Noonan looking to finish strong
Dana Hills High standout tabbed to win third section title after early-season struggles
It’s taken longer than he expected, but Evan Noonan of Dana Point’s Dana Hills High School believes he’s hitting his stride ahead of the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Southern Section Cross Country Championships on Saturday.
The senior was projected to be one of the top boys’ runners in the nation this season after he won the 3,200 meters in the CIF State Track and Field Championships in May and the two mile in the Nike Outdoor Nationals in June. However, Noonan finished 18th in the Woodbridge Cross Country Classic in Irvine on Sept. 21 and 10th in the Nike XC Town Twilight Invitational in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Oct. 5.
Noonan was not far off the lead in the latter stages of both races, but he slowed unexpectedly in each of them, barely making it to the finish line before collapsing to the ground. He initially viewed what happened in the Woodbridge meet as just a bad race, but after again struggling at the end of the Twilight Invitational, he figured something was amiss.
“I had my eyes set on first place because I had bridged the gap between myself and the leader,” Noonan recalled of the race in Indiana when he was making a late run at first-place Jack Bowen of the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “The whole time I was thinking, ‘This race is mine. Even though he’s got 15 meters on you, do what you do.’ And then I stepped in a small hole, and right after that things didn’t feel right.”
Noonan did a visual check of his foot and tried to pick up the pace, he said, “And then I kind of felt it all seize up. I’m breathing harder than I was 10 seconds ago. I can’t raise my knees high up, and I basically stiffened up during the last 250 meters of that race. I tried to get to the line, but that was one of the more difficult ones.”
A shortage of carbohydrates in his diet and a strict avoidance of sugar since his sophomore year appeared to have played major roles in Noonan’s struggles in Irvine and Terre Haute.
But he is on a two-race winning streak as he looks to win his third consecutive Division 3 title in the Southern Section finals at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut.
“I’m eating a lot more carbohydrates, especially than I was before, and I have more sugar in my diet,” Noonan said on Sunday after winning his qualifying heat in the section prelims on Saturday. “And things have gone well the past two races. Especially yesterday, I was feeling great. I know it was an easier race, but it felt so much better. There was no seizing up towards the end of the race. I think the change in diet has us heading in the right direction in terms of fixing the problem.”
Noonan, who has personal bests of 4:06.89 in the mile and 8:43.12 for 3,200 meters, played soccer from age 6 through eighth grade. However, his interest in the sport waned in 2020 when safety precautions put in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic limited the way he and his teammates could interact with one another during practice and games.
After taking a break from sports for several months, he started running in the summer of 2021 and became the No. 5 runner on a Dana Hills cross country team that finished seventh in the Division 3 race of the CIF State championships that year.
He ran 4:33.12 in the 1,600 and 9:52.50 in the 3,200 during his freshman track season before really blossoming as a sophomore.
First, he won Division 3 titles in the Southern Section and state championships in cross country and then he lowered his personal bests to 1:55.26 in the 800, 4:09.48 in the 1,600, and 8:49.38 in the 3,200.
The 8:49.38 clocking came in winning the Southern Section Masters Meet, but he finished third in 8:56.63 in the state championships a week later after he had crashed to the track on the fifth lap of the race after being inadvertently clipped from behind by a competitor.
Noonan had moved into fourth place before getting tripped, but he was out of the top 20 when he regained his footing with a little more than three and a half laps to go. However, he didn’t panic and try to make up all of his deficit in the next lap or two.
He had moved back into the top 20 with three laps to go and he eventually finished third after picking up six places during the seventh lap of the race and seven spots in the final 400 meters.
While Noonan was frustrated about placing third behind a pair of runners he had defeated in the Masters Meet, his parents view his reaction to the fall more positively.
His mom, Helena, said that “any type of quote-unquote failure is actually a phenomenal thing to happen at a young age, because then you deal with it very differently. So for me, one of the biggest moments in his short three years of running was when he got back up after falling and won third place. For me, that’s his best race ever.”
Noonan’s father, Shawn, who was a standout runner at Moreau Catholic High in northern California before running for UCLA for two years, called Evan’s third-place finish a “real breakthrough moment… As far as parents are concerned, this is what you want to see in your child. To get back up after that and go for it was just really impressive. We were very, very impressed with his effort.”
Noonan credited good genetics and “fixing imperfections that caused me to feel worse” when he was asked about his improvement as a sophomore.
“Physically working harder was definitely part of it,” he said. “But I learned about the importance of stretching and I started doing these challenges with my uncle where we cut sugar out of our diets.”
