The "Run-Down": State Meet @ Sun Willows Golf Course (Pasco)

200 Miles is the distance John Colter had to negotiate back to his home fort after his race against the 200 Blackfoots. 200 Miles is also the distance from Washougal to Pasco. But we got to drive on pavement in our new 9-passenger vans. All Panthers agreed that the new 4 wheeled commodities were a sweet ride.

Since we were making good time through the gorge (only minor delays in the fire area due to reduction of travel lanes), we decided we had a little extra time to kill after our van decoration party at the Subway parking lot. Ironically, all of the girls went to “Dutch Brothers” while all the guys chose Rite Aid. Maybe the girls were looking for dates for the Prom in the spring, but were they really eager to find a guy to go “Dutch” with? Shouldn’t they be searching at Burger “King” to find a guy that could/would pay for it all? Oh well!

At the course for the pre-race jog through, junior Gabriel Dinnel had to quickly resort to urgent recovery mode even before the jog through. This recovery was not to lower his heart rate, but rather to recover his iPhone from out of one of the Honey Buckets, as it had fallen out of his sweat top pocket while inside. Good thing we were one of the first teams on the scene such that there was not a whole lot of “stuff” at the bottom of the bucket!

In spite of Gabriel’s unwanted sanitary confrontation, which he supposedly sanitized appropriately from afterwards, he was accepted back in the herd of guys as all nine of us (me include) ordered Calzones at our favorite Italian/Greek restaurant in Richland.

The forecast for race day called for temps in the upper 30’s for the girls race, the second coldest meet in my eight years at WHS. Junior Amelia Pullen likes colder race weather, but I think even she would have preferred 5-10 degrees warmer, especially since she had a sore throat. In the race, Amelia and 4 others stayed cool through the first mile at 5:51, then two of them “turned up the heat” in the second mile. They broke away from Amelia as she broke away from the other two as well. Somewhere in that mile, Amelia’s thoughts went from “stay with the leaders” to “I’ll be happy holding on to third place”, which she did with no one else close to her, like most of the rest of season. Her time of 18:36.3 fell short of her fastest time of the year but it was the fastest time ever at the 5K state meet from a girl from our district.

Amelia was not the only one battling some sort of sickness in the girls’ ranks. Freshman Meryl Keeler possibly was fighting something all week long; whatever it was, it hit full manifestation that morning. She still managed to be the second Panther across the line even though she was way of her normal mark. Our next two girls ran their best races ever: junior Annabelle Palmer and senior Alexis Maniscalco ran P.R.’s by 8.2 and 9.8 seconds. We are confident that if they had such efforts on a “cosmic orange” course, they would have cracked the Top Ten All-time Panther list! Sophomore Morgan Stinchfield had ten reasons why she didn’t run a P.R. – 5 on each hand! The chill in the air nearly froze her fingers off, which probably cost her more than the 1.7 seconds from her all-time best time. Our scoring five was good enough for 11th place, which is better than most polls ranked us. It was also better than the Hawks from Hockinson, thus putting us back at the top of our League. Junior Brooklyn Bausch and senior Bekah Shilling battled either injury or being “under the weather” but still beat plenty of others in the race.

The boys’ battle with “whatever was going around” was much more global! Freshman Jonathan Wells woke up to a fever on Friday so he stayed back in Washougal longer than the rest as to stay away from the rest of the team and be on his own schedule. Next door neighbor junior Ian Palmer was also sneezing and appeared fuzzy headed throughout the trip. Despite running tough, their performances were far from their potential. Most of the rest of the team fell noticeably short of their best race of the season with the exception of juniors Koy Chaston and Warren Henderson! Koy broke his P.R. by 5 plus seconds and Warren was just 6 shy of his, as he passed other runners all the way through the race. Our two lead runners, juniors Troy Prince-Butterfield and Gabriel Dinnel were both 15 or so seconds off of last week’s performance. Gabriel (14th) walked away from the race with a medal in hand along with determination to come back with vengeance in 2018. Senior Tanner Lees was also just under 15 seconds off his lifetime best.

Due to the additional opponent of health issues, the Panther boys barely made the top ten in the team scoring, well below our expectations. However, all (except for Tanner) will be ready on November 3rd, 2018 to make history!

Coach Terry L. Howard

Here are the line scores:

Varsity Boys		1 Mile	2 Miles	5000 M
Gabriel	14^th	5:01.6	10:11.8	16:11.1
Troy	41^st	5:18.7	10:41.0	16:40.5
Tanner	83^rd	5:29.3	11:05.2	17:18.3
Jonathan	107^th	5:30.1	11:08.1	17:30.6
Koy	108^th	5:30.5	11:08.8	17:31.1	P.R.
Ian	109^th	5:29.7	11:08.5	17:30.2
Warren	127^th	5:36.9	11:24.8	17:46.4
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Varsity Girls
Amelia	3^rd	5:51.5	11:50.9	18:36.3
Meryl	68^th	6:24.2	13:09.0	20:39.4
Annabelle	117^th	6:41.3	13:43.6	21:33.8	P.R.
Alexis	123^rd	6:41.6	13.44.8	21:40.2	P.R.
Morgan	136^th	6:45.0	13:58.5	21:55.7
Brooklyn	148^th	6:43.0	13:59.0	22:22.8
Bekah	152^nd	6:52.2	14:22.2	22:48.0
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