Colorado made away with some seriously strong performances in Portland this past weekend.
In a meet with Colorado-connected entries spread throughout, those entries made the most of the opportunity.
For the purposes of this article, I'll restrict comments to current and former Colorado high school athletes.
In the current category, Tyler Scholl once again made the trip to Portland and shave four seconds off his 2K Steeple record from last year. Scholl completed the five laps of steeplechase in 6:34.34 for fifth place.
And, Katie Rainsberger also shave a couple seconds off one of her PR marks. Running in the second of four heats in the women's high performance 1500, Rainsberger crossed the line in 4:12.62 and third place in the heat (13th of 45 overall). That still left her three seconds behind high school rival Christina Aragon.
And Aragon's 4:09 hints pretty strongly that last weekend's 2:06 800 in New Mexico was not a full-throttle effort. There's good reason to think we've not seen the fastest of these races yet. Stay tuned for more to come.
Among Colorado high school alumni, the Portland Track Festival witnessed all of the following:
- Marci Witczak ran 17:07.46 in the Open 5000
- Evan Appel ran 14:51.38 in the Open 5000
- Natosha Rogers won the High Perfomance 10,000 in 32:06.82
- Ben Payne ran fourth in the High Performance 10,000 in 28:36.43
- Bethany Praska and Maddie Alm finished 7th and 31st in the High Performance 800 in 2:02.72 and 2:05.93, respectively
- Dusty Solis finished 29th in the High Performance 800 in 1:49.62
- Morgan Mosby and Tabor Scholl had 1500 times of 4:23.79 and 4:32.19
- Nick Harris and Tabor Stevens ran 3:42.60 and 3:43.56 for 1500 meters
- Bailey Roth, Connor Winter, and Scott Dahlberg ran 8:36.65, 8:43.83, and 8:59.20, respectively for the 3000 Steeple. Roth's time was good enough for a third-place finish.
- Alisha Williams and Laura Thweatt finished fourth and sixth in the High Performance 5000 with times of 15:23.11 and 15:26.28, respectively
- Marty Andrie logged a 14:07.53 in the High Performance 5000
And, if you're thinking a couple of those names also showed up at NCAA DI Nationals in the past week, you'd be right about that.