He started high school knowing nothing about running. He’ll finish as a 100-mile champ.
When Owen Thornton runs, he looks and acts a bit like a kid on a playground.
Not really a kid anymore but not yet quite a man either, the soon-to-be-18-year-old Ardrey Kell High School senior runs with a smile that seems to be glued to his face — even when he’s scurrying up the side of Crowders Mountain, along a trail so steep that it makes hikers pitch their upper bodies forward to counterbalance their weight.
As he runs and smiles, he sees a big rock jutting out of the earth, and he can’t help but run over to it, run onto it, and launch himself off of it, throwing up his hands and letting out a laugh as he flies through the air.
Then he runs some more, still smiling, looking like he could run forever.
Or, at least, for 18 hours and 45 minutes.
That’s the amount of time it took Thornton earlier this month to run the Unico 100 Miler, a 100-mile race held on a gently rolling five-mile loop course in the tiny town of Wingate, about 30 miles to the southeast of Charlotte.
Let that sink in for a minute. One hundred miles of running. That’s like running from uptown Charlotte to downtown Greensboro. And then running another seven or eight miles once you get there.
Let this sink in, too: On Dec. 4, Thornton won the Unico 100 by more than an hour, out-running a field of 29 runners that included 16 who didn’t make it to the finish line. The average age of the 12 other runners who completed the race behind him was almost 44 years old.
Not bad at all for a teenager who, just a few years ago, didn’t even know what cross-country was when he went out for his school’s team.
‘I was gonna let him figure it out’
His mother is the one who set him down this path.
“Owen is kind of a loner I would say, and I wanted him to get to know people, because it’s a big high school,” Dawn Thornton says of why she encouraged her son — less than three and a half years ago, at the start of his freshman year — to give Ardrey Kell’s cross-country team a try. “And it was in the woods. He loves the woods. So I just told him it was a trail in the woods.”
Says Owen, who laughs about it now: “I thought it was some type of club sort of thing. If anything, maybe some outdoor activity. I honestly had never heard of cross-country before.”
Dawn smiles upon being asked if she had.
“I knew exactly what it was,” she says. “But I was gonna let him figure it out on his own.”
On his first day meeting with the team, at McAlpine Creek Park, the assistant coach told him — much to Owen’s surprise — to go run five miles on the trails. So he set out for his “run,” and along the way ran into a friend from middle school.
“Owen, you’re doing cross-country?” the other boy asked.
“Uh, maybe,” Owen replied. “I don’t really know. I didn’t even really realize it was gonna be running.”
The first day, in fact, involved more walking than running, though he at least did enough of the latter to cause some significant soreness in the days that followed, since his legs weren’t at all used to using those muscles.
But it turned out his mom’s plan worked: The running part of cross-country wasn’t what hooked him, initially; it was simply his realization that this was a good, tightly knit group of kids who he thought he would really enjoy being around. He liked it so much that he decided to also run track in the spring.
As for how he went from not being sure he wanted to run five miles to wanting to run a hundred, well ...
Working up to 100 miles, quickly
It just kind of happened.
“Going into 10th grade, I was introduced to the long run with our new coach, and he had us going like 10 miles,” Owen says. “Eventually I got that up to 12, and I started to enjoy the really long stuff. A friend and I did 13 miles together, then I did a 15-mile run, then a 20-mile run.”
In December of his sophomore year, though he wasn’t properly trained for it, he tackled 26.2 miles by entering the Charlotte Marathon.
“And that was probably the worst run I ever had,” recalls Owen, who at age 15 covered the course in a very respectable 3 hours and 46 minutes but finished with a hip injury that wound up causing him to miss the spring track season. “I felt really awful, but somehow it (racing long distances) hooked me, and I think it ended up really hooking me because there was just a goal there, and that goal was sort of something that seemed impossible.”
But it wasn’t until he hooked up in 2020 with a private ultrarunning coach that he began to run all those miles — sometimes as many as 80 miles a week — with a real sense of purpose.
