Approaching the race like the tortoise instead of the hare, Chesterton junior Ryan Nix keeps on moving up, all the way to 58th place out of 250 runners at the state cross country championship

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

The starter’s gun blasted at the Lavern Gibson Championship Cross Country Course in Terre Haute at noon local time Saturday and 16 minutes and 9.5 seconds later, Chesterton High School’s fall sports calendar was over, ending on an upswing.
That’s how long it took junior Ryan Nix to run 5,000 meters at the state meet, negotiating his way through crowded packs of Indiana’s best high school distance runners to finish 58th among 250.
Not too shabby for a runner who remembers finishing 18th in a dual meet with Thomas Jefferson Middle School just a few years and thousands of miles ago.
His final race of his breakthrough season followed his career curve pretty closely. One mile into it, Nix was in 133rd place, then 76th after two miles, and finally, 58th after 3.1 miles. This was not by accident. As with all his training and racing strategies, Nix formulated a plan based on discussions with coaches. He trusted them and then executed their suggested plan superbly.
Nix won the DAC and sectional individual and team championships, and was 15th at the regional, where the team placed sixth, one spot out of qualifying, so he ran alone. Three DAC runners placed ahead of him at the regional, just one at the state meet: Lake Central sophomore Lucca Neves (31st in 15:48.6). Nix finished ahead of Crown Point’s Jake Metzger (71st in 16:14.7) and LC’s Ben Perschon (84th, 16:21.6).
One mile into the race, Nix was fifth among DAC runners, trailing Crown Point’s Jackson Zona by 19 places. After two miles, he was fourth. Then, he picked off Metzger and Perschon and kept going.
“I had come up on them just before the final 400-meter straightaway and I went to go around them,” Nix said in a telephone interview after returning home. “I definitely had seen them throughout the race ahead of me and they were two targets for me to try to aim to go after. I was very conscious of where they were throughout the race. They are both incredible runners. Being able to go down state and gauge where I am was really cool. We had to represent the DAC.”
Columbus North won the team championship. At the front of the race, spectators were treated to a photo finish. Spring Valley junior Calvin Seitz ran a 15:01.22, Northridge’s Noah Bontrager a 15:01.24. Committed to compete at Notre Dame, Bontrager took home his second consecutive state runner-up finish and this time had the Mental Attitude Award to go with it.
Nix shared what he heard about how that duel played out: “They had to go to a photo replay because Bontrager sat on the kid’s hip the whole race, and then he goes to pass him and the kid goes into an all-out sprint. It came down to a lean at the line. It was crazy.”
Clearly, both runners were able to push their bodies to the max for more than three miles and still have enough to step on the gas, as did Chesterton’s lone runner in the race.
Adrenaline is such a powerful force in sports, but if allowed to run wild, it can amount to fool’s gold. Nix was mindful of that after discussions with head coach Tom Moeller and assistants Dylan Olson, Nathan O’Connor and Tim Ray.
“The coaches and I talked about how this race is notorious for going out super, super fast, and we talked about how a lot of people were going to fall off after the first K, so if I could be patient, I would be able to move up in the race,” Nix said.
To hammer home that point, one of the coaches referenced, “a few guys last year from the region who were in very similar situations, where they were in like 100th place after the mile and finished top 50, so they knew if I could do that, I could replicate that,” Nix said. “For me, it was very much looking at the next jersey ahead of me. OK, I have to get that person, then once I did that, OK, now I have to go get this person. It was very repetitive, doing that over and over again.”
Along the way, Nix noticed a couple of other runners clearly favoring the tortoise approach over the hare one and strangers became co-conspirators, moving up together.
“It was really, really crowded the first 2K, and then it started to thin out just slightly and it made it easier to pass, so a few of us started moving around people,” Nix said.
Competing at state for the first time gave Nix an understanding of why so many runners can’t resist the temptation to go out too fast.
“It’s the environment, the adrenaline behind that race,” he said. “Everyone knows that state is such a big race. Then you get there and there are hundreds of people at the start line and all the fans surrounding you. It’s so loud throughout every part of that race, it’s just pure adrenaline for the first K. It was pretty cool to be in that race.”
The only thing that would have made it more enjoyable, he said, would have been if teammates had run the race as well. Chesterton last qualified as a team in 2022, when the Trojans finished ninth in the state.
“We need to bring back going down as a team, for sure. I was just looking at some results. We have a chance to be No. 1 in the regional (in 2026), at least in my eyes,” Nix said. “I want our team to focus on that. We should make that our goal, starting now.”
First, he has earned some rest.
“I don’t know if I’ll necessarily take any days off, but I’ll probably do lighter mileage the rest of this week to let my body recover, and then I’ll go back to hitting it hard,” he said.
His definition of rest is different from most, which helps to explain why he went from 18th in a middle school dual meet to DAC and sectional champion, and 58th-place finisher in the state of Indiana.