Burton winning the 800m at the Region championships
Ah the joy and agony of the 800. It's such an amazing race when you get it right, but can have such disastrous consequences if you time it wrong. But what always impresses me this time of year is the PR's that some of the best 800m runners are able to put up at the region, sectional, and state meets. Sometimes those PR's seem to all drop like crazy. Now it's clearly a race that is at least somewhat a product of the circumstances and you can often throw out the MileSplit time rankings when trying to make predictions of who will win. Packed 800's produce PR's while solo efforts hardly ever do. But also, there are ALWAYS surprises with the 800 in these rounds. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad.
Northview got a good surprise when their freshman finished the 800m at the 2022 Region 5-AAAAA Championships. Ok, calling her a surprise winner is a little unfair as she had the 2nd fastest time coming into the meet and she had also previously qualified for the sectional meet with a new PR in the 1600. Gabriella Burton was competing in her first ever track region championship and she did not win her prelim heat. But the freshman ran the race like a seasoned pro. She opened strong but patient and started moving up on the 2nd lap before pulling away from everybody and outkicking her opponent for the win on the home stretch. That's about as perfect of an 800 as you can run and it was a four second PR as a result.
She'd already experienced some success, but she's clearly still finding her way. In cross country she started out in the mid 20's before working her way down to a PR of 20:55 at the Darlington XC festival. Then she placed 15th at the region meet to help her team qualify and went on to place 42nd at the state meet. It was definitely a solid season for a freshman, but nothing that would definitively indicate she would be a future region champion.
She opened up this track season with very solid times of 5:41 and 2:38 at the Northview time trials, showing she might have a little more speed than a typical sub 21:00 cross country runner. She worked those times down over the next month to go into spring break with PR's of 5:22 and 2:28, setting herself up for a shot to qualify for state in both events. And that's exactly what she did placing 3rd in the region in a 5 second PR of 5:17 and then running a PR in the region prelims of 2:27 to qualify for finals despite finishing 2nd in her heat. But she saved the best for last capturing the region championship in a brand new 4 second PR of 2:23 as she moves on the sectionals leaving us all wondering: just how low can she go?
