Southeast Missourian cross country runner of the year: McClellan consistently finished at the front

Wynn McClellan tries to learn something from every race.

He said that's the mark of a smart runner.

"I'm fortunate I have a good coach and my parents, especially my dad, are really into it," he said. "They see the race from a completely different perspective than me. When I'm running, I'm not really thinking right. I'm short of oxygen. I can go talk to my coach afterward and my dad afterward and they can point out different things. I learn from it and hopefully I run better next time. I learn from my mistakes. It's a good thing to do that."

McClellan finished near the front of every race during his senior cross country season at Notre Dame. He capped his season with a fourth-place finish at the Class 3 state meet. As a result of his consistency, McClellan is the 2009 Southeast Missourian cross country runner of the year.

"I was really pleased with my senior year," he said. "How could I not be? I finished well at state. Our team was kind of underdogs, like usual, especially in districts. We have a really strong district and people always say we wouldn't be able to get past it, but we somehow always scrape by. That's what we did this year."

McClellan finished no worse than sixth in any race this season. He won his first meet of the season, the Murphysboro Invitational, and added firsts in Central's meet, the Notre Dame Invitational and the SEMO North meet.

"I tell my teammates all the time that everybody hurts during a race, but the winner hurts for like 10 seconds longer than everyone else," he said. "That's how you win a race.

"In track, you can watch it. You can see when somebody starts to hurt and they stay with that pain for a little bit and they fall off. The next person is hurting but they stay with it for 10 more seconds and then they ease up and they finish the same distance apart from each other when they split. It's just staying with the pain as long as you can."

McClellan raced to a fourth-place finish at the Memphis Twilight Cross Country Classic and took sixth at the Forest Park Festival, one of the biggest meets in St. Louis.

"He has a lot of training over everyone," Central standout runner Roy Leighton said. "He's got a lot more miles. He's been working harder for longer. He's got a lot of speed and a lot of endurance. He can hold the pace and when everyone else gets tired, he just takes off."

McClellan said he leaned on his training over the summer to battle through tough spots in races. He tried to use the pain he experienced over the summer as motivation to continue running hard in races during the season.

"I definitely hurt during a lot of races," he said. "But I can look back on that and think I hurt during the summer when I was running 12 miles a day. Here it's only a three-mile race, a fourth of what I was doing during summer training and practices. Everyone is hurting just as much as me.

"I think I had the upper hand in a lot of races because I do all that training in the summer. I've kind of built up a tolerance to that maybe. That's the way I think. I don't know if it's actually true. It's all a mental sport."

McClellan said he begins his preparation for a Saturday race early in the week. He decides as soon as he gets the schedule at the beginning of the season which races he'll try his hardest to win and which ones he'll use to experiment with different strategies.

"About Tuesday, I sit down and come up with a plan of what I think I need to do during the race," he said. "Come Wednesday, I'll talk to my dad and my coach about what I think we should do. They'll give me feedback about what they think we should do. On Wednesday we'll come up with a plan of what's going to go on, if everything goes according to plan, here's how we're going to run. ... If I come out on top, great. If I come out last, we learned not to do that."

McClellan plans to put his knowledge to use as a college runner next year, but he hasn't decided on a school yet.