Challenger

Stress, anticipation and nerves were riding on a steep roller coaster at the annual Regional cross-country meet, held at Logan County High School. This meet was the ultimate decision to prove who had what it took to make it to the state meet, a prestigous honor to run in. The best runners in the Class AAA region competed against one another for a spot to race on the state meet starting line, so this race wasn’t any easygoing weekend run. The race had been tormenting the minds of every runner, and each runner on both the girls’ and boys’ teams had been working all season and getting in top shape for this moment of the season, especially those seniors on both teams knowing it was their last chance to compete in a high school regional meet.

To reach the state meet, the school’s team as a whole has to place in the top four in the region. The top seven individuals in the regional meet who’s teams failed to qualify for state were also selected as individual runners. For the boy’s team, Senior Mitch Sharber and Freshman Chris Stodghill ran extremely well at Regionals to qualify for the state meet individually. Sharber led the team with a 16th place finish (17:38) while Stodghill ran close behind with 21st place (17:49).

On the girl’s team, Seniors Christina Stodghill and Beth Ewing ran impressively to finish 17th and 19th, in a field of 76 of the fastest runners in the region. Stodghill finished with a tme of 21:35 and Ewing ran in 21:45.

All four qualifiers left school early on Friday November 12th to head to the prestigous state meet, held at Lexington Kentucky’s Horse Park. The runners arrived at Lexington in time to have a warm-up run on the course the day before the race in order to get a “feel” of the terrain and to mentally prepare for the next day’s race. This is all necessary in order to run well the next morning.

Although the usually dusty and powdery dirt of the trail had been rained on to cause a muddy turmoil for the runners, this obstacle just gave the runners incentive to race stronger and harder than they themselves believed they could have before.

“The course was really muddy at State, which made it alot harder to run on and slowed your time down a little bit. But it was okay because it made you run harder to get through it ,” said senior Mitch Sharber of th e difficulty at the state meet.

Stodghill finished with a time of 18:01. He placed 79th among the treaturous and intimidating status of the much older and more experienced runners there.

Christina Stodghill led the E-gals at State, placing 79th overall with a time of 21:39 while Ewing placed 85th and ran 21:48 for the day. Both runners agreed that with it being their senior year, they wanted to give it all they had.

Ewing and Stodghill plan on running indoor track during the winter . The indoor season begins in late December and evolves into the early part of outdoor track in March.

harber, a talented swimmer as well as runner, is already deep into his seventh year of swimteam. Chris Stodghill is also planning on running indoor track. These four individuals are all very close friends and realize what an amazing accomplishment it is to ever get the chance to compete in a state cross-country meet.