Daily Journal Athlete of the Week: Menlo’s Landon Pretre

Pretre didn’t finish in the top 10 — the Menlo School junior settled for 25th place — but he still made history. With a personal record 8 minutes, 48.11 seconds, the Daily Journal Athlete of the Week broke the all-time CCS record in the 3,200, eclipsing the mark of 8:48.74 set by Bellarmine’s Nolan Topper in 2021.

“The joke was … ‘Man, I finished 25th, but I’m so happy right now,’” Menlo head coach Jorge Chen said.

The scary part is, Pretre might just be getting warmed up. After missing the end of cross-country season in the fall due to a hip injury, Saturday was just his third competitive 3,200 race since returning to action. His first serious race two weeks previous, March 23, at the Azusa Meet of Champions was also among the all-time great CCS performances. His third-place finish of 8:53.37 marked the fifth-best time in section history.

So, as happy as Pretre was with his CCS-best run in Arcadia, he was also happy to be running pain free for the first time in over a year.

“It hurts your confidence a lot that the people you’re going against, pretty much all of them haven’t gone through something like that,” Pretre said. “So, it’s a little bit of a confidence hinderance. But I think doing a few races … I think running a good race a couple weeks ago gave me a lot of confidence going into it.”

Pretre isn’t in a position where he can afford a lot of downtime.

Four years of varsity athletics tends to breeze by, especially when you run as fast as the Pretre clan can. His older brother Justin — a Menlo graduate in 2023 who now runs at Cal — held the 72nd best CCS mark in the 3,200 at the start of this season. Their older sister, Kyra — now a senior at Yale — currently holds the 67th best CCS time ever in the girls’ 1,600.

The youngest Pretre, though, happens to be a part of an extraordinary CCS junior class. Of the top 10 times recorded in the 3,200 in CCS this season, seven are held by juniors, including Santa Cruz’s Eli Kitchen-Young (third best, 8:57.29); Crystal’s Benjamin Bouie (fourth, 9:02.82); and Sacred Heart Cathedral’s Miles Cook (seventh, 9:17.45).

“I know whatever meet I go to, there’s going to be someone who’s on my level,” Pretre said. “It’s a blessing and curse … but I’m super happy because it pushes me and keeps me honest.

“I know if I want to keep the record, I’m going to have to keep on working,” he said. “Because there’s a lot of guys gunning … all these guys who are super fast.”

Even with the depth of competition — and a friendly competition at that, as many in CCS junior class have grown up running together — Pretre certainly isn’t acting like he’s hearing footsteps.

Prior to Saturday’s Invitational race, he was as loose as could be, Chen said.

“He was shaking and dancing around,” Chen said. “I knew he was ready to go. He was just so relaxed ... but in kind of a comical way.”

Pretre got a good jump at the gun. The strategy was sound, getting out of the cluster of runners jockeying for position in order to not get snakebit by any sudden tangles or arms or legs. Once he settled into the race, though, Pretre was content to fall back as he found the tempo he’d been working toward the previous two weeks.

At the Azusa Meet of Champions, Pretre was averaging 67 seconds per lap. The goal in Arcadia was 66 per lap, a number he hit like clockwork. At the midway mark of the race, his 1,600 split was 4:26.59.

“Which is the fastest that I’ve ever gone before, but I was dead last,” Pretre said. “But I knew that I was doing good. ... I was just sitting in the back of the pack watching all that happen.”

Typically, distance runners on the verge of an extraordinary performance save their best split for the bell lap. This Pretre did, and how, running the final lap in 1:01.06, over five seconds better than any of the previous seven laps. Those five seconds were the difference between his previous PR, 8:53.37 at Azusa, and the CCS-record 8:48.11 in Arcadia.

“By the time you get that fast, it’s harder and harder to PR by a lot,” Chen said. “But for him, it was really funny, after the [Azusa] race, which we trained really, really hard for, his workouts were looking really good after that. ... We knew that Landon was ready to do something really, really big. And, of course, he did.”

Chen said Pretre was “clicking 66s” in reference to split times in practice two weeks leading up to the Arcadia Invite.

“Next couple weeks, we’re going to start clicking away 65s,” Chen said.

So, considering the old adage that records are meant to be broken, the new CCS-record time might not stand for long. And Pretre is the leading contender to break it.

“With how good I’m feeling, how healthy I’m feeling … I’m feeling pretty good about the rest of the season,” Pretre said. “I know there’s room to grow … and I can keep upping my training in a way that keeps me heathy, and the times will speak for themselves. So, that’s the goal for the rest of the season.”