Steven Weeks has been running since he was 5 years old, and it paid off for the Arvada High School junior when he won the Class 5A cross county championship a year ago.
That experience will come in handy with the boys and girls state cross country meets arriving Saturday at The Vineyard/El Pomar Youth Sports Complex in Colorado Springs, because the pack is getting deeper and closing fast.
“The field is going to be stacked. There are a lot more guys up there in the standings, and everybody is really competitive,” Weeks said.
Weeks is in the mix and feels the pressure. One observer has a perspective that dates to the running boom of the 1970s, and he understands Weeks’ pain.
“This is the toughest, deepest year of all time,” said Dave Reese, the 1987 Denver Marathon winner and the boys distance running coach at Mullen. “About four or five years ago, I thought that this is the one sport where kids still haven’t improved. But this is the best I’ve seen since I was (at Wheat Ridge) in 1978. I would hate to be running now.”
Colorado high schools have had their share of elite runners – including Mike Vanatta, Jon Hume, John Luff and Adam Goucher on the boys side, and Melody Fairchild, Rebekah McDowell, Sarah Schwald and Megan and Katelyn Kaltenbach on the girls side. But now it is harder to see the lone tree through the forest of runners.
“Colorado has been on the high end depth-wise for a while, but it has just exploded in the last year or so. There is so much good stuff going on in the state right now. Once you get that spark, it causes a wildfire,” said Rich Gonzalez, who is part of the Nike Team national rankings committee.
The reasons for the conflagration are varied.
There is a greater willingness to train year-round, rather than just during the cross country season. South’s Mohamud Ige, Colorado’s current phenom, runs almost every day and has eyes on the Olympics. This trend has some coaches changing their way of thinking.
“What I was getting away with training kids three or four years ago just doesn’t cut it anymore,” said Alan Versaw, who led The Classical Academy to boys and girls 3A titles last season.
Craig Masback, the CEO of USA Track & Field, has noticed the trend and links it to the availability of information on the Internet.
“There’s a depth of performance that in some cases is unprecedented and is harkening back to earlier eras. … I think kids are sharing information. They can model off the better athletes – Jorge (Torres), Dathan (Ritzenhein), Alan Webb – and they can model their own high school careers off what these guys did,” Masback said.
Another possible factor in Colorado’s boom is the weather.
“I tell the kids there are only five days – one hand’s worth of fingers – when it is too hot to run. Have you ever been to the South? The humidity is suffocating,” Boulder cross country coach Monique Guidry said.
Whatever the reasons, the numbers do not lie. At last season’s state meet, seven boys broke the 16-minute mark, and three girls ran the 5-kilometer course in less than 18 minutes. From 2000-02, a total of three boys and no girls posted those times. This season, 16 boys have times under 16 minutes at state- sanctioned meets.
“If you are a college coach, you better be coming to Colorado,” Guidry said.
Guidry and others see one downside – burnout – to the increased competition and willingness to run so many miles. If high school runners put in 50 miles a week, 50 weeks out of the year, they may win a state title, but the tank might be empty by the time they get to college.
“Year-round training is more common and I’m seeing more kids willing to do it,” Versaw said. “But I am still afraid to give a kid a running schedule 50 weeks a year because you will probably see a burnout instead of a Foot Locker (national) finalist.”
There’s more to life than just running.
“I am a huge advocate of playing multiple sports,” said Guidry, who saw her team jump from 90 runners the past two years to 130 this year. “That’s a part of being in high school.”
Staff writer John Meyer contributed to this report.
