Niwot junior Hunter Robbie’s brief running career continues to trend upward — a booming stock that nobody from the inside is ready to sell on.

A soccer player turned runner his freshman year, Robbie established himself among the best high school distance runners in the nation this past fall and winter.

In early November, he finished sixth at the state cross country meet to help the Cougars to a team title in their first year in the 5A classification. A month later, his 21st-place run at the Nike Cross Nationals led them to a national championship, the first-ever won by a boys team from Colorado.

“He’s fierce,” Niwot coach Kelly Christensen said of the Daily Camera runner of the year. “He’s someone who has had to scrap, crawl and fight his way from basically being dead last to being where he is this year.”

The dramatic rise only sounds hyperbolic.

His progress, meanwhile, is best viewed through struggle.

When he arrived to Niwot as a freshman, Christensen said he was one of the slower runners on the team. Robbie himself said he wasn’t immediately taken by the sport. Though, that began to change after he saw results from the work put in.

By his sophomore year, he was a varsity runner on a team that qualified for the Nike championships. Even then, he had a ways to go.

“We wanted to watch the race from last year (as a team) and that first 2 minutes of the race, Hunter is in dead last, sprinting,” Christensen said. “He is going all out and can’t even keep up. And it takes him 2 minutes to pass one person. And everybody wants to watch that over and over because it’s funny. And he’s laughing at himself, too.”

Robbie: known to always provide a smile and laugh.

Known for this, too: “But he expects it to be hard, and he knows when the race gets harder for everybody else, he thrives.”

Robbie eventually passed about 90 runners at Nike’s his sophomore year, finishing middle-of-the-pack in 106th.

It, of course, paled in comparison to his 21st-place finish just weeks ago. On a cold and wet day in Portland, Oregon, Robbie was Niwot’s top runner, pushing the Cougars past defending champ Herriman (Utah), which had beaten the Cougars at Nike regionals weeks earlier, and second-place American Fork (UT).

“Freshman year, I remember, I wasn’t that good for the first two months and didn’t like it that much,” Robbie said looking back on his journey. “But then I started actually making good jumps, so I started to like it a lot more. I was like, ‘Oh, the harder I work, the faster I run.’ So, it’s satisfying to get that result. And once I was midway through that cross season, I started liking it a lot.”

Robbie didn’t win a race this season and wasn’t always Niwot’s top runner. But he was consistent and was at his best in the biggest races.

He finished second to teammate and reigning BoCoPreps.com runner of the year Rocco Culpepper at the St. Vrain Cross Country Invitational in September, and then again at the Granite League Championship in October.

His sixth-place finish at the state meet at Norris Penrose Event Center was good for second on the team, 1.7 seconds behind Ryder Keeton. Both runners were named to CHSAA’s 5A first team.

At Nike’s Southwest Regional, Robbie finished 21st and a few steps behind sophomore Quinn Sullivan (12th) and Keeton (15th), running a personal-best 5K time of 14 minutes and 57.03 seconds.