Alysha Valencia won’t go down as the girls 3,200-meter run champion at the Kansas Relays, but she showed a lot of guts trying.
The Free State High junior launched into first place off the starting line and opened a considerable lead so quickly Friday it seemed she would wilt after her 5:22 first mile.
But her lead grew even as fatigue set in, as she pulled ahead of the pack by 25 meters. — a tactic Valencia said she typically tried by running her competition out of the race early.
“I tried to do that here today, and I didn’t put in the fact that there’s a lot of wind on that back stretch,” Valencia said.
A gusting headwind took its toll on Valencia on the last couple of laps as Malorie Champa, the defending Class 4A cross-country champion from Clearwater, stalked behind Valencia for a lap before blowing past her in the final 200 meters.
Valencia wasn’t disappointed with second place, but wished she remembered Free State coach Steve Heffernan’s advice.
“That would have been nice to block and give myself a little break so I could get my legs going again,” Valencia said. “And my coach did tell me to do that, only I just now remembered.”
But Heffernan wasn’t disappointed, endorsing her strategy.
“The only thing that’s fast is her first 200,” Heffernan said. “She didn’t slow down. What happened is, the other girl picked it up a bit at the end and caught her. I thought she did well. I think if she had run it any differently, she would have gotten the same result.”
Valencia chalked this race up as an opportunity to gain experience.
“I guess that’s part of being a smart runner, which I’m still learning how to do, to listen to my body and how I feel instead of going out there being like, ‘Well, I should run fast and go,’ so I’m still working on that,” Valencia said.
Lawrence High’s Chelsey Ornburn worked late into the night to earn a 10th-place finish in the pole vault. She cleared the bar at 10 feet, but couldn’t make it again at 10 feet, 6 inches.
Nevertheless, the jump marked a huge improvement for last year’s state runner-up, who had struggled so far this season.
“The whole season I’ve been working on getting back to where I was jumping last season, and finally today I committed to my jumping,” Ornburn said.
Free State’s distance medley snagged a third-place finish but struggled in the first three legs of the relay. Danny Schneider ran the final leg — 1,600 meters — and received the baton in seventh place. Schneider ran his first lap hard and began to fade, but he caught a second wind and blew past several runners to finish third.
For Schneider, the finish atoned for a lackluster fourth-place finish in the four-mile relay earlier Friday.
“I was real disappointed with how I ran the four-mile,” he said. “So coming into this I knew I had the chance to redeem myself, so I just focused on getting a fast start.”
Lawrence High’s boys 400- and 1,600-meter relay teams advanced to today’s final. The 400 team will compete during the Gold Zone.
Lions coach Scott Stidham said he was thrilled to have one of his relay teams compete during the splendor of the Gold Zone.
“It’s in the middle of the Gold Zone,” Stidham said, “and so you’re on the track a little bit before and after Maurice Greene, so we’re happy for those guys.”
Stidham said the purpose of this meet was to improve before hopefully peaking at state.
“We finished higher than we were supposed to in the seeds. That was our goal,” Stidham said. “Today, we got better as a track team.”