I know we mentioned it before, but it deserves mention again. What La Salle's DJ Principe and Portsmouth's Nikki Merrill did at Saturday's meet was simply phenomenal. Principe won the 3K, 1,500m and 1K and also went "sub-two" for the third-place 4x800m relay squad. Merrill anchored her school's victorious 4x800m team and then went on to win the 1,500m, 600m and 1,000m. I'll admit, when we looked at the seed sheets and noticed they were both running three individual events, we didn't quite think they could pull off the triple-threat individually, despite their gifted talents. That was part of the reason we didn't mention it when we made our State Meet predictions. As we indicated in a previous article, Merrill won her three races combined by just over two seconds! We did the math on what Principe did. Here's the eye-popping figure we came out with. With all his races combined, he ran 3.9 miles in around 17:14. That's just under 4:25 per-mile pace for that distance! And he wasn't even going all out in the 3,000 where he ran 8:46! Pretty incredible stuff.
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