At the conclusion of the NCAA cross country season, we tapped CITIUS MAG throws correspondent Paul Hof-Mahoney (a.k.a. Paulie Throws) to write a reflective piece on his first time keeping up with collegiate cross country. Given that our readership skews heavily distance-focused, we felt it would be interesting to hear an “outside” perspective on a sport so many of us have been intimately familiar with since high school, if not earlier.

This spring, we decided to flip the script, sending distance runner and burgeoning throws fan Audrey Allen to pack her bags, venture from sunny Southern California to windy rural Oklahoma, and provide us with a scene report on a place that has quickly become the center of the throwing universe. With Paulie Throws as her guide, Audrey was quickly immersed in the sights, sounds, and world record-setting atmosphere of Ramona, Oklahoma’s Millican Field. These are her findings:

As the plane lifted off from LAX en route to Tulsa my mind began to race with images of the chaos inherent to covering a track meet: trying to snag photos or get interviews of multiple athletes… when there’s at least three events going on at once… some of which take just 10 seconds and change, and every event is stacked with names.

Then I remembered that the four-day competition I was heading to was limited to the discus, hammer, javelin, and shot put. Things would look a bit different. The format is more “one athlete at a time, one flight at a time.” And in most cases there would be about two events a day, with pauses between throws and six tries to get the right shot.

The only chaos I was anticipating would come from the wind. But at Ramona, the wind is kind of the point. If a typical track meet and the typical track athlete—can be described as frenzied, a throws-only affair— most throwers and throwing events, based on my own experience covering and participating in the sport, should be decidedly more chill.

These suspicions were confirmed regularly throughout the 2025 Oklahoma Throws Series World Invitational. It wasn’t ever verbalized, but just from witnessing these athletes’ auras, I think it was felt on their side, too.

The chillness was there in the nonchalant way Mykolas Alekna threw something in warmups in excess of 70m (despite clipping the net). It was there when he then proceeded to reset his own world record a day before its first birthday with a 74.89m throw to kick off his series, and only gave the camera a “thumbs up” upon seeing the measurement populate the result screen. It was there when all Matty Denny could do was celebrate alongside Alekna after his 74.78m fifth round throw, which would have been the world record had it come before his rival’s historic mark. And even when the Lithuanian thrower and redshirt-junior at Cal sealed the deal with a 75.56m “toss” that was just a hair away from the right sector line, he made it look… well… chill. 

Maybe it’s because it’s hard to get too animated about any one throw when there are so many incredible tosses flying all over the place. If you got caught up in the two history makers up top, you missed a lot of insane results farther down the list. Sam Mattis inched centimetered his way closer to the American record with a 71.27m mark and Lawrence Okoye, Clemens Prüfer, and Mika Sosna all eclipsed the 70m line for the first times in their careers.

The women’s discus competition on Saturday was the best American history, as four of the five best throwers in national history—Val Allman (73.52m, AR), Lagi Tausaga-Collins (70.72m, 2nd all-time), Jayden Ulrich (69.39m, 3rd all-time), and Veronica Fraley (68.72m, 5th all-time)—set new PBs. The competition went by fast, but it didn’t feel rushed. The expectations were high, but the pressure felt low. The head-to-head battles were present, but rather than in-your-face competitiveness, the athletes embraced one another with an unmistakable degree of camaraderie. Again: exceptional chill in the face of history-making performance.