The Worlds were, in every imaginable way, a very different world for Laura Thweatt.
The 2007 Durango High School graduate competed in the World Cross Country Championships on Saturday, held halfway across the world in Guiyang, China.
The race featured most of the best cross-country runners in the world. Thweatt had earned her place in that field nearly six weeks earlier at the USA Cross Country Championships in Boulder, where she attended the University of Colorado and now calls home.
But this was her first world event, a world away from Colorado. And she was, admittedly, a bit out of her element.
“I was on the starting line with all these different countries. It was a different field,” said Thweatt, who finished a respectable 29th in the 83-runner women’s field Saturday. “Here (in the U.S.) you know the competitors. It’s familiar. That wasn’t familiar. It’s a completely different starting line. I let myself get more intimidated than I thought I would. It’s the big-time.”
Thweatt was the second American woman across the finish line – Sara Hall was 20th – and she finished the 5-mile race in 28 minutes, 49 seconds. That was just over a minute slower than her winning time at the U.S. Championships in February. But this was a course like no other she had ever seen.
Out of this world.
“The course was extremely challenging,” she said of the race site, a converted horse racing track in the heart of a mountainous area about 20 miles outside Guiyang. “It’s cross country through and through, which is good. It was so tough. But that’s what’s so great about cross country – you never know what you’ll get. It wasn’t a bad race. I’m not totally disappointed. One of my coaches at CU was there and she said ‘That’s like a B-minus for you.’
“What my coach wanted me to do was to go out and be aggressive,” Thweatt said of her strategy in the race. “I was all-out sprinting (at the beginning) and I was still in 38th. I wanted to put myself in the top 15 and settle in. But I didn’t ever get myself as far into the race as I hoped I would. I freaked out a little bit and settled in where I was. I was slowly able to make my way up, but it wasn’t where I was hoping to finish. It’s not what I went there to do. I was hoping for a higher finish and a little different race. But on that day, I gave it everything I had.”
Agnes Tirop of Kenya was the women’s winner, finishing in 26:01, and a Kenyan also won the men’s title, while Ethiopia won both the men’s and women’s team titles. In all, 51 countries were represented.
“It’s an experience I’ll never forget, and I learned a lot from it. I can take that away from it,” Thweatt said from Boulder on Thursday; she returned from China on Monday. “It was my first time competing at the world level. It’s a completely different level.
“To be able to stand on that starting line ... To make it there was huge. I just hope that next time I’m a little more competitive.”
After getting back from China, Thweatt won’t have much of a turnaround before competing in the prestigious Mt. Sac Relays and Payton Jordan Invitational, April 16-18 and May 2, respectively, in California as she works to earn a return trip to Worlds. But after her China experience, those trips should be a breeze.
“Travel was grueling,” she said of the China trip. “It’s definitely a long haul – it’s pretty much on the opposite end of the world. It was definitely brutal. But I don’t think it affected me too much. Coming back, I was exhausted. I was fine in China. But when you get home, it catches up to you.”
bpeterson@durangoherald.com
