Gilly Valdez seems to not even need his full effort to win state championships. He barely seems winded after most races.
He completed the trifecta by winning all three of the distance races — 800 meters, 1600 meters, and 3200 meters — while barely breaking a sweat.
During the 3200-meter run, the Peñasco senior has time to decide that his sunglasses are bothering him, find photographer and friend John Denne on the sideline, and toss them his way.
He even has time to plan strategy with a teammate halfway through the race, seeing that freshman Jude Martinez had more in the tank, and the other contenders were falling off the pace, and planning their move.
Valdez recounted yelling at his teammate on his shoulder, “Jude, we’re making a gap, and we’re getting away. If we just hold on this last mile, we’re golden.”
It was probably fewer words than that.
But the message was conveyed, and when the other contenders faded out, Valdez easily won the only race he had lost last year, and freshman Martinez glided into a second-place finish. Valdez said they had been training together for years, and it was a special moment for both.
“My goal this year was to sweep all the distance events,” Valdez said. “I’m very happy I got it done. I was really bummed last season.”
Escalante Runners Take Medals
The Escalante Lobos reached 11 podiums, placing in half of their events and seemingly most all track events.
“It was a great day for us, I’m ecstatic,” said Escalante coach Isaac Royston.
Though none of the Lobos took home a gold, the best finish came in the 4×400 meter relay, “the worst race ever,” senior Sherydan Salazar called it, and others agreed.
The team of Hannah Lopez, Felice Baca, Salazar and Reina Terrazas beat their best time from the season by nearly 20 seconds — it helped that this was perhaps their first meet of the year without some harmful weather pattern — to take the top time in the preliminaries (top contender Tularosa false started in the preliminary).
“Last year, these girls were the ones that brought me to state,” Baca said while emotional after the race. “They put their whole hearts into it. Second place right now, that’s all that matters.”
They basically matched their time in the final, running 4:28.56, and though the Rehoboth Christian team proved much too fast, a silver medal was a great consolation, especially for the two seniors in the final two legs in their last career athletic event.
“With the adrenaline of state and wanting to do good, the weather was also really good,” Terrazas said. “We all relied on each other.”
“We knew what was at stake,” Salazar said. “We all put our whole heart in it.”
The silver was Terrazas’s fourth medal of the day. She also took a fourth-place finish in the 100-meter dash, third in the 400-meter, and anchored the girls 4×100-meter team to third place. Lopez and Baca won fourth place in the 4×800-meter relay, missing third by .06 seconds.
“I had her since she was an eighth-grader, every year that she’s been here she’s medaled,” Royston said of Terrazas.
Junior Nate Martinez was the star of the boys team, winning three individual medals — fifth in the 100-meter dash, and bronze in both the 110-meter and 300-meter hurdles; though his time in the longer hurdles, a personal best, would have been over a second faster than anyone else in the state last year.
Martinez said he had been nervous all day since 4 a.m. for the 300-meter race, where he was the top seed from the regular season, imagining falling or other ways he might fall short.
The sight after the high hurdles race is Martinez with a group of finalists all seemingly at least six inches taller than him — something he first noticed at last year’s state meet but did not intimidate him.
“I have to make it up in speed and my form,” Martinez said. “Someone that’s 5-7 like me, that’s pretty short compared to other hurdlers, I have to work every single day in practice on my speed in between the hurdles and my form.”
Sophomore Luka Torrez won his own trio of medals with fourth place in the 400-meter dash and sixth in the high jump, and anchored the boys 4×400 team to sixth place.
Other Local Schools Brought Their Best
McCurdy’s best finish came in the girls 4×800-meter relay, where a young team improved on their season best by over 40 seconds to take fifth place with a time of 12:06 that would have placed third the year before. Casey Nevarez qualified for the finals in the 100-meter dash and finished eighth.
Their girls sprint medley relay team, with two freshmen and two juniors, were second in their preliminary heat, and initially finished fourth in the final after a fantastic finish from Aubrey Cordova making multiple passes and besting two runners at the finish line. But their team was disqualified for an out-of-zone pass, leaving the team devastated.
Mesa Vista’s Brandon Sandoval reached the finals in the boys javelin despite being the last qualifier, and finished eighth with a 124-foot-9-inch throw. Amarissa Quintana had a good chance in the girls 200-meter, but hyperextended on the final steps and pulled up shy of qualifying for the final.
With hardly any seniors active on the team, the Trojans will have a chance to come back for a stronger season next year.
“They see the competition that’s here,” said coach Tony Valdez. “A lot of these guys (at other schools), they run year-round. My advice is to run offseason, too.”
Dulce had multiple surprising finishes in the second-day afternoon portion. James Johnson threw a career-best 141 feet, 8 inches on his final javelin attempt, moving well up into second place. Less than an hour later, he was running the 400-meter leg of the medley relay, and handed off to Isaiah Reval who went from sixth to a third-place finish, nearly passing the runner in second place.
“After he realized what little things (Johnson) was doing wrong, because his shoulder was hurting at the time too,” said Dulce coach Dakota Petago. “You could see it in his face, everything was calm and collected. And he had an amazing throw for his last throw.”
It was the first time at state for nearly all of the Hawks after the 2020 track season was canceled and Dulce did not have a season in 2021.
Peñasco eighth-grader Rochelle Lopez had the big upset of the first day claiming gold in the 3200 meter run. She beat her seed time by nearly two minutes to top Josette Gurule from Academy for Technology and the Classics, who had been the cross country champion in the fall and later won first in both the 800-meter and 1600-meter races.