Kirtland Middle School runner breaks school record
Lakyla Yazzie (4) of Kirtland Central keeps pace with a Lady Horsemen runner on Saturday in Albuquerque. Yazzie broke the school record by 18 seconds with a time of 11:40 at the New Mexico Class 4A state track meet in the 3200-meter race. (Times photo – Donovan Quintero)
ALBUQUERQUE
In her third 3200-meter race of the year, LyKyla Yazzie thought about giving up with 200 meters to go.
It was a cold, damp morning on the final day of the 2015 New Mexico Activities Association State Track and Field Championships. An eighth-grade student at Kirtland Middle School, Yazzie had nothing to lose.
“I was going to give up,” she confessed. “But I couldn’t.”
Her tenacity earned her a third-place finish in the 3200-meter run with a time of 11:40 and she broke the school record by 18 seconds.
Kirtland Central High School head track and field coach Leland Adair said he was astonished about Yazzie’s strong finish in the state meet as a middle-school runner.
“She just ran an unbelievable race,” he said. “She did an amazing job.”
Yazzie ran the entire middle school season and was moved up to the high school just after it ended. The middle school doesn’t run 3200-meter races so she got her first taste of it just weeks before the state race. She qualified for the state meet the two previous times she ran the two-mile.
She said she worked her way up to the high school level by putting in off-season workouts.
“I had to run over the summer and I had to pace the boys out with me, the girls weren’t competition,” she said.
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Highway 264,
I-40, WB @ Winslow