It started innocently enough.
Devon Meth would go on runs to train for his upcoming cross country season and his younger sister, Izzy, would accompany him on her bike.
And a passion was born.
“Just seeing how much he liked it, it helped my love for the sport,” Izzy Meth said. “My mom and dad are big runners and Devon did track and he pushed me. I started track in seventh grade and I really liked it from the start.”
Meth had no idea, however, of the challenges she would face.
Since entering Lawrence High in 2023, she has experienced enough ups and downs to start her own elevator business. Injuries have nagged the Cardinals junior but never knocked her out, and she has been on a high in this, her junior season.
It culminated on Nov. 15, when Meth ran a 37th-place time of 19:11 at in the NJSIAA Meet of Champions at Holmdel Park, shattering the Lawrence record that had stood for 41 years at the state’s most challenging course. LHS Hall of Famer Beth Starr had the former mark of 19:27 set in 1984.
“I am very happy with the result,” said Meth, who made it a family affair atop the Lawrence record board as Devon holds the boys record. “I’m very grateful for finishing this season as strong as I did, especially coming back from injury and being behind at the beginning of the season.”
Meth qualified for the MOC on Nov. 8 when she ran a 19:42 at Holmdel to finish ninth in the NJSIAA Group III meet.
“I was really happy with that,” Meth said. “It exceeded my expectations because I never placed in cross country at groups. Freshman year I got 11th and made it as a wild card, but knowing I was guaranteed to have my spot, it was exciting. It was a new thing for me.”
None of it was on her radar in September.
“I kind of went into the season not knowing what to expect,” Meth said. “I just wanted to get my fitness back up and see what I could do and try to get back what I lost over the summer.”
As for reaching the MOC, she said, “At that point I had nothing to lose. You made it to where you want to be and you just run freely for a time and see what you can do with all the effort from the past few months.”
And wow, has there been effort as she has had to battle through one health woe after another.
Meth burst onto the high school scene in a big way as a freshman.
“She had a fantastic cross country season,” coach Tim Collins said. “She nailed all the meets, set all the course records for the school at Cherokee, Thompson Park, and ran fantastic.”
Her first trip to the MOC, however, was a wake-up call as she finished 45h in 19:55.
“It was definitely intimidating,” she recalled with a laugh. “You look up at all these older girls and all their times, you’re like ‘Oh my God, they’re so much faster, they know what they’re doing.’ And you’re just going in blind so it’s a little scary.”
In the winter of that school year Meth opted for swimming over winter track and Collins felt it had an adverse effect on her spring season, which he termed “average.”
“Swimming definitely helped me aerobically to stay fit but not having that mileage and trying to get back to what I was doing during cross country led to some injuries and muscle tightness,” Meth said. “That held me back freshman year (in the spring). Just switching gears over to winter track and using it as a training season really helped me after that.”
But first she had to endure a rough sophomore cross country season due to minor injuries and illness.
“She was doubting herself, just never got in a rhythm last year and cross country was not successful,” Collins said.
“I have a problem with getting in my head a lot and I think that was a factor,” Meth admitted. “Just seeing some other athletes who got better and faster kind of made me feel I wasn’t where I needed to be. I wasn’t really doing enough strength training, that set me back and tendonitis in my knees bothered me.”
She recovered physically and mentally with what Collins called “fantastic winter and spring track seasons.” Meth set school records in the indoor (11:10.33) and outdoor (10:59.32) two mile, went to Meet of Champs indoors and just missed outdoors by one spot.
“Over the winter I focused on clearing my head before races and that helped me with spring,” she said.
Missing the outdoor MOC turned out to be a silver lining, as Meth was suffering from a stress fracture that started acting up late in the season. Running in the big meet would have aggravated it and, as it turns out, that injury began a series of health issues that she battled over the summer.
“She was in a boot for about a month so that’s some time off,” Collins said. “That impacted her for about five weeks, which impacted her summer training. She was behind everybody coming into the summer.”
Meth was able to go to cross country camp and began training well, but there were some residual issues caused by her stress fracture. Due to time in the boot she lost muscle tone that caused knee issues. Meth did physical therapy to get through that, but had an ankle problem that flared up a bit.
“By then you’re freaking out,” Collins said. “It’s like ‘Did you come back too fast?’ We were really nervous for a couple weeks. And I didn’t know if we’d have to shut her down again. You don’t know if it’s phantom pain, a rebuilt bone or what.”
Her injuries finally regressed and Meth wasted little time rounding into form. Lawrence’s season-opening meet at the NIKE Cherokee Challenge produced a third-place run with a PR of 11:58 in the 3200.
Not wishing to push it, Meth did not race again for 21 days and went easy on her workouts. She swam with her Peddie Aquatics club team to work on aerobics and endurance. Collins felt the break helped.
“We were taking it easy, being super careful, and then she was feeling better and better,” the coach said. “The ankle thing had gone away, she got stronger, PT worked the leg muscles back on her left leg. She started gaining some confidence, and then she started looking good and feeling good.”
It was an impressive comeback. In a sport that is as much mental as physical, it would have been easy for Meth to just bail on cross country and aim for winter track.
But she fought.
“It was pretty hard,” she said. “I had to learn that if I felt something, just shut down and not do anything to make it worse. I knew if I kept trying to run through it, thinking I was fine, it would make it hurt more and I’d be out for longer.
“I just made sure I was doing everything to strengthen and get better. Seeing the better results made me push through a little more, knowing what I was doing was helping me and I was going in the right direction. The injuries helped me be smarter with my training and change how I race.”
After skipping the Shore Coaches Invitational, Meth finished fifth at the Thompson Park Class Meet (19:30) and took second at the CVC Valley Division Meet with a school record time of 18:38 at Robbinsville.
She finished fifth in 19:25 at the CVC Meet and nine days later knocked 20 seconds off that time in the Central Jersey Group III meet at Thompson with a sixth-place run of 19:05.
“I was really happy with the CVC race and the divisional race,” Meth said. “That was after I took some time off and I was able to come back a little stronger than I thought I could. The state races, I was happy with them, but there were some things I wished I could tweak or do better.”
One of Meth’s great strengths is having a sense of what to do and when to do it on the course.
“She’s a really good racer and has really good instincts,” Collins said. “She’s got a good sense of a race and what she should be doing. She just makes some good moves. When she’s feeling good she runs very confidently and that started coming back this year.”
Meth knew what to do instinctively as a freshman, but lost that feel last fall.
“I worked on it in winter track, just knowing when to follow somebody or when it’s too slow and I should pick it up,” she said. “It helped me this season so I have a little mix of what I learned and what I feel comfortable doing.”
Meth is at high a comfort level in the classroom, where she has a 4.34 weighted GPA. Just as she followed Devon into running, she wants to do the same thing professionally and get into the sports medicine field.
“Over the course of recovering from all these injuries and seeing what was wrong was really interesting to me,” she said. “And then seeing how it could be fixed was even more interesting.”
The fact that she dealt with those injuries and never let them get her down is a key reason for Meth’s resounding bounce-back season.
“She doesn’t show her nerves at all, she’s got a very good poker face,” Collins said. “She’s doesn’t externalize her problems. Thank God it hasn’t gotten her down. She’s got good fortitude and a good family to back her up. It could have been frustrating like ‘Forget about this, this isn’t working.’ But she never got there.
“She never lost faith. Some kids have it, some kids don’t. When she’s on she’s tough.”