Shannon Whitmer has been coaching track at Pocatello High School for 30 years.

She thought she had seen it all.

But standing at the 300-meter corner during the Class 5A State Track and Field Championships at Mountain View High School in Meridian on May 16, the veteran coach witnessed something she thought she might never see — a Pocatello girl winning the 3,200-meter state title, and with an improbable comeback no less.

Senior Katie Boyle chased down Twin Falls’ Raelee Richardson to claim the 5A title, becoming the first Thunder girl and just the fifth runner overall to win the event in at least 40 years.

“She made that decision that she wasn’t gonna let go, and she just kept chasing her down,” Whitmer said. “To chase her down and go after it at the end was pretty awesome.”

It wasn’t always headed this direction.

Boyle only competed once at state during her first two years — finishing dead last in the 1,600 as a sophomore. There was more than a 42-second differential between her and Skyline’s Nelah Roberts, who won the event that year.

That was enough to prompt a change.

“I decided that I wanted to put all my effort into running and just see how far I could go with it,” Boyle said.

She quit soccer, joined cross country and committed fully to running. But her junior season was undermined before it started — shin splints wiped out her entire summer of training. She placed 10th at state in the 1,600 and seventh in the 3,200 in her first year ever running the event, finishing nearly 19 seconds back of even placing and more than 48 seconds behind winner Jaycee Jensen of Idaho Falls.

“It just felt like it wasn’t quite paying off, and like I wasn’t still where I wanted to be,” Boyle said. “But I think looking back, that helped me. It brought me the motivation and the experience to get where I needed to be.”

It helped that she was healthy last summer and could fully train. Boyle took third at the Class 5A State Cross Country Championships with a personal-best time of 18:07.5, the third-fastest time in the classification and a top-25 time overall. But she didn’t stop there. She continued running six days a week through the winter — something she had never done before.

“I’m a numbers person — I keep everything forever,” Whitmer said. “I was able to go back and show her workouts from the Bailey Bird era and show her, look, you’re faster, you’re better, you can go out and do this.”

Bird was no ordinary benchmark. A three-time state placer in the 3,200 and four-time cross country medalist with three straight runner-up finishes, Bird went on to run at Utah State.

Boyle tried to remember that during a rut that spanned about half the season.

A spring break trip to Italy — the Amalfi Coast and Rome — right before the start of the season left her conditioning lagging. She finished 39th in the 1,600 at the Boise Relays on April 11 and didn’t have enough left for the 3,200, withdrawing from the event. Even a few weeks later at Tiger Grizz, she kept getting passed in the final stretch of both races.

“A lot of the workouts I’d been doing, I was hitting the splits for the times I needed to run. It just wasn’t translating to my races,” Boyle said.

But Boyle and Whitmer finally figured it out. The culprit was her finishing kick. So Boyle practically became a sprinter toward the end of the season, drilling fast 200s at the end of hard workouts over and over again.

That training came in handy during the final lap of her high school career.

Richardson led for most of the 3,200 final. Boyle sat in the pack, patient, working her way through the field. She passed one girl on the third-to-last lap, another on the second-to-last, then looked up and saw Richardson had slipped away. With one lap remaining, the gap was real enough that even Whitmer had her doubts. But Boyle was thinking something else entirely.

“I was like, ‘Shoot, let’s see if I can catch her,’” Boyle said. “I just felt like this is still a possibility. So let’s just go all out. I slowly started to get her and I think that gave me the confidence to just keep going. It gave me that motivation to just not stop.”

The announcers on the NFHS broadcast noticed too, taking to counting the cone distances between them as Boyle closed in.

Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

Running on fumes, Boyle finally caught Richardson with just 10 meters to go and her mind went blank. She sprinted through the finish line before her legs gave out, crumpling to the track below. But she couldn’t help but smile, waiting for the announcement she had worked four years to hear.

Boyle won by just 20 hundredths of a second with a personal-best 11:15.40 — the second-best time in 5A this season and 15th overall in the state. A year earlier she had run 11:48.26 at state, nearly 33 seconds slower. She also took third in the 1,600 the day before with a personal-best 5:11.44 — nearly 20 seconds faster than the year before for her first-ever state medal.

“For that first little while I just kept being in shock,” Boyle said. “I was like, dang, that really just happened.”

Whitmer could hardly believe it either.

“She came running over and gave us a big hug and she was just so excited,” Whitmer said. “She really deserved it — she is such a hard worker.”

Her name now sits alongside some of Pocatello’s finest — J’Dee Wilson, Caleb Armstrong, Shane Gard and Elijah Armstrong — as the only Thunder runners to win the 3,200 state title since 1986.

They all competed collegiately. Wilson and Caleb competed for Utah State, Gard at the University of Idaho, and Elijah split time between Boise State and BYU. Elijah was the first Idaho high school runner to win four state cross country championships, claimed eight track state titles including three in the 3,200 and still holds the 5A classification records in both the 1,600 and 3,200.

“Some of those people are people I really looked up to,” she said. “I’ve heard Shannon talk about their times and been like, ‘Dang, that would be such a crazy thing.’ And now it’s like, oh, I’ve done that.”

Boyle will now take her talents 114 miles west to the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls, coincidentally coached by Richardson’s mom, Janae Richardson. But she’ll only run there for the fall semester before departing in January for an 18-month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She plans to resume running when she gets back.

But this season will always be hers.

“That’s something I’ll always kind of have with me,” Boyle said. “Maybe it’ll be my favorite part looking back at high school — like, oh yeah, that’s something that I did. That was super cool.”