Ava Gordon was a little surprised when nobody else took the lead early into the girls’ 4A race at the Virginia state cross country championships April 24.
VHSL Championship
|
DCXC
|
Matt Smith’s time-released allergy pill didn’t work, but his timed kick did.
Loudoun Valley’s sole senior made a decisive move in the last half mile of the Oatlands course to break the tape in the 4A boys race April 24, running and sneezing his way to a 16:22 win over Grafton junior Ben Madrigal’s 16:27.
|
Mackenzie Keller knew the Oatlands course well enough to know the first mile was a trap.
“I knew a lot of people were going to go out fast,” she said. “That’s what they did last year (at the Oatlands Invitational in 2019) and I got sucked into it and it got me. I wasn’t going to do it again.”
|
When Colgan senior Bryce Lentz made his move to pull away from Arnav Tikhe in the third mile of the Virginia 6A championship, he had to do it fast.
Lentz’s gentle demeanor wouldn’t let him say in so many words that he was trying to extinguish any hope Tikhe would be able to hang with him after that on the hilly Oatlands course. He was more delicate, but the effect was the same.
|
Thais Rolly’s dad Philippe wanted her to grow up playing a lot of sports, so she did.
Soccer, tennis, swimming, rock climbing.
|
Check out a food site and chances are the first thing you’ll hit is a story, rambling about who knows what, forcing you to scroll through narrative to… just give me the recipe already!
Trust me, this story is worth it, and it will make the recipe even better. I’m sure they all say that, but this time, it’s true.
|
It was seven months.
Seven months of torturous unknowing. Seven months of never-ending fatigue and sluggishness for George C. Marshall High School alumna Natalie Bardach. Seven months of doubt and disappointment. Seven months of just surviving a sport she had once thrived in, helping to win team conference, regional and even state titles.
|
Time moves differently now for Andrew Lent.
Part of it is his age — he’s 21, and a minute, an hour, even a month exists on a broader scale than it did a few years before.
|
When Gavin McElhennon decided on a college last year, he didn’t expect to spend his first semester thousands of miles away from Johns Hopkins University’s campus in Baltimore.
But with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing classes online for his first semester, Gonzaga alumnus McElhennon and 13 of his first-year classmates took their academic flexibility to Flagstaff, Ariz. The Blue Jays weren’t alone — college runners from across the country, including many in and from the D.C. area, took a consolation prize from a deferred fall season and did some altitude training.
|
Tom Martin isn’t sure what he’d do without the towers field in Bethesda, Md. Maybe his cross country runners would have to do more workouts on the track, he says. Maybe he’d even think about retiring from coaching. That’s how important the roughly 1.25-mile, grass-and-dirt loop around the WMAL radio towers is to him. It’s more than just a 75-acre field nestled between two highways and not far from Walter Johnson High School, where Martin coaches. It’s a crucial piece of the local running culture in Montgomery County.
“For me, it’s almost as if, when that goes away, I might consider retiring,” Martin says. “It’s invaluable just to have… this nice open space where we can do all different kinds of workouts. It would be a tremendous loss to our program.”