TODD SOMMERFELDT
Coulee Sports Connection
WEST SALEM – Manny Putz made his way through the chute at Maple Grove Venues for the final time – again a winner.
The Onalaska High School senior has never lost a cross country race on that course, and there were plenty of handshakes, hugs, fist bumps and photo requests awaiting him after winning his fourth MVC championship.
Putz, who has committed to run at the University of Wisconsin, maneuvered through the accolades that awaited him with a big smile. He took a break from that to help teammate Arlo White away from the finish line after placing third, then picked it up again.
“This is our home course, and I even raced here in middle school,” Putz said after a winning run of 14 minutes, 56.9 seconds. “Every time I’ve run here, I feel like I know what to do.
“We still have sectional and state, but then it’s off to college. I told Arlo that I was going to try not to cry after the race.”
He didn’t, possibly because there was plenty to celebrate. Putz never lost at Maple Grove, and he broke the course record in it every race he ran the course … until the last one.
Putz missed out on the 14:50.3 he recorded there earlier this season. He accepted that and in typical Manny fashion, joked about it.
“First time for everything, right?” he said with a chuckle. “I guess that shows how much more hyped I am at the beginning of a season.
“But I felt so good through the first mile and second mile. I told my coach (Darin Shepardson) that I didn’t really push that hard over the last 1,000 (meters). I was six seconds off my best time without pushing, so that shows how much faster I can go (the rest of the season).”
The rest of the season consists of a WIAA Division 1 sectional race at Verona on Saturday and the state race that follows in Wisconsin Rapids on Nov. 2.
That’s where Putz hopes to become the seventh boys in association history to win a third individual state championship.
Should Putz win again – he also helped the Hilltoppers win a Division 1 team title while placing seventh individually as a freshman – he will do so with a much different training schedule than his opponents.
Heavy mileage is generally connected to any successful runner, but Putz – a fifth-place finisher at the Nike Cross Country Nationals last winter – has followed a very different path while carving out his spot as the country’s top senior runner for his final season at Onalaska.
A case of COVID-19, a knee injury and an ankle problem have all sidelined Putz this fall, but he has been happy with the few races he has run.
“I’ve had so many bugs, and my body is so fragile,” Putz said. “We keep working with it, and I’ve always had injuries, so we kind of understand the protocols.”
Putz missed his sophomore track and field season due to achilles tendinitis, and he missed out on the chance to run at the Roy Griak Invitational last month. That was a rare chance – before the state meet, of course – at some competitive racing for Putz.
Alternative workouts, he said, are created by Shepardson, and they have benefitted him throughout his career.
“I do other workouts that are equivalent to the mileage that other people run,” Putz said. “There’s biking and swimming, and when I can do a workout, I split it up and work harder at specific things.
“I trust in whatever (Shepardson) tells me to do. His workouts are so unique that I can’t explain how unique they are.”
Shepardson said finding the correct ways to keep Putz at an elite level has been a challenge for him, but also a fun challenge.
“We’re always trying to facilitate some physiological response in different energy systems,” he said. “In our workouts, if we are going to be doing something longer and aerobic, we want to pair that with something short and fast.
“There will be days with multiple tiering going on, where I want them to run at this pace for this amount of time, and then we’re going to change to mile pace or half-mile pace or all-out sprinting.
“There’s a part of the season I call the grunt and groan part of the season, where the mileage is high and the intensity is high. That’s where he is now. A lot of the other runners are already on the taper side of it.”
