Making up for lost time.

For most athletes, that might mean something routine, such as coming back from an injury.

For Kalee Cipra, it means coming back from a missed state meet.

With the current cross country season under way, it’s safe to say that the speedy Auburn Riverside High senior will be keeping her eye on two timepieces this fall. One of those, of course, is the stopwatch.

The other? A wristwatch.

It all goes back to an unintentional and unfortunate incident last fall that kept Cipra out of state. She was erroneously given the wrong starting time of her race at the Class 3A West Central-Southwest District meet, as coaches Bill Sumner and Megan Ellis Sumner thought it began half an hour later than it actually did.

While everyone else was toeing the starting line, Cipra was out warming up with a teammate. They hurriedly checked in, but took off well behind the pack. An attempt to allow them to run in the 4A race to qualify for 3A state was denied.

So after a silver-medal finish in the Class 1A/B race as a freshman at Evergreen Lutheran, then a 23rd-place run in the 3A meet as a Riverside sophomore, Cipra wound up staying home.

“I was just thinking about it every day,” Cipra said earlier this week after the Ravens raced against Jefferson and Kentridge in the South Puget Sound League North Division opener on AR’s home course at Roegner Park.

“It lingered for a long time – probably the rest of the year.

“That’s not going to happen again.”

A seasoned competitor

While others in November’s Class 4A meet in Pasco might be favored to win the title – seven of last year’s top 10 were juniors or younger – Cipra has the talent and the experience to race for a spot among the top 12 and thus the awards podium.

She already has been there once, taking second in the Class 1A/B race as a freshman at Evergreen Lutheran in 2005.

But now, that seems like a long time ago.

“I’m getting a lot better than freshman year. I’m putting more miles, and there’s more competition to go against,” the 17-year-old Cipra said. “We didn’t have that much competition (at Evergreen Lutheran) until district and state. Here, at every meet there’s competition.”

Cipra is hoping that on the way to state – not to mention once she gets there – the competition will push and pull her to some personal-best times. That would be especially true for Pasco, where she says, “I want to get into the 18:30s eventually.” (Cipra ran 19:47 as a freshman and 20:10 as a sophomore on the 3.1-mile Sun Willows layout.

In the meantime, she’s pushing herself, with her Ravens teammates alongside.

“It’s getting there,” she said of her training base. “We did at least six miles a day this summer.”

If it all goes according to schedule, Cipra, and perhaps the entire Riverside team, which opened the season on Wednesday with a 25-31 victory against perennial power Jefferson, will be on the line in Pasco.

And rest assured: Cipra intends for all aspects of this cross country season to be on schedule. In fact, while some athletes in any sport might have felt dragged down by a mishap such as the one she had to deal last year, Cipra turned it into a positive in terms of motivation.

“It boosted me up,” she said.