It’s hard to break old habits, particularly the ones you don’t really think about much, but sometimes it’s necessary for athletic success.
It’s also hard to come back from a scary injury, particularly with that nagging fear that you won’t be quite as good, or you might re-injure yourself.
Reeths-Puffer cross country standout Jaxon Allen had to deal with those types of issues over the past few years on his way to becoming an elite high school runner.
The good news is that he’s met his challenges and is running great as the fall cross country season reaches the championship weeks.
Allen is among the favorites to win the individual title at Saturday’s Greater Muskegon Athletic Association City Meet at University Park Golf Course. If he's successful he will maintain a very impressive streak, because a Reeths-Puffer runner has won the event for each of the past four years.
R-P cross country standout Jaxon Allen with his coach, Darin Grant
Klay Grant, now running collegiately at Colorado Christian University, won the title the last three years, and R-P’s Evan Hodson won it the year before.
“I would say I’m a little nervous,” Allen said, when asked about the city meet, where all the best runners in the county will go head-to-head for bragging rights. “I just want to go run the race and see what I can get. This year there’s going to be some good competition, guys who are better than they were last year. With the setback that I had it’s going to be a dog fight.”
Allen’s original issue as he started his varsity career was simple, but complex at the same time.
For years, as he was growing up, he tended to walk while putting most of his weight on his toes, and he ran that way, too.
That worked well enough in his pre-high school years as a runner at Orchard View, when he won the middle school GMAA city meet.
Allen nears the finish line at a race earlier this season.
But high school cross country courses are longer, and Allen soon learned that his style of running was causing pain and problems.
He transferred to Reeths-Puffer as a freshman and posted a time of 27 minutes in his first varsity race, which was nowhere near where he needed to be.
“I always walked on my tiptoes – I still do a little bit – but running longer distances that way was causing pain on the ball of my foot,” Allen said. “I was getting blisters a lot of the time and my calves and Achilles were sore a lot.”
Allen made a conscious effort to start walking and running flat-footed, and eventually started doing it without thinking about it.
“It was mostly mental,” he said. "I had to mentally figure out how to correct myself. It was just a matter of thinking about it until it became a habit to go flatfoot.”
Allen, left, hits the trail with his teammates at the Fruitport Calvary Invitational.
The results of the change were obvious right away. By the end of his freshman season Allen was running in the 17-minute range – a full 10 minutes faster than he ran at the start of the season.
With that issue out if the way, Allen hit his pace as a sophomore in 2021, finishing second behind All-State teammate Klay Grant at the GMAA meet, placing eighth at regionals, and finishing an impressive 58th at the Division 1 state finals at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn. He was among the top five sophomore runners at the event.
“That race I just showed up to have fun,” Allen said. “I was not planning on doing well. I hadn’t run in that big of a race before, and the more you’re scared the more you tense up. I had fun and I was pumped at the finish.”
Klay Grant graduated last spring, leaving Allen as the lead runner for the Rockets this season. He started out strong before an injury in early September gave him a big scare and threatened to derail his season.
“We were practicing out at the winter sports complex and I had about 10 minutes left in my run,” Allen said. “I was running down a small hill and I rolled my ankle on a tree root. I heard a snapping or popping kind of noise, it hurt for a second, I really didn’t think anything of it, then I kept running and the pain really hit me.
Allen works his way past a pack of runners.
“My teammates helped me out to the road and I was able to take my shoe off. That’s where I got really scared, because it was swollen up about half of the size of a baseball.”
R-P boys cross country coach Darin Grant could see right away how frightened Allen was.
“He was pretty sure he broke it,” the coach said. “He was in tears because it hurt so bad, and he thought his season was in jeopardy.”
X-rays showed that Allen likely had a high ankle sprain, but doctors recommended a two-week checkup to make sure there wasn’t a hidden fracture.
By the time the checkup came he was showing improvement and started light workouts again, gradually increased his workload, and was back on the cross country course about 3 ½ weeks after the incident.
The R-P boys cross country team, which will compete in Saturday's GMAA meet.
Allen has competed in three varsity races since his return.
On Sept. 26 he posted a time of 17:03 and finished in 20th place at the Cougar Falcon Invitational at Calvin College. On Sept. 30 he posted a time of 16:54 and finished ninth at the O-K Green conference jamboree.
On Oct. 4 he cut his time to 15:27 and took fifth in the Falcon Invitational at Allendale High School. That was 17 seconds faster than he ran on the same course a year earlier, and only five seconds off his time at regionals last season.
It appears that Allen is completely back to form and ready to make a run at some championships, starting with Saturday’s GMAA race, followed by regionals and perhaps another crack at the state finals, if he qualifies again.
“I had so much adrenaline when I saw the time I ran,” Allen said about the Allendale race. “I was pumped. It was such a relief to know I wasn’t out of shape. I didn’t know how much the injury had set me back.”