Black, Black, Black, Black, Black, Black. That is what color of courses that Nolan Johnson has ran on the past 6 weeks. He posted a time of 20:19.7 at Oregon City the second meet of the season; the past two meets, he ran Black Course P.R.'s that started to approach that time so we knew he was ready for a big P.R. when we hit an Orange Course. We were right. Nolan ran a P.R. of 1:10 on the Lewisville Park Orange Course; evidently he loves this color! His 13th place finish ranked him as the 7th freshman boy in the Future Varsity race. He completes the season as the 12th fastest freshman in our seven school league. Considering that he is our 3rd freshman, it's easy to project that Nolan will become one of the key runners on great Panther teams of the future.
We have a new definition for the word 'Impossible' around here: 'Pertaining to all accomplishments that Panther XC runners are capable of performing that all other XC teams believe can't be done.' Most other XC runners on other teams figure running a 3 minute P.R. is impossible. But our Laura Wagner must have believed it was possible for a Panther, because she did it. Well, she did have a bit of a challenge believing it for a few minutes after she did it... The Saturday before, she raced through significant pain at Warner Pacific. With blisters on her feet and a few tears wanting to stream from her eyes, she was very frustrated even though she ran a 38 second P.R. in 30:24.2. Today, she courageously ran 27:22 eclipsing her previous best by an 'Impossible' 3:02.