The road out of El Paso for elite high school distance runners is well paved.
While UTEP has a long history of greatness in distance running, most of those athletes have been foreigners, many from Africa.
Perhaps this city's greatest product, Alan Culpepper, went to Colorado out of Coronado in 1991. More recently, the city's high school cross country runner of the year Daniel Bernal went from Eastwood to South Carolina's Furman University in 2017.
The road back to El Paso is not as well paved, but not coincidentally, Bernal and Culpepper found it.