The Pagosa Springs High School Pirate cross-country team competed at the Durango Relay Carnival last weekend.
The team split up into teams of two and ran 8 miles, alternating a mile lap at a time.
The other two teams at the meet, Durango and Dolores, made coed teams, but coach Josh Kurz explained he didn’t have enough girls to make coed teams with the Pirates.
In an email to The SUN, Kurz calls the meet a unique, hard workout that challenged the kids to work together and encourage one another.
Each athlete ran a total of 4 miles at the meet.
Kurz timed each athlete’s mile times and averaged them out.
On the boys’ side, Rylan Ash averaged a time of 5 minutes, 17 seconds. Weston Sweet averaged a time of 5:44.
Jacen Easling averaged a time of 6:07, Hawkin Kofke averaged a time of 6:09, Miles Dempster averaged a time of 6:14, Kieran Kurz averaged a time of 6:23, Stetson Osborn averaged a time of 6:41, Isaac Hanto averaged a time of 6:51, and Silas Yost averaged a time of 6:55.
Wells Witting averaged a time of 7:03, Matthew Mars averaged a time of 7:10, Liam McKnight averaged a time of 7:15, Jacob Freeman averaged a time of 7:19, Micah Tyler averaged a time of 7:42, Davyn Leiker averaged a time of 7:47, Breland Bridges averaged a time of 7:55, and Eli Hanto averaged a time of 8:59.
On the girls’ side, Elsy Wood averaged a time of 8:18, Adi Oelking averaged a time of 8:49, Izzy Ratcliff averaged a time of 9:05, and Skylar Leiker averaged a time of 10:02.
Josh Kurz mentions that many of the athletes ran personal best times in their first mile of the relay race, with Sweet and Easling taking off the most time from last year.
He also notes that Osborn was the most consistent runner on the day.
The Pirates have Labor Day weekend off and won’t race in another meet until Sept. 12, when they head to Alamosa for the 33rd Joe I. Vigil Open.
In the meantime, Josh Kurz indicates they’ll switch practices to the afternoon due to the heat and this Friday, Sept. 4, they’re going to complete their high altitude training.
The training consists of running from the top of Wolf Creek Pass to Lobo Overlook, which is just under 3 miles and around 1,000 vertical feet of elevation gain.
The tradition has been going for 20 years or so, notes Josh Kurz, but last year it didn’t happen, so this will be the first time a lot of the runners have done the training.
“I just hope the Lobos [training] is going to make everything, all the other races seem easy because it’s going to be very similar to their race distance, but at altitude and all uphill,” Josh Kurz wrote.
After the training, the team will get three days off to rest and recover before revamping training ahead of the meet the following weekend.
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