Tanner Norman Takes Down All-Class 3200 Meters Record
Brent Vaughn's record had stood since the state meet of 2003. The list of people who took serious shots at the record and came up painfully short reads like a Who's Who of recent Colorado distance history: Kevin Williams, Connor Winter, Evan Appel, David Perry, Paul Roberts, and Cerake Geberkidane all made Vaughn's record break a sweat over the last 10 years.
Tanner Norman made it fall on a comfortable Pueblo evening. Dead calm wind, temperatures in the 60s, and middling barometric pressure made for conditions good enough for Norman.
For the first three laps, Norman and Palmer Ridge's traded off the lead, coming through at about 65 on the first lap and the next two at 67/68.
On the fourth lap, however, the race broke apart. No longer able to sustain the briskness of the pace required to get to 9:05, Meadows fell off the lead and Norman was on his own for the last four laps of the race.
Laps 4, 5, and 6 each hovered around 70 or 71 seconds and, for a few agonizing minutes, it appeared Norman would join the long list of close-but-no-record.
"I saw the clock with two laps to go, and I knew I had to close the last 800 in 2:14," Norman explained after the race.
Actually, he closed in about 2:13, rolling through the final two laps in about 68-point and 64-point. Without the nudging of the pace on lap 7, lap 8 probably wouldn't have mattered.
Lots of folks looked at handheld stopwatches an instant after Norman crossed the finish line. Almost everyone's watch read 9:04-and-change. There's some margin in 9:04-and-change when the record in 9:05.89, but there's also room to be skeptical.
At last, the announcement came. 9:04.97. Tanner Norman had made one of Colorado's most storied records fall.
While coaches were still shaking their heads in disbelief at what they had just seen, Norman and 16 of the young men who shared the moment on the track quietly slipped out of the open north end of Dutch Clark Stadium and wound down the evening with a cool-down run along the Pueblo Riverwalk Trail. For 15 minutes or so, the magic still hung in the air for 17 young men.
And Norman was not the only one with cause to celebrate. It's difficult to say yet exactly how many school records went down in the race on Friday evening, but we know that records changed hands at Alamosa (Isaiah DeLaCerda), Widefield (Max Martinez), and Custer County (Jerald Taylor) High Schools.