Collegiate honors for cross country runners from American and George Washington universities and Oakton and Loudoun Valley high schools.
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DCXC
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Avery Graham didn’t even recognize a fellow Montgomery County runner at the Oatlands Invitational, where she finished three seconds behind Poolesville sophomore Daisy Dastrup.
When Graham, a Sherwood freshman, saw her two weeks later at the Georgetown Prep Invitational, she restructured her goals for the race.
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D.C. private school runners won both individual varsity races at the Landon Invitational in the first large cross country race for many runners in almost two years.
St. Albans senior Pierre Attiogbe was the first of five D.C. school runners across the line, running 17:25 to Sidwell Friends senior Michah Lachman’s 17:44. Attiogbe broke away in the third mile and relied on the focus he had practiced most days during the height of the pandemic.
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Apparently finishing second at the state meet at the end of an abbreviated freshman season didn’t give Sailor Eastman much confidence.
It wasn’t until she was battling Olympic Trials 800 meter runner Juliette Whittaker in the last mile of the Oatlands Invitational that she realized she belonged in the race.
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Five years after Loudoun Valley’s Drew Hunter kicked off his professional running career right out of high school, his mother Joan is making the same jump.
She will oversee training for the Boulder-based Timman Elite, an all-male collection of distance runners, including her son, who mostly represent the United States. She brings with her 18 years of high school school coaching at three different Northern Virginia high schools — with two Nike Cross Nationals titles in the last four seasons — and several intervening years coaching a youth team. Hunter served as a remote interim coach since March, before she and husband Marc retired as Loudoun Valley’s track and cross country coaches.
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The family she babysat for didn’t need her. The cost of living, with no job, in Westchester, N.Y. was crushing. Her team’s funding was gone. So Katy Kunc came home.
With the pandemic squeezing her out of everything else, she ran the same roads and trails where she discovered her talent for running while at Lake Braddock.
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Fitsum Seyoum didn’t last long during freshman tryouts for the Tuscarora track team.
“Most of track season is pretty warm, but tryouts were early in the year, so it was pretty cold and wet,” former Tuscarora coach Troy Harry said. “He didn’t stick with it.”
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Taylor Knibb had already gone an entire year without competing in a triathlon, so what was a few more months?
Possibly the difference between making the U.S. Olympic Team and staying home.
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It was a cultural shift for Christie and Joe Jones.
Not to moving Virginia after living in Honduras and Bolivia. Rather than sitting quietly and clapping between points on the tennis court, they were welcome to… nay… encouraged to make as much noise as they could as their son Matthew ran around cross country courses.
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Garrett Woodhouse gave an understated evaluation of Oakton’s performance at the 2019 Virginia state meet.
“We’re very dissatisfied with this race,” he said. “We’re always striving for more.”