Proving that distance running is as much mental as it is physical, two of the state’s best distance runners entered Saturday’s NCHSAA 4-A Mideast Regional Girls Cross Country Championship dealing with fragile confidence.

Apex High’s Andie Cozzarelli and Athens Drive High’s Callan Fike finished first and second, respectively, by a wide margin at SAS Soccer Park, but their finishes were almost secondary to building confidence for Saturday's 4-A Championship at Tanglewood Park in Clemmons.

For Cozzarelli, winning the regional served as a reaffirmation of her win over Fike, the reigning state champion, at the Tri-Eight Conference Championships just 10 days earlier.

“Yeah, this does help my confidence,” said Cozzarelli, who placed second in last year’s state meet. “Callan is such a great runner that beating her again helps prove to me that I am one of the better runners in the state and that I have the ability to beat anyone. So, I do feel confident about my chances next week.”

For Fike, who had been hampered by a stress fracture in her right foot during the latter portion of the season, the regional was a boost to an inner psyche that had been bumped and bruised along with the injury.

“I felt really good,” said Fike, who admits to being at 100 percent for about the last two weeks. “I lost some of my confidence with the injury ... I just wasn’t at my top shape and my times weren’t what I have liked.

“So much about cross country is running with pain and having positive thoughts that you can run through that pain. When I wasn’t running at my best, I started to have negative thoughts.”

As much as Fike wanted to win the regional, a moral victory was keeping Cozzarelli within sight. At the conference meet, Fike was 49 seconds behind Cozzarelli. On Saturday, Fike had reduced the margin to fewer than 16 seconds.

On a balmy and breezy Saturday morning around the muddy 5,000-meter SAS Soccer Park course, Cozzarelli finished in 18:40.44, Fike in 18:55.97.

“Once I’m in front, I just run like [runners] are right over my shoulder,” Cozzarelli said, “so I have no idea where they are.”

Cozzarelli and Fike knew they had clinched state meet berths as soon as they crossed the finish line as the top five runners not on a qualifying team advance.

Kristen Azarelo of Cary High was not as confident. Azarelo finished 10th in 19:54.05, but had to wait for the final scores to be tabulated.

During the post-race awards ceremonies some 30 minutes later, Azarelo was standing among the top 20 finishers when Imps coach Jerry Dotson told her she had run well.

“He had that tone like it wasn’t good enough,” she joked. “I really didn’t know.”

Then Azarelo heard her name called and she welled up with tears in her eyes.

“This is awesome,” she said. “I’ve been working hard all year and this was my goal.”

Making the state meet was also the goal of Green Hope High’s girls, but that was nearly in jeopardy.

“The girls were a disaster,” said Falcons coach Mike Miragliuolo. “I wish I could tell you the reason they ran so poorly.”

Megan Brower, for example, is considered to be the Falcons’ No. 2 runner and was running in good fashion for most of Saturday’s meet. With 200 meters remaining, she was positioned 13th and the Falcons’ hopes were all but assured.

But a funny thing occurred near the finish and Brower finished a perplexing 61st.

“I wish I had an answer,” Miragliuolo reiterated.

Morgan Youd, though, helped pick up the slack with a 39th-place finish as Green Hope’s fifth scorer, giving the Falcons a two-point edge for the fourth and last qualifying positions.

“Hopefully we have had our bad race for the postseason,” Miragliuolo said.

Chapel Hill High won the girls title in convincing fashion, totalling 38 points with five top 15 finishes. Broughton High finished second with 128 points, followed by Durham Jordan High with 129 and Green Hope with 130. Leesville Road High was the odd team out with 132 points.

Locally, Cary High finished seventh with 160 points, Athens Drive High was ninth (206 points), Apex High was 11th (234 points), Middle Creek High was 14th (413) and Panther Creek High was 17th (496).

The Imps’ Dotson was not bemoaning his team’s seventh-place finish, but would like to see a better qualifying system in place for the state meet.

“We run in the toughest region in the state, top to bottom,” he said. “And if the goal of the [NCHSAA] is to have the top teams at the state meet, then we need to change our process.”

Dotson said a likely proposal would be to create a Super Regional in which, for example, the top teams from the East and Mideast regionals would compete and advance.

“This way you’re identifying the very best teams in a region, and not sending four from a regional because it’s mandated.”

The boys regional was a bit more cut and dry. Chapel Hill won with 33 points, followed by Broughton (61), Enloe High (103) and Green Hope (136). East Chapel Hill High was further back in fifth with 175 points.

Miragliuolo held no illusions that his Falcons were the best team in the region, but he did expect his team to qualify for the state meet.

“We had been ranked sixth in the state most of the year and fourth in our region, so I knew we had a pretty good shot,” he said.

All bets were off, though, given the conditions of the course — especially in the first 300 meters.

On Wednesday, the Town of Cary held its annual Snow Day Preparation Exercises, running trucks over the designated starting area for the cross country course and creating large ruts across the surface.

While dirt filled in the terrain, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference held its league meet on the course amid heavy rains on Friday.

By Saturday, large patches of muck dotted the opening portion of the course.

“What was the town thinking?” Miragliuolo said. “They could not have waited a week to hold their exercises? Couldn’t they have looked at their calendar and said ‘Hey, we have these two big meets coming up, let’s move it back a week?’”

And the adverse conditions had an effect as the boys meet was restarted after a couple of runners slipped and fell in the first 150 meters.

“You want a clean and fair start,” Dotson said. “After the first stretch, the rest of course was beautiful. It just didn’t make sense.”

Contact Stuart Hall at 460-2606 or stuarth@nando.com.