Tanis Baldwin beat the course and the conditions at the NCHSAA state meet to run nearly 3% better than anyone else.
Earlier this year, I began a series on "athletic transcendence" inspired by the performances of Trentavis Friday. The central premise of that series was that North Carolina's most dominant athletes had a difference of roughly 3% or more between them and the rest of the elite athletes in the state's All Time Top 25. This is the continuation of that series, and it focuses on individual cross country performances. This idea suddenly became much more relevant over the last two weekends with two outstanding performances by North Carolina runners. First, Tanis Baldwin (East Henderson) ran 15:25 at the NCHSAA State Meet, on a day when the next-best time was 15:50 - a difference of 2.7 percent. That surely proves that Baldwin transcended the course and the conditions that day! This weekend, of course, Ryen Frazier (Ravenscroft) ran 16:44.27 at WakeMed, the first time a North Carolina high school girl has run under 17 minutes (more below on that performance).
When you look at track events, you can compare current performances to those that came before because the events are standardized - same distances, same weights, etc. Cross country is a different animal, though, because of the different difficulty levels associated with the courses. You can't really declare a state record or record an all-time top 25 like you can with track, because races on different courses are not really comparable (not to mention such variables as weather and mud). Let's also start this article with an admission: the 3% rule doesn't work in cross country, because the times are too large. 3% of 15 minutes is 27 seconds, so a male athlete would have to break a course record by that amount to qualify for transcendence under the same standard that we have applied to sprinters and field-events athletes (a female would have to make an even greater leap). That might happen when a course is very young and there happens to be a historically great runner in the state, but that won't happen on an established course with a long history. In fact, I could only find one North Carolina performance in McAlpine's history that even approached a 3% improvement over all previous competitors. Nonetheless, the history (as recorded by NCPrepTrack) does reveal runners that lowered the course records significantly enough to be worthy of mention. So, what follows is a list of runners whose performances, at the time they were run, were transcendent in comparison to all previous performances on that course.
NOTE: the primary purpose of this article is to examine North Carolina athletes, although I did make note of some major out-of-state performances. Most of the state's courses are either too young to have a significant history, have had too few races to accumulate enough of a sample size, or have changed too many times for fair comparisons. Also, all times were researched through the excellent all-time course listings on NCPrepTrack.com (scroll down and look for the cross country section on the left).