Noonan, who said he ate a lot of candy and consumed a lot of caffeine at that point in his life, was only able to go four days without sweets during his initial challenge. But he eventually made it to 30 days and kept going.
Looking back, Noonan said his uncle viewed the challenges as a psychological thing as much as physical one. They were about decreasing sugar in his diet. But they were also about having the mental discipline to go without something he liked.
Talking further, Noonan said an improved racing mentality was also key to his progress as a sophomore. As a freshman, he had often finished races with plenty of energy in reserve. But as a sophomore he got better at distributing the use of that energy over the course of a race.
In short, he got comfortable with being uncomfortable.
“A big thing I learned as a sophomore is this shouldn’t come easy,” he said. “It shouldn’t be easy finishing a 5k [cross country] race in the low 15s. None of that stuff is going to be easy… You just learn new things between your freshman and sophomore year. You’ve got two seasons under your belt between cross country and track, so it’s just more about learning to meet your effort and just getting better at racing in general.”
Noonan’s improvement continued as a junior as he won his second consecutive titles in the Division 3 races of the Southern Section and state cross country championships while leading Dana Hills to victory.
His winning time of 14:35.3 in the state meet was 29 seconds faster that he had run as a sophomore on the same 5,000-meter course at Woodward Park in Fresno. And though he finished a disappointing 45th in the Nike Cross Nationals meet in Portland, Oregon, a week later after falling three times on a rain-soaked course while wearing spikes that were too short, he lowered his personal bests to 1:54.18 in the 800, 4:06.89 in the mile, and 8:43.12 in the 3,200 during track season.
His 3,200 best came in winning the state title and his fastest mile occurred when he won the invitational boys’ section of the Mt. San Antonio College Relays. However, one of his fondest memories is from the Nike Outdoor Nationals meet in Eugene, Oregon, where he won the two mile in 8:52.41.
Noonan had been feeling a lot of self-induced pressure earlier in the day because he didn’t want his junior track season to end in the disappointment he felt after finishing 45th in the NXN meet. But he entered the race in a much more relaxed frame of mind after speaking by phone with Dana Hills boys’ coach Craig Dunn.
“He told me, ‘I don’t care what you run, don’t care how you do, no matter what place you get, I’m proud of you,’ ” Noonan recalled. “I was almost crying right there. It was really beautiful to hear that from him… Hearing that was just awesome, because I was able to forget about everything and just go out there and do my best, whatever that was. I think that that was one of the main reasons I ended up doing well, because the pressure was off.”
Dunn, who is in his second stint at Dana Hills after a highly-successful first run from 2000-2021, wrote in an email that Noonan “needs to not put so much pressure on himself. He’s a great runner and just needs to be himself.”
When asked specifically about their conversation before Evan’s race in the Nike Outdoor Nationals, he wrote that “It had been Evan’s longest season so far and I knew the work that he had put in. I felt that it was important for him to take a deep breath and enjoy the moment. He made the sacrifices, logged the miles, and stuck to the plan, now it was time to do what he does best and race with his heart.”
Noonan, who has taken two “great” recruiting trips to universities he chose not to identify, is coached by Dunn and his dad.
They have been working with him after Sandy Mesa coached him during his freshman and sophomore years.
While Shawn Noonan felt that Mesa, the activities director at Dana Hills, had done an “amazing” job with Evan, he had approached her after Evan’s sophomore year to ask if she could use some help. When she said absolutely, he started the process to become an assistant coach at the school. Not long after that, Dunn let him know that he would be replacing Mesa, and they agreed to collaborate as coaches.
Although Shawn and Helena work together as real estate agents, Shawn has an undergraduate degree in physiological sciences from UCLA and he was employed in the physical therapy field for many years before becoming a realtor.
That background made him well aware of the demands that elite high school distance runners put on their bodies, so when Evan ran out of gas at the end of the Woodbridge Classic, he and Helena took him to a local emergency room to get checked out.
Although tests run at that time showed no abnormalities, Shawn and Helena decided that a deeper dive was required after watching what happened in Terre Haute.
The final 400 meters of that five-kilometer race is a straightaway and Shawn recalls standing near the finish line and watching Evan in the distance.
“He was making a push on the kid who in the lead, and then all of a sudden, he wasn’t,” Shawn said. “I could see down the straightaway with about 150 or 200 meters to go, and I could see that he had fallen back. And then he got closer, about 50 meters out, and you could see he was just really, really starting to struggle. He was really having a hard time, and by the time he got close to the finish line, I didn’t think he was going to make it.”
Based on what happened, Shawn and Helena told Evan that he had to take some time off until they had a better idea about what was going on. While Evan wasn’t thrilled about being sidelined, he understood that it would have been irresponsible for his parents to let him continue to run.
