His Road to Top Ran Through Colorado : Cross-country: A summer of devotion to training could make former Marina standout Shanon Winkelman an NCAA champion.

On the dusty trails outside the city limits of Alamosa, Colo., more than 7,500 feet above sea level, Shanon Winkelman ran at the back of a pack of the area’s best distance runners. He was quiet, too wide-eyed because of the scenery and the fast company he kept to speak up.

Each day last summer, it was the same. At the front of the pack ran the best-known of Alamosa’s 6,830 citizens, Pat Porter, The Athletics Congress’ cross-country champion a record eight consecutive times from 1982 to 1989. Winkelman, a hopeful champion just trying to keep pace, ran at the back.

Some days, when his legs couldn’t have felt worse, Winkelman let the pack go on its way, churning out the miles at less than a six-minute pace. Most of the time, he stayed close. After all, this was why he’d left Orange County for southern Colorado at the spur of the moment June 29. He wanted to train hard, and with the best runners he could find.

It was the principal reason he left Marina High School in 1988 to attend UC Riverside, a top-ranked NCAA Division II program for many years.

Four years later, it wasn’t enough to be named a Division II All-American three years in a row. Winkelman wanted more.

For six weeks, he averaged 110 miles a week. Once, he ran 75 miles in only four days. He returned home in mid-August, then spent two weeks at Mammoth Lakes, Calif., keeping to his 110-mile average even at 9,500 feet above sea level.

Every step was preparation for his senior cross-country season at Riverside. Winkelman believes all those miles have pushed him to a new level. He’s now in the best shape of his life, and it feels good.

“I know I’m running faster and training harder than ever before,” he said. “It seems like I’ve made a significant jump.”

Times and places tell the story best for outsiders. Winkelman won the Sonoma State Invitational Sept. 21, running the 10,000-meter course in 30 minutes 55 seconds. A week later, he won the 8,000-meter UC Riverside Invitational in 24:16.

It’s often difficult for runners, even gregarious types such as Winkelman, to describe the feeling of unprecedented fitness. The best analogy is of a jump shooter who suddenly finds he can’t miss a basket. For the runner, every step feels better than the last. Even if the pace is killing, he knows that he can run faster, that the others he is racing will fall back, and that he can win.

It happened to Winkelman at the Riverside race. The competition was difficult, and the pace through the orange groves near the campus was fast. Still, there was this feeling . . .

“It was like that extra edge that I’ve been looking for was suddenly there,” he said. “Maybe I can run as fast as I want to someday.”

It’s a far different feeling than he had at the Division II cross-country championships last November at Humboldt State. Then, he blazed past the first mile in 4:19--good enough to make the CIF State track and field 1,600-meter final most years--and wondered what he was doing with these maniacs.

Despite a fall later in the 10,000 race, held on a damp day on a golf course, and his own self-doubt, Winkelman finished sixth in a personal-best 29:55.

The weeks in Colorado have made him a more confident runner, he said.

“I’d wanted to go for quite a few years, but it just didn’t work out,” he said.

It might not have worked out this past summer, either, but Winkelman met a runner from Alamosa at a road race in Orange County. Three hours later, his bags were packed and he was on a plane to Colorado.

“I was on the plane, thinking, ‘I’m going to Colorado by myself. Whoa. I know nobody, but this guy across the aisle,’ ” Winkelman said.

He stayed with some students at Adams State, in something of a runners’ commune, and worked for his meals at the local restaurant where Porter’s fiance worked. His days consisted of running, eating and sleeping.

“They were the best, most boring days of my life, do you know what I mean?” he said.

At first, Winkelman was afraid to approach Porter.

“When Porter started meeting with us, even the easy days were at a 5:50 (mile) pace,” Winkelman said. “I was just being real quiet. Usually I’m chirping away, always talking. It was like ‘Shut up and run.’

“It helped me a lot. I’m a lot tougher having run up there.”

Winkelman said Alamosa was a “utopia” for runners. There are miles of trails to run on, which made it easier on his body in the long run. Seldom did his training group have to run on streets or highways.

Although the city is more than a mile high, it lies on a flat, open plain, so workouts did not require a climb over the mountains each day. Rest assured, however, that Winkelman ran his share of hills.

“(Alamosa) was good for my mental attitude,” he said. “I mean, there were great runners everywhere. I was on this 20-mile run with another guy, and we saw this little, gray-haired old lady running out in the middle of nowhere. It was at least seven miles back to town, so you know she wasn’t just some jogger.”

Before going to Alamosa, Winkelman had never consistently run as many as 110 miles a week. At Marina, he topped out at 75 miles, most of them solo.

Now, thanks to his Colorado trip, his expectations have risen along with his weekly mileage totals.

His focus is on the Division II cross-country championships Nov. 23 at Edwardsville, Ill. He plans to redshirt his next track season and perhaps give Eugene, Ore., another running haven, a try as his training base next summer, then return to the track team in the spring of 1993.

“One day, I want to run 13 (minutes) flat for 5,000 and 27:10 for 10,000,” Winkelman said. “If I’m not able to run what I want to run, if it becomes a task and it’s not fun anymore, I’ll stop and do something else.”