Matt Withrow called on something he hadn’t used in more than a year to win the Foot Locker Cross-Country National Championships on Saturday and stamp himself as one of the best distance runners in Illinois high school history.
Withrow, a senior at Andrew and the Tribune’s November Athlete of the Month, had to use his kick to overtake favorites Galen Rupp of Oregon and Shadrack Kiptoo, a Kenyan who moved to New Mexico a year ago, in the final 300 yards at Balboa Park’s Morley Field.
Withrow’s winning time was 14 minutes 55 seconds on the 5,000-meter course.
“I tried to make my midrace push like I normally do, I even delayed it a little bit,” he said. “But then they all caught up with me again.”
The victory caps an outstanding season for Withrow, who hasn’t made his college choice but lists several Big Ten schools among the possibilities. He won every invitational he entered–his closest winning margin before Saturday was 13 seconds when he won the Class AA title at the state finals in Peoria.
He also had the nation’s best 3-mile high school time, 14:14, for the season.
“I’ve seen a lot of great runners, and he ranks up there with the very best,” York’s legendary coach Joe Newton said recently.
As he has done all year, Withrow surged just past the 2-mile mark Saturday, taking the lead and maintaining it for about 400 meters as the pack approached the course’s most challenging portion, several rolling hills that lead to a 310-meter incline.
But for the first time all season the rest of the runners caught and overtook him.
“The little hills took everything out of my legs,” Withrow said. “I was kind of getting down on myself at the top [of the incline], thinking it was over.
“But I was able to regroup and say `All right, I know I have a better kick than anybody, I haven’t used it all year, but I know I have one,’ and it was there thankfully.”
Withrow, who had fallen back to fourth place with less than 800 meters remaining first passed Joshua McDougal of Peru, N.Y., then overtook Rupp at the next turn. Only Kiptoo remained.
“I looked at Shadrack, Shadrack looked back at me, I looked in his eyes and I knew I had him,” Withrow said.
Kiptoo (14:58) was nosed out at the finish for second by Rupp (14:57).
“This is the first race all season where [Withrow] wasn’t by himself for the last half of the race,” Andrew cross-country coach Joe Mortimer said.
“I couldn’t fathom this, I couldn’t bring it down to a level that I could understand,” Withrow said about the victory. “It’s something I’ve definitely been working on for three years. I knew I could do it.”
