<\/p>\n
Mancos is now home to a USA Pentathlon Youth National Championship gold medalist.<\/p>\n
Teslin Stecher, 14, took top honors at the elite competition last month. The rigorous Olympic competition features swimming, running, fencing, shooting and horse jumping on a timed, point-based scoring system.<\/p>\n
Stecher won first place in the Youth C division for individual male athletes, edging out the runner-up with a nine-point lead. He also took second place in the gender relay of the Youth C division.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to Nationals last year and got fourth. \u2026 A lot of the same athletes were there this year, so I was mostly trying to beat them,\u201d Stecher said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
To prepare for competition, the young athlete swam three days a week and ran nearly every day. Stecher also trains at home in shooting and fencing, his favorite sport, with his father, Marty Stecher, who is a member of the Durango Fencing Club.<\/p>\n
Stecher also swims with the Durango Swim Club, runs with the Mancos and Durango cross-country teams, and trains regularly with the Four Corners Fencing and Pentathlon Club, which is run by former Olympian and his coach Jennifer Thurston.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ran every day and was doing a 10-mile loop around town, and also trained a running camp with where we were running 14ers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Although he now has a first-place national win under his belt, Stecher isn\u2019t resting on his laurels. He\u2019s actively training and hopes to compete next year in the horse-jumping category.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s totally new for me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Stecher\u2019s training partner and three-time national champion Seamus Millet, 16, of Durango, won first place in the Youth A and B divisions for male athletes.<\/p>\n
Millet will represent the U.S. this September in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the Pentathlon Youth World Championships, a path that Stecher hopes to explore as he competes more.<\/p>\n
\u201cNext year if you\u2019re in the top 4, you can go for more international competitions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For now, however, Stecher\u2019s rigorous training and preparation continues, and he wouldn\u2019t have it any other way.<\/p>\n
Stecher and Millet\u2019s wins are putting the Four Corners on the map as a training ground for high-caliber athletes, as their Durango training grounds have recently received heightened interest from pentathletes on the Front Range.<\/p>\n
Denise Stecher, Teslin\u2019s mother and member of the Four Corners Fencing and Pentathlon Club, says a group from Denver came down to Durango last week for training.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re starting to get quite a few of them (out-of-town athletes). You don\u2019t always get people down here to train, and I think it\u2019s so cool that our little area has produced two national champions,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
14-year-old medals in U.S. pentathlon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":111232,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6371],"tags":[13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-111231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mt-news","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111231"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=111231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}