Cross country: Torkelson closes career on a strong note
Published 1:10 pm Saturday, November 5, 2016
NORTHFIELD — Peter Torkelson of GMLOKS didn’t have a lot left in him after his final high school cross country race, but he was satisfied with what he left on the course at the Minnesota Class A state cross country meet in St. Olaf Saturday.
Torkelson, who was running at state for the second time, finished All-State with a 18th place finish and a career-best time of 16:28.3. He finished the race in a dead sprint as he wanted to place as high as possible.
“It was a great race,” Torkelson said. “Every time I felt like I was going to stop, I just looked at the people in front of me and said ‘no, not yet.’ I didn’t have much left [down the stretch]. You don’t know you’ve run you’re best until you can’t move your legs.”
Pacelli senior Nathan Drees also wrapped up his high school cross country career with at state. Despite losing his shoe half way through the race, Drees was able to keep going strong and take 125th out of 176 runners with a time of 17:59.2.
“I just had to keep going because it would take more time to put it back on and I wanted to keep running the way I wanted to,” Drees said. “I’ve lost my shoe before, but there was a lot of gravel here and that made it a little harder.”
Drees couldn’t picture a better way to end his cross country career with the Shamrocks than by running at state.
“It was a privilege to race here. Not many people get to race here and I was glad to run here. It was a good way to end my cross country career at Pacelli,” he said.
Torkelson, who also ran at the Class A track and field meet last spring, is hoping to continue running at the college level.
“There’s a lot of great people in the cross country scene in high school and I”m thinking about doing it in college,” he said.
Blooming Prairie senior Alec Ille, who was running in his second state cross country meet, finished in 72nd place with a time of 17:24.9.