SALT LAKE CITY — Nicole Wayment and Sienna Barton crossed the finish line back-to-back at Tuesday’s cross country state championship race.

For Wayment, a junior at Bonneville High, her seventh-place finish (18:33.7) in the 5A girls race capped a stellar season for her in which she won the Region 5 championship by 12 1/2 seconds and knocked more than 1 1/2 minutes off of last season’s personal best 3-mile time.

For Barton, a Bonneville senior, her eighth-place finish in 18:34.4 was a satisfying result after a difficult nine months of running, not running, and wishing she could run.

“I had torn hamstrings and I came back flying, so my teammate Nicole Wayment has done amazing. It’s been really cool to pace off of her,” Barton said.

Hamstrings with an ‘s,’ as in both of them.

“I feel amazing,” Barton said. “A couple months ago, I wasn’t even able to race so coming in, I’ve learned to love the pain because I didn’t have the opportunity to do that before.”

She tore the hamstrings in both of her legs in January while training for the 2023 high school track season, which she subsequently missed.

“It was the same day. I want to say they were probably like intervals apart, like I felt one, and then I was like, ‘Ah keep going, and then I felt the other one,” Barton said.

She wasn’t 100% for most of this cross country season as she tried to rehab both muscles.

Her first race of the year was a pre-region meet in late August when she took third place with a time of 19:57.6, way off her 3-mile personal record of 18:12 she set as a junior.

“I started really trying to run again in June and then it was just a long recovery, and I didn’t feel like I actually felt like myself until the end of September,” Barton said.

At the Weber City-County meet in mid-September, she guessed she was around 50% healthy for that race.

Barton, who has hopes of running in college, won last year’s City-County race by 39 seconds, but came in ninth this year with a time of 20:34.1.

Wayment torched this year’s City-County field with a 27.25-second win amid a howling headwind.

At Tuesday morning’s state championship, Barton and Wayment slogged through a slow, wet course with medium-to-long grass that was heavily watered as recently as Monday night.

“Well, I will say this is not a cross country course, this is like a freakin’ track course, but you know what? The way to get good at this course is to just have a good attitude. When I was in the most pain, I smiled, funny enough,” Barton said.

Many runners wore spikes on their shoes, especially for the morning and early-afternoon races. The cool and slow course, despite being flat, was just another marker for Barton to clear in a season full of them.

“It’s been — I’ve learned a lot about myself and how to be mentally strong, which is why I bring that up in this race. I was suffering just as much as anyone else, I promise, I just decided to smile,” she said.

Connect with reporter Patrick Carr via email at pcarr@standard.net, Twitter @patrickcarr_ and Instagram @standardexaminersports.

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