“It’s going to be exciting racing him for two more years,” he said.

Though Shackelford expected to win, he was thrilled with a 40-second PR and to be healthy after a bout with anemia last fall.

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Junior Girls

Holt went out hard from the gun, aiming for Weini Kelati‘s 17:45 record from the meet’s inaugural race in 2014. She had a four-second lead on Green at the mile, coming through in 5:16, then split 10:50 after a 5:34 second mile.

Confidence made a big difference for Holt.

“Last year I was a little hesitant on this course,” she said about an effort that still ended in a sophomore race victory. “This year I just attacked the whole course, I didn’t hold back.”

She felt confident she could dip under 17 minutes, but it took about all she had.

“I definitely had to spring at the end to get it,” she said. “When we were coming up on the track (with roughly 200 meters to go), I couldn’t see the clock but one of my teammate’s parents told I had to go right then.”

It wasn’t just her teammates’ parents cheering her on. Holt got the sense that seemingly everyone on the course knew how hard she was pushing and booster her resolve.

“It’s an amazing community,” she said.

Walter Jonhnson’s Abbey Green was hoping to narrow the margin between the two after last week’s Oatlands Invitational but was stymied in part by box assignments, with her Walter Johnson team on the opposite end of the starting line from Holt’s George Marshall team.

“I think we played it differently, she got out a little faster than I expected and I was chasing her from the start,” Green said. “I was never really close enough to her.”

She still ran 17:14.

“I just tried my hardest to keep on pace, close the gap a little,” she said.

Having run DCXC before, when she finished third in the 2015 sophomore race, Green knew the race was an opportunity to run a fast time, but she was guarded in her optimism.

“I knew it was a flat course, but each day is different and you don’t know if you’re going to feel great,” she said. “I’m lucky that I felt great.”

Last year’s race was a bit of a shock because Green had never run such a fast course.

“I wasn’t approaching it with a strategy, I was just running,” she said. “After running indoor and outdoor track last year, I’m a lot better at flat courses, just running fast.”

Holt’s teammate Ava Bir finished third in what she described as a rebound.

“I had a rough week with training, school, socially, basically everything,” she said. “Running this well was a surprise.”

Though DCXC has become a race where people come to run fast, all-out, Bir was hoping to take away some lessons about racing tactically, but with more than  90 seconds between her and Green and a 26-second cushion over fourth place finisher Kenady Horne, she spent the entire race alone.

“I definitely slowed down a lot on my own,” she said. “My motivation was to not let anyone catch me, but the spectators were so supportive. You’re not running alone in the woods, so you have people all over the course.”

That said, the course was too flat for Bir.

“I really do better on hilly courses,” she said.

Emma O’Brien from Columbia, Md.’s Atholton scored a 2-minute PR, putting everything together in what she called a special race.

“I was really focused, really motivated, really excited about this race,” she said. “I had people ahead of me and they kept motivating me to run faster.”

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Junior Boys

Derek Johnson joined Hassebrock as an individual winner from Tuscarora, and moved up from his runner-up spot in last year’s sophomore race.

“I felt like I was controlling the race the while time,” he said. “Maybe the other guys thought differently, but with a mile and a half to go, I just decided to see who could hang.”

Last year, he thought he could hang until he lost in a sprint at the end.

“That was devastating,” he said. “I wanted to make sure it didn’t come down to pure speed again.”

But he didn’t expect to run 15:21 for a 5-second gap over Jay Hall, from Charles County, Md.’s Westlake.

“I ran a little too much the week before Oatlands, so I cut my mileage at the end of this week,” Johnson said. “I could feel it, just being fresher, after the first mile.”

Jay Hall took the opportunity to race some fast guys, and he made the most of it by improving by roughly 45 seconds from the Nike Cross Southeast race.

Poolesville’s Ryan Lockett finished third, with a PR by “uhh, a lot.”

