Lesher shooting for another breakout race
Hueneme High senior enters Nike Cross Nationals after upset win in state champs
A 27th-place finish in an early-season invitational does not typically portend a win in the state title meet 10 weeks later. But J.R. Lesher of Hueneme High School in Oxnard, California, will enter today’s Nike Cross Nationals in Portland, Oregon, fresh off an upset victory in the boys’ Division 2 race of the California Interscholastic Federation State Cross Country Championships.
The girls’ race at Glendoveer Golf Course will start at 1:05 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, followed by the boys’ contest at 2:35.
“He needed to throw himself out there and run with the leaders,” Hueneme coach Doug Petree said about Lesher’s strategy in the state meet at Woodward Park in Fresno. “The way I phrased it, it’s like cliff jumping into the water. Everyone’s scared to jump off at first. But once you do it, it’s not that hard.”
Petree could have played things safe at the state meet and had Lesher go out more conservatively for the first mile or two of the race. But in an effort to truly challenge his charge, he encouraged him to run with co-favorites Griffin Kushen of Tesoro in Las Flores and Trey Caldwell of De La Salle in Concord from the outset.
“I just wanted those really fast guys to pull me to a fast time and a decent place,” Lesher said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “My goal was to stick with them for as long as I could. I’d raced pretty much all of them before and they’d beaten me by different margins, some of them pretty large. I just really wanted them to pull me to a fast time… And then it turned out I just had a lot more at the end than I thought I would.”
Lesher had finished 18 seconds behind first-place Kushen when he placed third in the Southern Section championships a week before the state meet. However, he was only 15-20 meters behind Kushen after he had overtaken Caldwell with 400 meters left in the five-kilometer race last Saturday.
Although he soon began to make up ground on Kushen, Lesher admitted that he still thought his rival might still spurt away from him if Lesher pulled alongside of him. But when that did not happen with 100 meters left, Lesher kept driving to the finish line and he opened up a gap over Kushen with about 50 meters to go.
His winning time of 14 minutes 43.0 seconds crushed the 15:01.1 clocking he had run over the same Woodward Park course when he finished 10th in the Clovis Invitational on Oct. 12. It also left him 1.6 seconds ahead of Kushen, who ran 14:44.6, and nearly seven seconds in front of Caldwell, who finished in 14:49.8.
“It was just surreal,” Lesher said when asked how he felt after his victory. “It meant so much to me. It was like, ‘Did I really just do that?’ ”
While Petree had not expected Lesher to win the race when it started, he said the victory was the result of his charge’s desire to constantly absorb knowledge about different aspects of running.
“He’s always trying to learn more about how to race better and how to train better, and that’s been the biggest thing that surprised me about him, especially during this cross country season,” Petree said. “He has been applying every lesson he’s learned from every race or workout to the next race or workout, and that enabled him to move up from being one of the better runners in the section to being the state champion.”
Lesher, whose dad, Bryan, is a construction mechanic in the Navy, was born in Virginia. But the senior had lived most of his life in Missouri until two summers ago when his family, which also includes his mom, Angela, and his younger sister, Aurora, moved to California because Bryan had been deployed to the Naval Construction Battalion Center Port Hueneme.
Petree, who is in his fourth year as the cross country coach at Hueneme, first learned about Lesher when he received an email from him in which he introduced himself to his future coach after having run for Centralia High School in Missouri as a freshman and a sophomore.
The email did not go into details about Lesher’s personal bests, but it didn’t take long for Petree to realize that he had a talented transfer on his hands.
The first clues came when he learned that Lesher had run 4:23.17 in the 1,600 meters and 9:40.25 in the 3,200 during his sophomore track season when he placed seventh in the former event and eighth in the latter in the Class 3 races of the Missouri State High School Activities Association Track and Field Championships.
One of the next indicators occurred when Petree said Lesher averaged in the “low six-minute [per mile] pace’’ on a 14-mile training run.
“You just don’t see a lot of high school runners run that fast for that long a distance,” Petree said. “Particularly when they’re not seniors. They typically don’t have that kind of endurance yet.”
Nonetheless, it took a while for Lesher to adjust to his new surroundings. As he admits, he wasn’t thrilled about moving away from Missouri.
“I had a lot of friends there,” he said of Centralia. “Our cross country team was really young, but we had already finished seventh in state… I wasn’t really sure how the new team would be, how the new coach would be.”
Sensing Lesher’s concerns, Petree tried to make him as comfortable as possible around his new teammates and he said they were very receptive to him joining the program.
He also took it upon himself to fill Lesher in on the difference between high school running in Missouri and California.
“Especially in cross country, the courses here were much different from the courses in Missouri, and the quality of competition was much higher in California,” he said. “So I made it my job to get him up to speed in a lot of ways… How to approach races and how to train and he was eager to learn all that. It took a while to get his wheels under him, but his first year was really successful. It really laid the groundwork for this season.”
After finishing fifth in the Division 2 race of the Southern Section championships last year, Lesher placed 29th in the state meet.
