Northern Burlington graduate Nina Burden finished her college cross country career at Stevens Saturday at the NCAA Division 3 Metro Region Championships.
Which is incredible considering she just ran her first-ever cross country race a few months ago.
It’s been quite a year for Burden. She placed 53rd out of over 250 runners at the Interregional Border Battle at DREAM Park in Logan Township last month, took 37th out of over 125 runners at the Middle Atlantic Conference meet in Grantham, Pa., and on Saturday was 86th out of nearly 200 runners at regionals.
What makes all of this so remarkable is that she never ran cross country before. Not in high school, not in college, nowhere.
Burden played soccer at Northern and was a 2nd-team all-BCSL all-star and stuck with soccer first three years at Stevens, making the MAC All-Academic Honor Roll each year.
She did run track at Northern but never ran anything longer than the 800. She had an 800 PR of 2:47.71 from indoor 2018 Group 3 sectionals at the Bubble, but she lost her senior year to COVID and her improvement has been amazing since arriving at Stevens, located along the Hudson River in Hoboken.
She placed 6th at the MAC outdoor meet in May in Chester, Pa., with a PR 2:17.98 and she also ran on top-5 4-by-4 and 4-by-8 relay teams. In all, she’s won 18 medals at the conference meet in either the 800 or on a relay team in four years with the Ducks.
Her 2:17.98 is No. 3 in school history, and her 2:20.90 from the 2023 AARTFC meet at the Armory is No. 3 on the indoor school all-time performance list.
As impressive as Burden’s track career and one year of cross country have been, she’s an even better student.
In 2022, she received the John F. Hedderich III Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Scholarship and spent 10 weeks working at Stevens’ Laboratory for NeuroInnovation studying “the use of low-frequency electrode stimulation to trigger neural immune system responses,” according to an article on Stevens’ web site.
She may be finished with XC but she’s clearly got a bright future.
From the Backstretch by Reuben Frank 