Thorne Bay cross-country runner Taylee Nyquest hears the advice from her coach all the time: Run like a bear is chasing you.
It's meant to motivate. But last Saturday at the Region V championships in Ketchikan, Nyquest had to resist the urge to put those words into action when she came within 10 feet of a black bear on the race trail.
Nyquest was more than two miles into the 3.1-mile race and more than a minute ahead of anyone else when a bear appeared on the race trail near Ward Lake, a few miles north of Ketchikan.
"I was just going along running and I came up on the trail and a bear was on the bank coming up from the lake," Nyquest said Friday in Anchorage, where she will join hundreds of high school runners for Saturday's state high school cross country championships at Bartlett High.
"I was about 10 feet away from it so I stopped and backed up from it and started yelling 'there's a bear.' I think I startled it, so it climbed up a tree. I didn't want to run past it -- I'd be going about three feet from it if I did, and that wouldn't be very smart, so I was just waiting. It climbed down the tree, ran across the trail and into the woods."
Alerted by Nyquest's shouts, race officials stopped the other runners. But Nyquest didn't know that, so once the bear disappeared into a wooded hillside, she kept running.
Though the rest of the field ran the race again later in the day, Nyquest did not because she completed the course and received an official time the first time. She wound up winning her third straight region title with a time that was 92 seconds faster than anyone else's, despite an estimated 30 to 45 seconds spent waiting for the bear to leave.
Running into wildlife is not an uncommon occurrence in Alaska. At last year's Cook Inlet Conference cross-country championships at Kincaid Park, the course was rerouted while the girls race was in progress after officials discovered a bull moose on the course and couldn't scare it away.
Marcus Dunbar, the longtime Kodiak coach and former Bartlett High star, remembers a high school race at Kincaid years ago when former Dimond High coach John Clark got a face full of pepper spray meant to chase a moose off the race trail.
And in Kodiak, where all of the bears are grizzlies, "we've had training runs where we've changed the course because of a bear on the course," Dunbar said.
Melissa DeVaughn Hall, an assistant coach at Chugiak, said there were two days this season when the Mustangs changed their plans because of bear sightings on the Beach Lake Trails near the school.
And prior to last week's CIC championships at Bartlett, coaches were told to make sure runners were bear aware. Moose aren't too common on the northeast Anchorage trails, but bears sometimes appear there.
Nyquest said she relied on experience when she had her bear encounter last week in Ketchikan.
"We've come across bears before, but never that close," she said. "We know about being loud and not running from them.
"I was a little concerned about how it was affecting my time, but obviously (I thought about) the safety aspect and being smart and handling the situation like a mature adult."
Nyquest said the bear moved quickly once it came down from the tree and headed into the woods, which are on the opposite side of the trail as the lake. Once it bolted, she did too.
"I was thinking, oh my goodness, people are going to start catching up," she said.
She said she didn't check to see if either runners or the bear were behind her -- "I never look back in a race," she said -- but felt secure that she and the bear were heading in opposite directions.
"It was going pretty fast up that hill. I was probably going a little faster," Nyquest said. "My mom always says 'Run like a bear's chasing you,' and it was a perfect opportunity to do that."
Saturday at Bartlett, Nyquest will be among four state champions in the field.
Two of them will go head-to-head in the Class 123A girls race, which will feature Nyquest, the 2012 winner, and Glennallen's Briahna Gerlach, last year's winner who earned a six-second victory over Nyquest.
The other two are Kenai's Allie Ostrander and Kodiak's Levi Thomet, who are overwhelming favorites to claim Class 4A titles for the third straight year.
Ostrander is a marvel, a senior whose times have surpassed those registered by most boys this season. At last week's Region III championships in Kodiak, Ostrander's time was faster than all of the 3A boys and all but seven of the 4A boys, Dunbar said.
According to athletic.net, Ostrander owns the second-fastest girls time in the nation this season, a 16:40 recorded at the Palmer Invitational last month. The only faster time on the national list is a 16:00 by California runner Courtney Clifford.Thomet, a senior who hopes to cap his second straight undefeated season with another state title, ranks 61st among the nation's boys with a time of 15:23, recorded at an August meet in Kodiak.
Having national-class runners like Ostrander and Thomet in the meet could push others to fast times, although snow is in the forecast and could impede the quest for personal bests.
"For our freshmen, they're just happy to be there, and watching Allie run could make them feel all the more successful," Hall said of the Chugiak girls, a team that includes four freshmen.
Chugiak surprised some by claiming second place at last week's CIC championships, behind defending state champion West.
"We don't have a rock star, so I think people overlooked us," Hall said. "We had known all season that we were within striking distance (of second place). We just had to have a good day, and we did."
All seven runners improved their personal best by at least 18 seconds, an achievement that Hall said included a mental component.
"We tried to get them to really focus mentally," she said. "They'd put in the work, so having them run more intervals or do more core work was not going to do anything. We wanted them to visualize the race and try to get the mindset to believe in themselves."