Daily Journal Boys’ Cross Country Runner of the Year: Menlo’s Landon Pretre

Middle sibling Justin followed and helped the boys’ cross country team to the state meet three times.

“I think I knew that it was going to be a legacy of Pretres ... after Kyra’s junior year when Justin came on,” Menlo head coach Jorge Chen said. “I knew that Landon was a great athlete, too ... but you’ve got to remember he was pretty young at that time.”

With Kyra reaching the NCAA Division I Cross Country Championships at University of Texas this season as a graduate student after a prestigious collegiate career at Yale, and Justin a sophomore at Cal while also running for Team Canada in the World u20 Athletic Championships for track and field, the Pretres enjoyed quite a year.

The youngest Pretre rounded out a stellar 2024 by capturing West Bay Athletic League and Central Coast Section Division V championships, while taking second place for Division V at the CIF State Cross Country Championships.

Now, Landon Pretre has also been named Daily Journal Boys’ Cross Country Runner of the Year.

“He did a lot of good things this year,” Chen said. “Pretty insane.”

Once upon a time, Pretre — who is now committed to run at the NCAA Division I level for Wake Forest University in North Carolina — wasn’t sure he wanted to be a runner when Kyra and Justin were turning the family name into Menlo royalty. Their mother Tina, a longtime coach for the Woodside Wilderbeests youth USATF running club, noticed the lack of enthusiasm her youngest child had when running track. That’s when she enlisted Chen to give him a pep talk.

Chen’s approach was simple. He attempted to bribe Pretre with ice cream to run a 1,500-meter race. Pretre didn’t go for it. Chen was nearly convinced the 8-year-old really didn’t want to run, until Pretre corrected him.

“He said: ‘No coach, I do like running, I just don’t like running in circles,’” Chen said.

And, so, another legendary Pretre running career was born.

“It’s changed a little bit,” Pretre said. “I do like track now. But cross country is my favorite.”

That’s what made Pretre’s 2023 season so devastating. Dealing with a foot injury for much of the year, the then-junior saw his cross country season end prematurely at the CCS Championships with a second-place finish in the Division V race. Two weeks later at the state championships, the closest Pretre got to the course was on the sidelines, rooting for teammates as the banged up Menlo squad took fourth place in Division V.

“A lot of the races I couldn’t bare to watch,” Pretre said, “but I had to watch the DV race and had to watch my teammates run.”

From there, Pretre set out on the road to recovery with one goal in mind — to qualify for the Nike Cross Nationals, aka NXN, at the end of his senior year. He mapped out a strategy of CrossFit training to minimize the stress on his foot through track season, and wound down by reaching the podium in the boys’ 3,200 meters with a second-place finish.

By the start of his senior cross country season, Pretre was off and running.

“I think I was prouder of each successive race I had,” Pretre said. “I kept getting faster and faster. I think that’s the best kind of season to have.”

Pretre opened the season Sept. 21 with a win in the 43rd Annual Woodbridge Cross Country Classic, topping the White Varsity Boys-A race on the three-mile course in 14 minutes, 16.7 seconds. Then the records started to fall. At the WBAL #2 race Oct. 24, he topped the field with a first-place time of 14:57.9, setting a new course record at Baylands Park in Sunnyvale.

Come the postseason, Pretre again put himself in rarified air at the CCS Championships. The course record for the 2.95-mile Crystal Cross Country Course heading into the year was held by Mitch Kingery, a San Carlos High School junior, set in 1973 with a time of 14:28.

“Being a local kid from San Mateo High, I never thought Mitch Kingery’s record was going to get broken,” Chen said. “Like, there’s no way.”

Not only did the record get broken, four runners bettered it over the course of the season.

On Oct. 12, De La Salle senior Trey Caldwell set the new mark with a time of 14:27.1. The bad news for Pretre was, while he did better Caldwell’s record Nov. 16 in the CCS Division V race with a time of 14:24.8, the preceding Division IV race saw Santa Cruz senior Eli Fitchen-Young break the record with an even faster time of 14:23.5.

The Division V race was quite a showdown, though, with Pretre going down to the wire with the defending CCS champ, Crystal senior Benjamin Bouie. The two were running even with 400 meters to go. And because someone had shouted out the wrong time to them at the two-mile mark, Pretre was stunned when he turned the corner for the final stretch and saw the low time on the race clock.

“There was a lot of shock and I was pretty mind blown that we were going that fast,” Pretre said.

Pretre used the final 200 meters to pull away, topping Bouie by over four seconds. Still, Bouie’s time of 14:27.9 was so fast, it too bettered Kingery’s previous record that stood for over half a century prior to this season.

That set the stage for Pretre’s return to Woodward Park in Fresno for the state championships, where injury had turned him into a mere spectator the year before.

“I was really nervous going into that race because I felt like everything I was working for all four years was kind of [riding] on that race,” Pretre said.

Once again, Pretre bettered the previous CIF Division V record at Woodward Park, only to have someone run it faster. At the start of the day, the DV record belonged to Trevor Reinhart out of Marin Academy, who ran the 5,000-meter course in 14:59 in 2014. It was Woodcrest Christian senior Eyan Turk who shattered the record with a time of 14:32.5. Pretre was over 20 seconds faster than the previous mark, finishing in 14:38.8. Crystal’s Bouie also topped Reinhart’s time with a third-place finish of 14:54.5.

“That was easily the best race of my life,” Pretre said.

While Pretre’s time would have qualified him individually for the NXN meet, the senior was even more satisfied with his entire Menlo team qualifying for the prestigious national event. That’s because Pretre’s second-place finish was the headliner of Menlo’s CIF Division V team championship, with all five of the team’s qualifying individuals finishing in the top 20 — senior William Hauser, fourth place, 15:02.4; sophomore Henry Hauser, eighth, 15:23.9; senior Jared Saal, 11th, 15:32.4; and freshman Oliver Olbekson, 19th, 15:58.9.

Pretre went on to finish 62nd in a field of 198 runners at the NXN meet, held Dec. 7 at the Glendoveer Golf Course in Portland, Oregon. But the youngest Pretre sibling — who Chen calls the crazy one of the three — achieved the daring goal he set out to achieve by reaching the pinnacle race of California high school cross country.

“My goals are always pretty crazy,” Pretre said. “I don’t always put it out there out loud, but Jorge knows when I go out there at the beginning of the season, I have some pretty crazy goals.”

Said Chen: “He’s just a very competitive, crazy kid. He lives life on his own tune and he’s definitely different than Kyra and Justin. ... All three of them are hard-working kids.”