Nathan Richards (pictured left by Ted Plunkett) elevated his running to another level on Saturday by taking down the Presbyterian Home 5K course record previously held by former E.C. Glass star Patterson Wilhelm with a 16:13 win at the second annual Hilltopper Invitational. In the process, Richards also reversed his finish order with Nathan Brame of Radford from earlier in the year at Franklin County's Eagle Invitational with a 20 second margin of victory over the defending Group A state cross country champion Brame (2nd, 16:33). The E.C. Glass senior bested Wilhelm's course record by five seconds, which says a lot about the difficulty of the course as Wilhelm went onto run 4:14 for 1600 meters and 9:17 for 3200 meters on the track.
Richards improved upon his 2006 Hilltopper Invite time (17:25) by 1 minute and 12 seconds. Last year, Richards finished up his cross country season with an All-State 13th place performance in the AAA race. If he can make another similar progression, his state meet finish could be significantly better.
With four runners in the top 12 and all under 18 minutes, the Christiansburg tallied 44 points and were able to keep the E.C. Glass boys (53 pts) from sweeping both the team and individual titles in their home invite.
Laura Rapp of Heritage just missed breaking her own course record set a year ago at the Hilltopper Invite in 19:22, but her final time this year of 19:30 placed her well ahead of the competition with the next finisher coming in at 20:53 with Jefferson Forest sophomore Nicki Jannah. The top ranked AA runner Rapp got in a nice tune-up race on a difficult course heading into a loaded field of individuals in next Saturday's Maymont Festival.
The E.C. Glass girls won quite convincingly among the 14 teams scoring in the varsity as their top five runners finished all within the first 16 individual places.
Hilltopper Invitational Results: Varsity Boys - Varsity Girls - JV Boys - JV Girls - Middle School Boys - Middle School Girls