From March 13 and March 16, some of the country’s greatest athletes flocked to Boston to compete in the New Balance High School Nationals.

This was the third consecutive indoor nationals hosted at the Track, New Balance’s state-of-the-art track-and-field facility in Brighton. This was also the third consecutive year in which the Boston Latin School track team both qualified for and competed in this prestigious tournament.

Captain Brendan Nolan (I), who has been running at BLS since his sixie year, says this achievement was multiple years of dedicated training in the making. Nolan remarks, “[The distance team] train[ed] for [the] event by running six days each week, no matter the weather. [We] create a large base mileage of 40 to 50 miles a week, then, as the season progresses, bring that weekly mileage down as [our] workouts become more and more physically taxing in order to train different systems in the body.” This intensive training continued throughout the winter, and thus, their successes in all events was to be expected.

This year, BLS sent a whopping nine athletes competing across five different events to nationals. Isa Ortega (V) competed in the middle school long jump. Boys’ team captains Bilal Elhaji (I) and Nolan both competed in the one-mile race as well as the distance medley relay alongside Sam Burnet (I) and Joe Day (II). Elhaji also ran the 5K race, marking a significant achievement to qualify for three events at the national level. The final team to compete was the shuttle hurdle relay, which consisted of Lateef Lawal (I), Brendan Furlonge (II), Reggie Hesselbein (II) and Haochen Zhang (II).

Last year, the BLS track team also performed well at the New Balance Nationals. The track team brought in many new faces to the team, as the only returning competitors were Elhaji and Nolan. The continued excellence of the team makes one wonder what makes them so successful year after year. Is it the hours spent working tirelessly on technique at Clemente Field? The time spent in the weight room after an exhausting practice?

Hesselbein, who ran in the hurdles relay, notes, “We consistently went to the Reggie Lewis Track Center after school every day. We mainly focused on our hurdle form, which was the biggest factor in increasing our speed.” The relentless training and desire to improve every day is what sets the BLS track team apart from the competition.

Hesselbein also touched on the technique required to run, especially in hurdles. That is where the coaches come in, as younger athletes are often unsure of the best drills or methods to improve. Thankfully, the BLS track team’s excellent coaches, Head Coach Chris Blondin and Assistant Coach Sean Nyhan, guided the hurdles team at nationals.

The hurdles team, according to Coach Nyhan, had an especially unique journey. At the beginning of the year they only had three hurdlers. Nyhan recounts how, after a particularly successful meet for the hurdlers: “We realized we had a national caliber team, [and] we thought that we somehow needed to get into nationals.” After thinking it was too late to qualify, the shuttles hurdle relay team managed to qualify in an extra race. Nyhan adds, “I’ve really got to give the team lots of credit — Lateef, Haochen, Reggie and Brendan, our new hurdler, [and] including Francis, the alternate —We had five great hurdlers by the end of the season.”

Reflecting on the season and his time running at BLS, Nolan says, “It’s been really fun being the captain of the successful team we have. We’ve put in quite a bit of work and are really happy to have had the results we’ve had. Our success can be attributed not only to our training but also to the bonds we’ve formed with one another.”