It's difficult to show improvement from one year to the next when you're already a top team, but Lamar has done exactly that. Photo by Alan Versaw.
One interesting analysis to perform at or about this time of the season is to ask which teams stepped up most between the end of last season and this point in the current season.
One way of looking at that question is to take the team rankings based on returning runners from the end of last season and compare those with the current rankings of teams. That's what we'll do here.
One complicating factor in doing that, though, is the teams that had the advantage of running at Desert Twilight/NXR-SW last fall. Pretty clearly, that course tends toward a faster sort of time than you can usually get in Colorado. In a few cases, entire teams went down, in other cases only an individual or two, and in still other cases, nobody from the team went down. Short of flagging every runner on that list--which I don't have time to research and do--there is no ...
