With individuals and teams winning races or placing high in various postseason meets, the 2025 high-school cross-country season during the fall was a big success for Arlington runners.
There also were some significant achievements for runners and teams from Fairfax County schools, especially from Potomac School on the private-school level.
Multiple local high-school indoor track-and-field squads have enough depth to contend for district, conference, region and state titles when playoffs begin at the end of the month.
On the girls side, the South County Stallions are the defending public-school Class 6 state indoor and outdoor champion from the 2025 track-and-field seasons.
It’s a challenge to single out who are, or could become, the top high-school indoor track-and-field athletes across Northern Virginia participating in the current winter season — because there are so many.
The 2025-26 campaign is ongoing and continues through early March.
The high-school indoor track-and-field season officially begins each December, but in reality doesn’t ramp up until early January.
The new year has brought a full slate of many more, and bigger, regular-season meets scheduled each week, with postseason championship competitions not far off.
Doubts swirled around my head, and my right quad muscles ached with cramp-like pain. It was only ten miles into the 2021 Philadelphia Marathon but as I watched what felt like hundreds of runners zip past me, I started to recalibrate my pre-race goal: Three hours and 50 minutes became four hours. Then four and a half hours. Then simply finishing.
The race turned into a mental battle. My legs screamed for me to stop and walk, while my brain urged me to continue on pace. The 10th mile would be my slowest up to that point. I tried to find motivation wherever I could. I repeated the mantras, “mind over body” and “don’t run scared,” to myself as I locked on to the runners in front of me. I visualized how satisfying it would feel when I crossed the finish line with another sub-four hour marathon. I thought about my supporters back home who were tracking my race online.
If I learned anything from the 2023 Parkway Classic, it was that I enjoy pacing people while running and that a large singlet was too big for me and threatened to sag below my shorts when it got wet.
Anyone I work out with on the track knows that I take a lot more pride in running my laps “dead-on-balls accurate” (it’s an industry term) than I do in running any rep particularly fast.
Sam Doud was itching to run, just for a few shakeout miles.
The problem was that he was at a post-race party after the California International Marathon (CIM) in Sacramento, Cali., where everyone else was happy to put the last 26.2 miles behind them. On that December 2018 morning, he was 52 seconds too slow to qualify for the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials, and eager to fix that. But he took a few steps and realized a run just wasn’t going to happen.
St. Albans alumnus wins club cross country championship.
