For at least this weekend, Portland, Oregon, will be doing its best Eugene, Oregon, impersonation—only instead of dubbing itself Track Town, USA, Portland will likely lean into an equally alliterative Cross Country City, USA, moniker.

In addition to its annual NXN-hosting duties (more on that in a moment), Portland will also welcome the top senior harriers from across the land—with some prominent exceptions, sadly—for the USATF Cross Country Championships, which will serve as the selection event for January’s World Cross Country Championships, held in Tallahassee, Florida. The top six finishers in the men’s and women’s 10k races will be offered spots on the World team. There will be separate 2k races, with the top two men and top two women being given the chance to contest the 4 x 2k mixed relay in Florida as well. Fans can anticipate an exciting and likely muddy affair given the next few days’ drizzly forecast. The already mushy muck and mire is liable to get downright sloppy, given that the pro men and women will race after the NXN kiddos have already decimated the course.

On the men’s 10k race side of things, Graham Blanks, Wesley Kiptoo, Cooper Teare, Parker Wolfe, and Nico Young should probably be considered your headliners, but the beauty of cross country is that none of them are a lock to make the six-man squad for Tallahassee. A scan of the entries reveals plenty of other notable fellas—Drew Bosley, Paul Chelimo, Olin Hacker, Drew Hunter, Woody Kincaid, Bob Liking, Alex Maier, Dan Michalski, Ahmed Muhumed, Abdi Nur, Ethan Strand—who run the gamut from elite marathoner stepping down in distance, to elite miler stepping up, to wily veteran track aces, to pure grass specialists. This list is hardly exhaustive, and any of these dudes could wind up on the team, either via a top-six showing or a top-six finisher turning down their spot.

On the women’s side, we’ve got just as much up-top star power in Shelby Houlihan, Weini Kelati, Karissa Schweizer, and Parker Valby. Of these four, Valby’s got the most recent relevant cross country experience—on considerably firmer ground at the NCAA level—but has also raced just once since her return from a long injury lay-off, a solid but not spectacular showing at the Dash to the Finish Line 5k ahead of the NYC Marathon. We’re not inclined to count out Houlihan or Kelati, who have both been consistently performing well over the past calendar year. But again, nobody is a sure thing when the footing is this suspect, finishing kicks lack their sharp edges, and the tactics are so unpredictable. Keep an eye out for usual U.S. champ mainstays like Allie Buchalski, Van Constien, Grace Hartman, Emma Grace Hurley, Ednah Kurgat, Olivia Markezich, Allie Ostrander, and Katelyn Tuohy, as well.

Unlike the NCAA ranks, both men and women race 10 kilometers, rather than the much shorter 6km for the collegiate ladies. That’s great news for strength-based runners with road-racing creds like Kelati, Hurley, or Kurgat, but those last 4km creates a big unknown for the track specialists, particularly those with more of a middle-distance pedigree like Tuohy and Markezich. And at the other end of the spectrum, there’s even a 2km selection event for the relay at World XC—probably the first time in a while runners like Vince Ciattei, Craig Engels, Sage Hurta-Klecker, and Emily MacKay have even entertained the notion of setting spike to grass.

USATF is presumably combining its senior cross country championship with NXN in hopes of drumming up interest for the former via high school runners and their friends and family. It’s hard to imagine too many of the actual competitors will be lining the course, but NXN is a much physically bigger to-do than U.S. XC so ironically the more amateur event will likely increase views of the pro showcase.

CITIUS MAG’s Paul Hof-Mahoney and Jasmine Fehr have been chatting with many NXN favorites over the past few weeks, and they’ve got a wide range of backgrounds, interests, and things to say about their own personal hopes and the sport writ large (You can read the full interviews at the links below).

University of Colorado-bound Emma Hoffman, the Michigan state champion, has surprised herself with her increasingly bright performances during the postseason. She heads to Portland after a second-place showing at the NXR Midwest meet, where she expected a fifth-place finish at best. Hoffman offers this bit of advice to other athletes, which runners at every level can take to heart: “...have no regrets and give everything you have on the day. You’ll be happy if you can walk away and say you gave everything. No regrets like ‘I should have done this or that.’ Just push as hard as you can during the race and don’t focus on anything else.”

We got an interesting window into the sport via new eyes in Yohanes Van Meerten, the Arizona state champion and third-place finisher from NXR Southwest. Van Meerten has only been running seriously for about 18 months, and accordingly, has a very unique Mount Rushmore of elite runners he looks up to: “who got me into running was Quincy Wilson. I loved Usain Bolt, but Quincy Wilson was a big inspiration for me to go do all this running. With other pros, Jakob Ingebrigtsen is probably one of my favorite long guys and Edward Cheserek. I just found out about him and he’s becoming more of an inspiration…”

Coloradan NAU-commit Addy Ritzenhein already has one NXN individual title to her name… a name that’s likely very familiar to our readership as belonging to her father, Dathan, as well. Being a defending champ and the daughter of one of America’s most celebrated distance runners ever would make for a whole lot of pressure for most athletes, but Ritzenhein possesses a poise beyond her years, and seems to get great advice from her team and family, both big picture and tactical: “From my coach, it’s always to have fun on the line. That keeps running lighthearted. From my dad, a big piece of advice that helped me at NXN my sophomore year was: don’t fight the mud!”

These unique perspectives add to the fascinating juxtaposition of races. (For more, check out interviews with Maddie Gullickson, Jackson Spencer, and Caden Leonard.) Compared to the pro ranks, where there’s a certain uniformity to approach and mentality, high school stars present a more idiosyncratic range of outlooks. And no matter whether they’ve been logging steady 80-mile weeks for years or they just started running every day this summer, when the gun goes off, the rain-soaked playing field is at least metaphorically level.

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