“Initially, he was resistant to it,” Shawn said about the forced time off. “But he was also receptive to it, because he knows ultimately that his health is more important than any running performance. And so that was the stand we had to take as parents.”
Although further blood tests did not reveal anything glaring, a nutritionist felt that Evan wasn’t eating enough in general, and in particular, he needed to increase his intake of carbohydrates and not be so adamant about avoiding sugar. That it was okay for him to have syrup on his pancakes, something he had been avoiding.
“Sugar was an enemy for me and that seemed to work for a while,” Noonan said. “But I learned recently that towards the end of races, once you’ve burned all your fat, your body looks for your glucose reserves, and if you don’t have any sugar in there, your body can seize up.”
Armed with that knowledge, Noonan figures there were two times during his junior year when an inefficient amount of energy adversely affected his performance in high-profile meets.
The first came in the Bob Firman Invitational cross country meet in Boise, Idaho, when Noonan was nipped at the wire after holding what appeared to be an insurmountable lead with 200 meters left. The second occurred in the Brooks PR Invitational track and field meet in Renton, Washington, when he finished sixth in the mile in 4:07.15.
“I was winning by 50 or 60 meters with a 200 to go,” he said of the Firman meet, “and I took this hairpin turn, and after that I was literally running like seven-minute mile pace. My legs just wouldn’t move. I was fully exhausted and I was passed with about three meters left in the race.”
The runner who overtook Noonan was senior JoJo Jourdan of Olympus High in Salt Lake City.
Jourdan went on to win the Nike Cross Nationals title last December, but Noonan figured he had him beat late in the Firman race.
“Honestly, the first thought that went through my head was ‘I have stolen this race.’ Like I really had it in the bag,” Noonan recalled. “But then I couldn’t get my body to do anything to get it done. I was out for a really long time after the race. Not unconscious, but just sitting there with my eyes closed, and breathing slowly. After what’s happened this season, what happened then makes sense.”
Although Noonan did not run for nearly a week after the race in Terre Haute, Dunn is pleased with where he’s at and feels good about the way he has navigated this season.
Junior Oliver Hunter, the No. 2 runner on this year’s Dana Hills team and the 15th-place finisher in last year’s state meet, describes Noonan as someone who leads by example most of the time, but isn’t afraid to speak up if he feels his teammates are not doing things properly.
He also says Noonan is really funny, as well as hard working.
“He never really complains about anything,” Hunter said. “When we get a hard workout, you’ll hear complaining about the number of reps or the pace. I never hear him doing that. He always just gets it done. And he also never cuts corners when we’re running laps on the field. He always makes sure we stay on the outside.”
Noonan’s parents describe him as a great kid who is humble, smart, persistent and thoughtful.
Helena, a Brazilian native who was a volleyball player during her high school days in Rio de Janeiro, says that as a mom, there’s “nothing better than knowing that your son is an amazing athlete, as well as an amazing human being.”
She then talks about something that occurred at the hospital after the Woodbridge Classic. Evan asked who won the race that he had struggled to finish. And when Shawn told him the winner was senior Owen Powell of Mercer Island High in Washington, Evan said he was very happy for him.
“And we started crying, because at that moment, that is what every parent wants to hear,” Helena said. “That your child is a great human being.”
Outside of running, Noonan is a top-flight student who has recently taken up photography and enjoys playing golf. He is also quite skilled on the drums and performed with various bands at the House of Blues in Anaheim when he was 10 to 13 years of age and most of the other band members were high school seniors.
“It was really weird,” he said of that experience. “That’s when social media was getting crazy popular. The rest of the band all had cell phones, but I didn’t until I was 13. So while everyone else was on their phones in between sets, I would sit there in silence… Obviously when you’re 10, it’s hard to talk to kids who are much older than you, so I usually only spoke when spoken to and kind of kept to myself the rest of the time.”
When it comes to the section championships tomorrow, Noonan says he’s “just going there to win. And so whoever’s there, I just need to do my best to stick with them and compete.”
If he runs as well as expected, he will then have a chance to win his third consecutive Division 3 title when the state championships are held in Fresno on Nov. 30.
“In terms of state, I’m going to do my best to run as quick as possible because that’s a qualifying meet for NXN,” he said. “And then obviously, at NXN, it’s just give it everything I’ve got.”
Despite his setbacks earlier this season, Dunn wrote that Noonan is in good position to finish strong.
“Evan is on pace to do something special this season, workouts are spot on. The few days off didn’t set us back. We’ve adapted.”