Elise Cranny crosses the NXN finish line in seventh. Photo by Patty Morgan.
One message has shown through in the last five weeks. Whether you put Elise Cranny, Heather Bates, and Katie Rainsberger on hills, in mud, or on a flat and fast course, they are among the very best in the nation. The trio that swept top honors at the Colorado state meet, then again at NXR-SW, was back at it under conditions about as bad as imaginable at Portland Meadows on Saturday.
Together, they gave Colorado three of the top 13 overall places. Cranny took seventh at 19:43, Bates 12th at 20-flat, and Rainsberger 13th at 20:01. While little fanfare other than hosing off the liquified goose poop prior to reloading the buses back to the hotel attaches to those places (Cranny does, however, bring home a trophy for her placement), it was a stirring performance for Colorado's top individuals nonetheless. At this race, those are big-time placements.
The day went in a different direction for Colorado's teams. Erin Hooker and Devynn Miller came up sick on race day for Fort Collins. Hooker ended up running the race, her fourth at Portland Meadows, and finished in 25th (20:15). Miller never made it to the starting line.
Despite that, Fort Collins battled through the difficulties of the day and still managed an eighth-place team finish. While that finish was definitely not what this team was capable of, it did keep alive the string of top-ten finishes and still just 40 points out of second. Solid midpack work by Kari Van Zyl, Heather Holt, and Audrey Oweimrin kept Fort Collins in place to finish that well.
Rachael Chacko and Emma Gee, individual entries from Colorado, finished among roughly the same midpack group as Van Zyl, Holt, and Oweimrin.
For Pine Creek, a team going in with no margin for error, the scenario they've managed to avoid all season struck at the worst possible time. One of their spectacular top five had an especially tough race, and there wasn't much of a way to put the pieces back together for a solid team finish. Heather Bates posted four team points and Gabrielle Sered posted 48, but the rest went into the 90s or higher, leaving Pine Creek in 18th place out of the 22 teams assembled.
Portland Meadows can be an unforgiving kind of place on the first Saturday in December. This is not an ordinary kind of cross country race, and this course has a way of changing the game even further.