He won the freshman race in 2014 before spending a year at Gonzaga. After this year’s race, he was surrounded by his old teammates, having shown them that even though he lives on the far western edge of Montgomery County, he hasn’t fallen off the face of the Earth.

“I was really disappointed with last year, so I worked a lot harder over the summer this year,” he said. “I didn’t die over the last mile like I did last year. That distance helped my endurance a lot.”

Like Lockett, the J.E.B. Stuart junior duo of Natnael Asmelash (6th, 16:08) and Matthew O’Cadiz (8th, 16:17) are reaping the benefits 0f more summer mileage, up to high 40s after years in the 20s.

“I felt like the first two miles (10:02) were faster than I usually go, but I felt a lot better in the third mile.

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Senior Girls

A little good-natured teasing has come back to bite Leah Walker, but in a good way.

Her daughter, Hayley Jackson, didn’t know what cross country was, a week before she started high school at Patuxent. When she found out, she asked “who would run three miles for fun?” A former Calvert High star, Walker challenged Jackson, who was looking for an after-school activity when he dreams of being in the school play were dashed.

“She told I wouldn’t be able to run her times,” Jackson said. “I tried and I was our top girl in our first race. She hasn’t really been talking much about her times anymore.”

The track talk in their house has focused on helping Jackson go forward from there, a path that has , so far, added up to a pair of 2A cross country titles.

“From my first race, it just hasn’t been hard to run fast,” she said. “I live 10 minutes away from the naval base, the power plant, the natural gas plant… maybe that’s why I’m so fast. Maybe it’s the radiation.”

As for why she ran fast at DCXC, winning the senior race in 17:42, the answer was more tangible.

“I heard you get a backpack with a lot of stuff if you win,” she said. “I heard there were Beats headphones in there and I told myself I wasn’t going home without a backpack.”

Though she suffered from some asthma during the race, she pushed those struggles aside by doing free association exercises.

“We ran by the river, I saw water and thought I’d really like some water at the end of the race,” she said. “Stuff like that keeps me happy, and I run best when I’m happy.”

Walter Johnson’s Katrione Kirsch trailed by 30 seconds, and in the process ran a 40-second PR. When Jackson went hard from the start, splitting 5:33 to Kirsch’s 5:43, Kirsch just wanted to keep Jackson in sight.

“I don’t usually like to think about time, I just like to run as hard as I can,” she said. “I’m super-ambitious with my racing but don’t always have the kick to finish is off. I did today.”

She held off Winston Churchill’s Julia Reicin by three seconds.

“There was no sun,” Reicin said. “It’s so nice to have a race that isn’t hot or humid.”

Westfield’s Didi Pace viewed the race as an opportunity to really go for a fast time. Her success created a feedback loop.

“I love the course. It was nice and flat, but when you realize how fast you’re going, you know you have to keep it up,” she said. “The race taught me to not be afraid to take chances, believe that you can be in the front pack and just make it happen.”

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Senior Boys

Saurev Velleleth defended his class’ title, again, running 15:01 for the day’s fastest time.

“I was debating different strategies before the race but when I was on the line I just decided to go for it, run for a big PR,” he said.

T.C. Williams’ John Mackay followed him through the mile in 4:49 and the two mile in 9:43 before Velleleth put a five-second gap on him in the last mile.

“I just went out and stuck with him,” Mackay said. “I was proud of myself for doing that. Last year I had a lot of confidence issues, I’d see people on the line and know I couldn’t beat them.

“Today, I thought about dropping back, but I knew if I could just stick with him, I could set myself up for something really great.”

It was mutually beneficial.

“I couldn’t run that fast without him with me,” Velleleth said. “It’s still early in the season, I’m still training through and I’ve been killing my legs on hilly courses.”

Harry Monroe continued Gonzaga’s strong showing with a third place finish in 15:21.

“I just wan 15:57 at Adidas last week, and that was a big PR, so I’m surprised to do it again,” he said. “I saw my teammates and former teammates run well all day today and I knew I had to match them and go  a little faster.”