Eleanor Fulton raised a few eyebrows with a 17:45 finish for third place. Photo by Alan Versaw
As might be expected for a post-season meet that came six weeks after the Colorado state meet, some Colorado athletes closed their seasons in spectacular fashion Saturday in Portland while others left realizing that some of the edge they had six weeks ago maybe wasn't quite as sharp it was in late October.
The big performance of the day belonged to Eleanor Fulton of Highlands Ranch. Fulton took a slightly aggressive start for this race and stayed near the lead group throughout the entire race, finding herself all the way up in third by the time she had covered five kilometers.
Kaitlin Hanenburg, competing for the Colorado Springs team, was the only other Colorado individual to finish among the top 20, concluding her junior season in 17th with a time of 18:10. The other two individual 
entries from Colorado, Kristen Kientz and Laura Tremblay finished in 48th (18:41) and 85th (19:04), respectively. Tremblay opted to take the course on wearing flats and struggled some with footing on the slicker portions of the course.
On the boys' side, Colorado was represented by Dart Schwaderer, at right, in 23rd with a time of 15:46 and Kevin Johnson in 87th with a time of 16:19.
The bigger story at NXN remains, however, the team story. This year, Colorado had two entries in the girls' team competition, Fort Collins (Fort Collins High School) and Colorado Springs (The Classical Academy).
The race was still in its earlest stages when three or four of the Fort Collins girls went down in a pile-up. Being experienced in high-stakes races, however, the girls simply got back up and began working their way methodically back through the field. Once the dust had settled (a figure of speech not entirely appropriate to the Portland Meadows course), Fort Collins, led by senior Miranda Benzel (below), .jpg)
had climbed to a very respectable 7th-place place in the standings. Behind Benzel, were Rachel Viger, Marci Witczak, Tati Ogan, and Kirsten Follett.
Participating in the Nike-sponsored championship meet for the first time, the Colorado Springs team finished 13th in the 22-team field. Behind Hanenburg were Emily LaValley, Shelby Stableford, Kelsey Brown, and Emily Husted.
With a break or two, both Fort Collins and Colorado Springs both might have finished a few notches higher in the standings, but cross country is--like all sport--about how your performance turns out on race day, not about how you would have fared if your team had just won the "exemption from bad breaks" lottery.
In the great scheme of things in high school cross country, two teams plus five individual entries in the NXN race is a solid accomplishment for a state the size of Colorado. Both Fort Collins and Colorado Springs return a majority of their top five runners, and Highlands Ranch--with the addition or development of one or two more top runners could easily figure as a team entry next year as well.
Girls cross country is clearly on the rise in Colorado, but it was all too evident on Saturday that New York stands alone among the 50 states where girls cross country is concerned. If Colorado can continue the progress we have made over the last few years, however, the New York teams may soon find that it's not just California and other eastern seaboard teams taking serious shots at toppling their string of domination of the team national championships.
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