Leo Young wins Under-20 national cross country title, books ticket to Australia

Throughout his final high school season, Leo Young had one eye on Australia.

But as he broke the tape and booked his ticket Saturday, the Newbury Park High senior thought to himself, “Did I just do that?”

Competing against a field of elite high school and collegiate opposition and running the 8,000-meter distance for the first time, the 17-year-old runner came from behind to win the USA Under-20 Cross Country Championships on Saturday at Pole Green Park in Richmond, Virginia.

“It’s really incredible,” Young said. “It was kind of poetic how things went.”

Young’s win in 23 minutes, 47.0 seconds earns him a place on the six-runner United States team for the World Athletics Cross Country Championship next month in Bathurst, Australia.

“A lot of it came down to the very end,” Young said. “This time, I played my cards right. I was able to make a move and get myself ahead. ... It’s super special.”

That the performance came six weeks after a front-running Young lost the lead at Nike Cross Nationals in Portland, Oregon, with only 400 meters to run made it even better.

“Things didn’t necessarily go how we wanted (in Portland),” Young said. “But I was able to take that and really learn from it.

“Usually when you finished your cross (country) season, you now have track and you won’t apply the lessons learned until next year. With this, I was able to apply what I learned almost immediately. … It was a great example of learning from your mistakes.”

Teammates Lex Young and Brayden Seymour were 12th (24:26) and 19th (24:57), respectively.

Cole Mathison, the Carmel, Indiana, senior who won the Champs Sports national high school championship in San Diego last month, finished seventh in 24:12.0.

Leo Young said his twin brother Lex’s training recently had been hampered by an injury which caused him to nearly pull out of the race.

The top 10 also included runners from the University of Wisconsin, Villanova, the University of Washington, the Air Force Academy, and the University of Michigan.

“I think it’s a great piece of experience going into college,” said Leo Young, the Stanford University commit. “Running an 8K today and running it with a bunch of college freshmen, is going to really help when I get to college and I’m around guys who are 25 years old.”

Irene Riggs of Morgantown, West Virginia, the Young brothers’ future teammate at Stanford, won the 6K Under-20 women’s championship. She also won Nike Cross Nationals in Portland last month.

Young had no complaints about the course at Pole Green Park.

“The course was incredible,” Young said. “It was a 2K loop that was largely flat, had some hills and some turns. Any sort of feature was mellow. The surface was really compact. The only adversity to overcome was the wind.”

Young didn’t quite know how to approach his first 8K.

With six weeks to work with, he expanded his training over the holiday break, which included a handful of 14-mile runs.

“We had to take a little different approach,” Young said. “I didn’t know how my body was going to react to an 8K.”

During the race, he found himself asking himself what his older brother Nico — who has helped Northern Arizona University win the last two NCAA Division I men’s cross country championships — would do.

He decided to just try and stay within touch of the leaders, which — at different points of the race — were Georgetown’s Luke Ondracek, University of Washington’s Jamar Distel, Mathison, University of Washington’s Evan Jenkins, and Villanova’s Marco Langon.

“I was awfully conservative,” Young said. “I never even touched the lead until the end. … When it was time to push, I was really able to push.”

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Newbury Park senior Leo Young wins U20 national cross country title