He then lowered his personal bests to 4:15.54 in the 1,600 and 9:09.43 in the 3,200 during track season, and placed seventh in the 3,200 in the Southern Section Division 1 final.
Those times were markedly better than what he ran as a sophomore, but they were not a surprise to Lesher.
“I hadn’t really focused into training until the winter of my sophomore year,” he said. “But I knew that if I had a really full, consistent year of training, I was going to run pretty fast.”
Although Lesher’s 27th-place finish in the sweepstakes race of the Woodbridge Cross Country Classic at the Great Park in Irvine on Sept. 21 was not particularly noteworthy, Petree said it was a valuable learning experience.
“I encouraged him to get out hard in the race and see what he could do,” Petree said. “He came through two miles in 9:15, which was nearly as fast as his best time on the track in that event. He ran out of steam in the final mile and died a bit. But I was proud of him for putting himself out there.”
In order to help Lesher get stronger during the final mile of his races, Petree began to have him work on increasing his endurance strength by incorporating more longer tempo runs into his training. And after finishing 10th in the championship race of the Clovis Invitational on Oct. 12, Lesher won the Ventura County title at Lake Casitas in Ojai a week later with a time of 14:48 that tied the three-mile course record set by Anthony Fast Horse of Ventura last year.
Fast Horse, who is now at the University of Oregon, had high school bests of 4:06.18 in the mile and 8:45.39 for 3,200 meters on the track. He also ran 14:32.5 over the 5,000-meter course at Woodward Park.
“In hindsight, his race in the country championships should have told me he had a shot at winning state,” Petree said about Lesher. “Fast Horse is a very talented runner.”
For his part, Lesher said he “started off the season racing the top talent and then just getting better all the way up to the state championships. That certainly surprised me. I definitely wasn’t expecting to be anywhere near the number one spot.”
But now that he’s a state champion, he and his coach have some lofty ambitions when it comes to today’s race over the 5,000-meter layout at Glendoveer Golf Course.
“He needs to throw himself up there pretty high, maybe in the top 20 or 25,” Petree said, “and then see how the race plays out.”
Lesher said he would love to earn all-American honors with a top-20 finish.
“Once again, I want to stick with the top pack, pretty much what I did at state,” he said. “Don’t go out crazy hard with those guys that are going to go super fast. But just get myself in position and put myself to be in the mix with some of those top runners and have a chance at being an all-American.”
Other runners to watch: J.R. Lesher of Hueneme High School in Oxnard is one of four runners from the Southern Section who advanced as individuals to the boys’ race of today’s Nike Cross Nationals based on their performances in the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) State championships last week.
The others are seniors Eyan Turk of Woodcrest Christian in Riverside, Evan Noonan of Dana Hills in Dana Point, and Griffin Kushen of Tesoro in Las Flores.
Turk ran 14:32.5 in winning his second consecutive Division 5 title in the state meet.
Noonan clocked 14:43.7 in winning his third Division 3 championship in a row and Kushen ran 14:44.6 while finishing second behind Lesher in the Division 2 race.
On the team side of things, Glendora will be one of 22 squads competing in the boys’ race after earning an at-large berth via its second-place finish behind Jesuit of Carmichael in the Division 2 race of the state meet.
When it comes to top-30 national rankings compiled by dyestat.com, Turk is 10th among individuals, followed by Lesher at 29th and Noonan at 30th. Glendora is the No. 30-ranked team.
The Southern Section runners scheduled to compete as individuals in the girls’ race are seniors Sadie Engelhardt of Ventura, Rylee Blade of Santiago in Corona, and Abigail Errington of South Pasadena, as well as junior Braelyn Combe of Santiago.
Engelhardt, Blade, and Errington are the second-, third-, and 18th-ranked runners in the nation.
Blade won her second consecutive Division 1 title in the state meet when she ran 16:46.5 and Combe finished third in that race with a time of 17:07.6.
Engelhardt won her third consecutive Division 2 championship when she clocked 16:57.6 and Errington won her first Division 3 title when she ran 16:57.5.
When it comes to the girls’ team race, Trabuco Hills of Mission Viejo is the No. 3-ranked squad in the nation and JSerra of San Juan Capistrano is 18th.
Trabuco Hills won its first Division 1 title in the state meet when senior Holly Barker and junior Millie Bayles finished second and fourth, respectively, with times of 16:58.9 and 17:22.2.
JSerra won its fourth consecutive Division 4 title — and seventh overall — in the state meet when junior Chloe Elbaz and senior Sophie Polay placed second and third, respectively, in times of 17:33.7 and 17:49.4.
While Noonan and Blade are making their third consecutive appearances in today’s meet, Barker is the one returning all-American among the Southern Section entrants as she placed 12th last year.
A livestream of the meet, which will be shown for free on runnerspace.com, will start at noon, Eastern Standard Time. The girls’ race will begin at 1:05 p.m., followed by the boys’ at 2:35.