EDMOND — Heading into the boys race of Wednesday’s Class 5A state cross country meet, Gage McElhaney and his coach had a plan.
Then again, there’s a saying about the best-laid plans.
Still, things went near-perfectly for the Elgin senior on Wednesday, and McElhaney knew it. And as he approached the finish line and reality began to set in, he did something he hadn’t done in the past 16 minutes.
He smiled, from ear to ear.
“Whenever I first crossed the line, I had a big smile on my face and remembered I had to start breathing again,” McElhaney said.
The smile was well-warranted as McElhaney ran the 5K race in 16:10, winning the first individual gold medal for cross country in the history of Elgin High School.
“It really didn’t hit me until I got out of the chute, and I fell over and laid down and thought, ‘I’m pretty sure I just finished first,’” McElhaney said. “Family members met me and they were bawling their eyes out, so that’s when it kind of set in that, yeah, we did it.”
Over the past few days, McElhaney and his coach, Jon Hughes, worked together on what the strategy would be. Having raced at meets against the likes of some of the state’s top runners like Piedmont’s Beckam Hartis and Guymon’s Mulubrehan Gebresilase, McElhaney not only felt fairly comfortable, but knew the other runners’ tendencies.
“We came into it, had a plan, but obviously, you can’t always depend on what runners are going to do around you,” McElhaney said. “It might sound cliche but it kind of went the way we planned it to.”
But McElhaney did his own film study, trying to draw inspiration from one of the best middle-long-distance runners of all time, Steve Prefontaine.
“I think a lot about Pre, I watched that movie (1997’s Prefontaine) probably 15 times this week,” McElhaney said. “Like (Prefontaine) said, I just wanted to turn it into a ‘pure-guts race’. If you’re gonna beat me, I’m gonna make sure you hurt doing it.”
Hughes said he believed something special was brewing when McElhaney was leading at the first mile marker. When McElhaney was still ahead of Hartis, Gebresilase and the rest of the field at the 2/3-point, the runner himself began to sense he was in good position.
“The 2-mile came around, we kind of took over, and I knew it would take someone really, really tough to get me,” McElhaney said. “There was a part of the course with about 1000 meters to go that had some trees and I was really trying to hug the trees and get out of sight of the other runners and play some psychological games, some mind games with them.”
Not only was he able to outlast the field, he was able to finish the race in 16:10, an Elgin school record. Even though he was an all-stater a year ago and considered a top-3 runner heading into the season, Gage still worked hard in the offseason to trim seconds off his time.
“I trained a lot this summer, put in a lot of miles this summer,” he said. “Me and Coach Hughes have talked about there’s a big difference between running a 16:20 and even a 16:30.”
Although he holds scholarship offers in both cross country and baseball, McElhaney still hasn’t decided which he’ll pursue in college — if either. He finishes as a 4-time state qualifier and 3-time all-stater. But winning an individual state title by four whole seconds will likely be his legacy.
“He’s just progressively gotten better each year,” Hughes said. “He’s really what you want to see as a male cross country runner, because they come in as freshmen and they haven’t really filled out yet, but as they grow, you hope they continue to improve and he did that.”
Improve he did, going from a top-25 finish as a freshman to top-10 finishes the past two years before putting it all together and winning it all as a senior.
And Hughes knows that McElhaney is a talent the likes of which he has rarely — if at all — seen in his 12 years of coaching, even if he hesitated to say it in front of his senior.
“He’s probably the best male as far as a complete package as far as all four years here at Elgin,” Hughes said.
The Owls finished 10th in the boys team standings, while Duncan finished 6th. Piedmont took first, followed by Tahlequah and Guymon.
In the girls race, Eisenhower’s Gennevieve Young finished 26th with a time of 21:06 in the 5K race, while Cayla Hoch finished 49th and MacArthur’s Kadiany Santana finished tied for 66th. Audrey McElhaney and Kendyl Marrero of Elgin finished tied for 41st.
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November 05, 2020 at 02:00PM
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Elgin's McElhaney wins state cross country on 'pure guts' - The Lawton Constitution
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