First, Owen trained for then ran the Natchez Trace Trail Run, a 50-mile race held in November 2020 in Franklin, Tenn., where he finished second out of 21 finishers (and, at age 16, as the youngest by nine years). He tackled 50 miles a second time this past April at the “Beast of the East” event in Kings Mountain, posting a third-place finish among 32 runners (the youngest by only two years this time, but in a field that otherwise had just seven total runners under the age of 30).
He then attempted his first hundred-miler in September at a race called Burning River, but had to withdraw after 74 grueling, rain-soaked miles due to another hip issue, this time on his opposite side.
To most rational human beings, this type of experience would probably not qualify as fun. So you might be wondering: What is it about doing these things that appeals to Owen?
“I think there’s something really fascinating about covering a lot of miles and just seeing a lot of things, seeing the world change around you as you go,” he says.
“I mean, there’s a point where things start to hurt a lot. But eventually you get into a state of mind, where it might not even be like a runner’s high necessarily, but it’s just a point of focus, where you’re just focusing so hard and trying to keep running faster and keep yourself relaxed and just going forward. Then it’s just a really freeing state of mind because it’s just putting all of your effort into one thing.”
After his hip had healed, he went right back to chasing that state of mind, taking another shot at the Charlotte Marathon in November and beating his 2019 time by more than an hour. Then he picked Unico in Wingate as his 100-mile mulligan, determined to complete his first hundred before his 18th birthday in January.
Owen took the lead at Mile 18 and held onto it for the next 82. On his way to becoming the second-youngest person to ever win a 100-mile race (according to records kept by UltraRunning Magazine), he says he smiled and had fun the entire time.
His younger sister, however, would beg to differ.
‘If this is what he wants to do...’
Evie Thornton was inspired by her brother to start running, and as a freshman at Ardrey Kell this fall, she joined the junior varsity cross-country team.
At the Unico race, Evie hopped in to run a five-mile loop with Owen for his 35th through 40th miles, and ...
“You can be honest,” Dawn Thornton tells her daughter, smiling.
“He was really crabby,” Evie says, as she lets out a little laugh. “And whenever I tried to play music, he always kept telling me it was bad music. So I tried playing him my music, like Taylor Swift — and he hated it.”
But, Dawn adds, “I would say she definitely lifted his spirits, and it was wonderful to see the two of them running, and her pushing him along.”
Dawn and Evie have actually been to all of Owen’s ultramarathons, turning them into family affairs, and he has several friends who’ve joined him at races to provide everything from pacing help to keeping him on track with his nutrition.
It’s not necessarily what Dawn imagined when she first kinda-sorta tricked him into going out for the cross-country team three and a half years ago.
But she’s as proud of him as she could possibly be. She brings up the fact that along the way to becoming a season ultrarunner he’s developed a great deal of confidence — and, fairly recently, at 17-1/2 years old, a desire to drive.
“He got his license right before Burning River,” Dawn says, as she stands at the foot of one of the trails at Crowders Mountain State Park that her son now runs on once a week, “and he’s been driving every weekend here since.”
“Yeah,” Owen says, “I never wanted to drive until I knew, Oh! I could drive out here to run!”
He likes it here because the trails are so hard and hilly, but also because this is where they hold the Beast of the East 100-miler. His goal is not only to win that race next December, it’s to set the course record while doing it — then to pursue a side career as a “professional” runner (meaning, loosely, one who has sponsors) while studying economics or finance at UNC-Chapel Hill or Case Western Reserve University in his mom’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.
His mother smiles at him as he talks about these dreams.
“For his 30th birthday, we might have to have a hip replacement or something,” she says, laughing. “But if this is what he wants to do, I’m 100% for it. I totally support him.”
Owen smiles right back.
Then he and his sister Evie get ready to head out together for a run.
This story was originally published December 24, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
