PORTLAND, Ore. — Every introvert in the country should have sympathy for the Portland State cross country program. Not because the Vikings are introverts themselves. Rather, the Vikings broke into so many new stages and crashed so many parties they had never been before, that it'd leave any introvert socially exhausted.
 
The obvious new stage for the Viking program came at the end of the season, when Katie Camarena became the first Viking to crack into the NCAA Division I Cross Country Championships, where she placed 70th overall out of 250 of the best runners in the country. But that was only one of the many firsts the Vikings achieved this season. Others included:
 

• First top 10 team finish at the NCAA West Regional (men placed eighth)
• First top three team finish at the Big Sky Championships (women placed third)
• First top five individual finish at the Big Sky Championships (Camarena placed fourth)
• First top five individual finish at the NCAA West Regional (Camarena placed fifth)
• First time either team's top five all placed in the top 100 at the NCAA West Regional (both teams did it this season)

 
Camarena's fifth-place finish at the NCAA West Regional was what qualified her for nationals. Portland State head coach David Hepburn and his staff celebrated with Camarena for the appropriate amount of time afterwards. But then, what was their first question after that settled down?
 
"How can we get better?" Hepburn recalled.
 
It's a question you might expect from a program that just got through a tough season, not its best season in Division I program history. But it's the necessary question if Hepburn and the Vikings want to ensure the 2021 cross country season goes down as the start of something big, and not just the program's peak.
 
"I think the team had a very fun, very enjoyable season that was very successful," Hepburn said of the year. "I hope that that gives them a taste of that and they continue to be hungry for it as a team. Competitive. They want to feel that again. Hopefully that's the lesson learned."
 
Part of that will be fostering a competitive environment within training, something the Vikings successfully did in 2021. The competitive training sessions weren't something available to the Vikings during the 2020-21 academic year, when COVID safety protocols demanded that the Vikings train in pods of four or five athletes.
 
"We had pods last year and they were competitive within themselves, but this year, they knew who was sort of next man up. You could see it. You could see it in practice. 'I've got to step my game up otherwise I might not be making that travel squad,'" Hepburn said of how training together helped foster competition within the team.
 
"And it was good and healthy competition. It wasn't, 'oh, woe is me. I'm not making it.' It was, 'yeah, let's everybody do better because we will, as a team, get better.' And we saw a lot of that this year."
 
All of it snowballed over the course of the year, with the Vikings picking up momentum with each meet. The Vikings only ran at three regular-season meets, one less than they would normally. But Hepburn said that helped the team focus on its training, which was all focused on the end of the season.
 
The Vikings first picked up momentum at the Roy Griak Invitational in Minnesota on Sept. 24, when both teams beat three regionally ranked teams. The men beat two Power 5 schools in Tennessee (5th in the USTFCCCA South Region at the time) and Georgia Tech (8th in South Region), while the women proved they deserved to be ranked in the USTFCCCA West Region ranking, which they weren't at the time.
 
The first sign that the season was really turning into something special, though, came at the Santa Clara Bronco Invitational on Oct. 16 – less than two weeks before the Vikings would host the Big Sky conference meet. 
 
"As optimists, we can look and crunch numbers and see if we can crack the top five [at conference], or crack the top four, or can we get into that top three? All of those discussions are had over a frosty beverage, and we have fun with that. But to really say, 'okay, this is going to be something different,' it probably swelled up and hit home after Bronco [Invitational, Oct. 16] on the fellas' side," Hepburn said when asked when he thought the season turned into something special. 
 
"It was really like, 'okay, if we click and all have a good race on the right day and the right time, yeah, we can do something special here.' And I think the ladies, too. They had some success, obviously, and there were enough pieces with all of that to where they could say, 'yeah, we could make some noise' at the conference and/or regional level."
 
The Viking men had three runners place in the top five at the Bronco Invitational. Josh Snyder, Jordan MacIntosh and Keynan Abdi placed second, third and fifth overall, respectively, while the Vikings dominated the team race, winning by 37 points over second-place Cal Poly. Cal Poly came into the meet ranked 10th in the USTFCCCA West Region – two spots ahead of the Vikings at the time – while the Viking men also beat UC Santa Barbara by 42 points, even as UCSB was ranked 14th in the West at the time.
 
The Bronco Invitational also launched Camarena into a five-week run that would turn her 2021 cross country season into the best individual season in program history. Camarena smashed the old 6k school record by close to 48 seconds while finishing third overall at the Bronco Invite in 20:00.4.
 
Camarena had already set the 4k record with a time of 13:47.1 at the Viking Rust Buster on Sept. 3, and she'd follow with the 5k record at the Big Sky Championships, where she finished fourth in 16:35.3.
 
