Bronco lost a shoe — and kept running to victory; Mountain View gets big win, too

Losing a shoe didn’t turn out to be much of a problem for Boise State cross country runner Allie Ostrander.

The redshirt sophomore won the Greater Louisville Classic on Saturday in Louisville, Ky., by nearly 8 seconds despite a wardrobe malfunction.

At the start of the race, another runner stepped on the back of Ostrander’s left shoe. She ran the first 3 kilometers of the 5-kilometer race with the shoe half on before kicking it off altogether.

“That’s who she is. She’s as tough as they come,” Boise State head coach Corey Ihmels said. “She’s not only tough but pretty stubborn, so she wasn’t going to let one shoe get in the way of her finishing and doing what she set out to do.”

Ostrander crossed the finish line in 16 minutes, 28.15 seconds wearing a shoe on her right foot and a red sock on her left. Her mother, Teri Ostrander, retrieved the missing shoe, according to the Peninsula Clarion.

All five of the Broncos’ scoring runners finished among the top 25 to claim the team championship in the women’s gold race. The No. 13 Broncos were among 42 teams in the field, including five others that were ranked in the most recent national poll.

“It took us awhile to kind of get into the run, but I thought all the ladies did a nice job of moving through the field,” Ihmels said. “It was a good start (to the season), but it felt like our first race. We struggled a little bit, but we were able to close well. … It was good to get it under our belt and move on to the next one.”

Saturday’s victory was Ostrander’s first cross country race in nearly two years. She sat out the 2016 cross country and 2017 indoor track seasons because of a sacral stress fracture, or crack in the tailbone.

As a freshman in 2015, Ostrander finished as the national cross country runner-up, earning All-American and Mountain West Cross Country Athlete of the Year honors.

She showed no signs of a layoff when she returned for the 2017 outdoor track season, winning the national title in the 3,000-meter steeplechase.

Boise State’s next race is the Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational on Oct. 13 in Madison, Wis.

And Ihmels is hoping for a little less drama.

“What I told her initially was, ‘You don’t have to make every race this exciting,’ ” Ihmels said. “… I would have preferred to have her step aside rather than run with one shoe, but that’s just a tribute to her and her competitiveness and her attitude of I’m not going to let anything get in my way.”

Top Idaho prep runner victorious, too

A week after winning the elite varsity race at the Bob Firman Invitational, Mountain View sophomore Lexy Halladay earned another high-profile victory.

Halladay ran a 17:19.6 to win the 5-kilometer Jim Danner Championship at the 38th annual Nike Portland XC on the Portland Meadows course.

The No. 22 Mavericks girls also won the team title with 77 points ahead of 19th-ranked Sunset (Ore.) in second with 89 points.

“That just tops it off, because it’s fun winning individually, but when you have a team to celebrate with you because we all won, it just makes it so much better,” Halladay told oregonlive.com.

This story was originally published October 2, 2017 at 8:57 PM with the headline "Bronco lost a shoe — and kept running to victory; Mountain View gets big win, too."