The bigger success for Camarena at the Big Sky meet, however, was in how she ran the race. She ran to win, pushing to pass eventual winner Taryn O'Neill of Northern Arizona in the final straight before running out of gas and placing fourth. Camarena's fourth-place finish still made her the first Viking ever to crack the top five within the conference, as it beat the previous best finish by a Viking by three whole spots.
 
"That was probably a little feather in her cap and she rode that wave," Hepburn said of Camarena's performance at the Big Sky meet. "And she did the same thing at regionals, stuck her nose in it and ran another solid race."
 
Camarena was still within a second of the overall leader after the first four kilometers of the race at regionals. She'd go on to pass two runners over the final two kilometers to place fifth overall, 23 spots higher than any other Viking in program history.
 
Most importantly, Camarena's fifth-place finish secured her one of the region's four individual bids to nationals, adding to the pile of accolades Camarena piled up over the course of the season. By the end of the year, Camarena would either become or set the:
 

• First national qualifier in Division I program history
• First USTFCCCA All-Region honoree
• Best individual finish at Big Sky Championships (4th)
• Best individual finish at NCAA West Regional (5th)
• 4k school record (at Viking Rust Buster, Sept. 3)
• 5k school record (at Big Sky Championships, Oct. 29)
• 6k school record (at Santa Clara Bronco Invitational, Oct. 16)

 
"To come in and kind of just smash all our records, that's been pretty fun. It's been pretty fun to sit on those coattails and enjoy the ride," Hepburn said of Camarena's record-breaking season.
 
"It was probably more of a slow burn. That's probably a little bit more of who she is, too. She's pretty jovial and along for the ride. She's having fun with it, which is fun to watch and be around. You could see people just gravitate towards her all the time. She's having a good time. She's smiling, she's laughing. And she's hitting home runs and taking them in stride. Never someone to have a big head, or anything like that.
 
"I think people love to see success and be around success when it doesn't turn into a big ego. People felt like they could share in this. '[Imitating Camarena] Yeah, come share in it. Let's have a good time.' That's pretty fun to be around."
 
The rest of the Viking women certainly shared in Camarena's success, as they were highly successful themselves. At the Big Sky meet, the Viking women placed third as a team not only because of Camarena, but in fact mostly because the team's next four runners all finished within 18 seconds and 11 places of each other. Hunter Storm, Liza Sajn and Abi Swain all finished within four spots of each other as the team's second through fourth finishers. Maya Irving then closed out the Vikings' team score just seven spots behind Swain at 30th overall.
 
The women also shared in Camarena's success at regionals, as they tied a program best with an 11th-place finish while placing all five scorers in the top 100 for the first time in program history. Irving and Sajn followed Camarena's fifth-place finish by placing near each other at 56th and 60th overall, respectively. Swain and Storm then finished next to each other at 88th and 89th overall.
 
And success wasn't just shared within either the men's or women's team. Hepburn noted that another benefit of the Vikings returning to program-wide training sessions was the support between the men's and women's teams.
 
"It was a huge, uplifting thing for them to be back together as a team with the guys cheering on the ladies and vice versa," Hepburn said. "That was something that was very fun to watch this year. With the men, at conference, feeling a little down about their place [sixth] but still so high that the program won as a whole because the ladies finished third. They shared in that joy, and the ladies also shared in the men's joy at finishing eighth at regionals."
 
The eighth-place finish at regionals showed off the depth and togetherness of the men's team. All five scorers placed within 47 seconds and 37 places of each other, easily the best bunching the team has ever had at what is annually the biggest field they face each season. Abdi and MacIntosh led the way at 40th and 43rd overall, respectively, while Snyder finished a little bit back of them at 60th overall. Dom Morganti and Drew Seidel then finished within two spots of each other, as they closed out the team score at 75th and 77th overall, respectively.
 
The previous best finish by the men's team at the NCAA West Regional had been 16th in 1998, meaning the Vikings halved that while breaking into the top 10 for the first time in program history.
 
Interestingly, only one of the team's four captains ran at regionals. Luke Ramirez was the lone regional runner among the captains, as Chase Lovercheck, Sophie Jones and Phoebe Brown all led from the sidelines.
 
Hepburn said the team didn't need the hands-on captaining this season, however. Everyone led by example and picked each other up regardless of who was named captain and who wasn't.
 
"People didn't need to have a 'C' on their chest to help lead this team, in whatever small shape or form they did," Hepburn said about his team.
 
"I think that's just a sign of the team and the team culture, that they bought into that and are okay with that. It's a sign of mutual respect, and I think that that's pretty evident in our teams. From a male to female, to a freshman to a senior...all of that, there's a lot of mutual respect. Everybody knows that they're going through that grind."
 
It's an enviable team culture to have, and one that brings Hepburn back to his initial question after Camarena made nationals.
 
"How can we get better?"
 
The culture is there. The plans are there. Now, will the Vikings take the next step up? After all, a record-breaking season is only record-breaking for one year. Then it becomes about breaking those records again.