South Georgia - In The Game High School Sports Magazine

Hunter Honeycutt, a junior at Tift County High and past In The Game featured athlete, is one of the top cross country runners in Georgia and one of the nation’s most gifted junior triathletes. But there’s another Honeycutt, and she’s a little younger, a lot prettier and just as gifted as her brother Hunter. Madison Honeycutt is rapidly stepping out of her brother’s shadow and making a name for herself in endurance sports throughout the Southeast. Madison Honeycutt runs cross country and track for Eighth Street Middle and swims for the Tifton YMCA. She is also one of 10 members of USA Triathlon’s Southeast Junior Team.

Lee and Marci Honeycutt are at a loss when trying to describe why their children are such gifted endurance athletes. They are solid runners and triathletes themselves, but they have never competed on a level even close to where their children are. “I don’t know where they get it,” laughs Marci Honeycutt, who also served as her daughter’s assistant cross country coach this year.

Madison Honeycutt’s first attempt at organized sports came with the YMCA swim team when she was six years old. A year later, she competed in her first running race. Two years after that, she completed her first triathlon. The seventh-grader says she watched her brother compete and thought it would be fun to try. “I wanted to do what he was doing,” she says.

Honeycutt soon realized that endurance sports suited her better than anything else. She was good at swimming, cycling and running. She picked up the sports very easily and she recovered quickly from one workout to the next.

Honeycutt is in an unusual position. She is a gifted runner – at 13, she could sign a running scholarship with a four-year college or university – but she’s looking down the road at triathlon. “I’ve never been much of a sprinter or a short-distance athlete,” she says. Since no schools in south Georgia field triathlon teams, she will have to run cross country in the fall and swim in the winter. Therein lies the quandary. Elite endurance athletes don’t take time off from their chosen sports. If Honeycutt wants to remain among the ranks of the elite junior triathletes, she has to swim, bike and run all year, regardless of the season or weather. So far, that hasn’t been a problem. During cross country season, Honeycutt manages to run upwards of 30 miles per week while keeping her bike mileage and swim yardage high. When the winter swim season is in session, her running volume doesn’t suffer much. Even when the weather is cold and nasty, she simply moves her bike indoors and attaches it to a stationary trainer.

This past cross country season, Honeycutt turned in one of the best middle school times in the state and helped make Eighth Street Middle one of the strongest teams around. At the 3200 meter distance, which is almost two miles, she turned in a personal best time of 12:40. At the state meet, she ran a 13:05, good for fifth overall.

The state meet was a bit of a letdown. In the past, middle school runners have been allowed to run five kilometers, same as the high school runners. Honeycutt is capable of running a sub-20:00 5K right now. Had she been able to run 5K at state, she would have likely brought the individual championship back to Tifton. Instead, the organizers kept the race at the standard 3200 meters. Honeycutt still did very well but it wasn’t what she had hoped to do.

When cross country season wrapped up at the end of October, she turned her attention to swimming. Honeycutt swims all year with the YMCA. She competes in a few meets in January and February as well as meets in the summer. These meets, particularly those in the winter, are dominated by athletes whose only focus is swimming. “They are very competitive. I don’t usually do as well in the winter meets as I do in the summer ones,” she says.

Honeycutt is driven to succeed at her chosen sport.  She is focused on earning a spot on the U.S. Olympic triathlon team some day, and she understands what it’s going to take to get there. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to work hard and make sacrifices,” says the 13-year-old phenom. “It’s hard to watch your friends go to the movies after school or go to parties when you have to go do a long workout. But that’s what it takes.”

With triathlon, the training never ends. Triathlon is not three individual sports, but one sport made up of three different disciplines. There is always something that needs attention and it takes a special mindset to wrap around that kind of training. “Madison has the mentality of a triathlete. She knows that she should do this one day, then work on something else tomorrow. She’s a little more laid back than Hunter. He wants to do everything right now, today,” her mother says.

Before she can get to the Olympics, Honeycutt still has a lot of competing to do for the Tift County program. Track season is right around the corner, and she will run the 800 meters and the mile for Eighth Street Middle. She enjoys the mile but not the 800. “It’s not my favorite. It’s too short. I just run it to score points for my team,” she says. Running as a sixth-grader last year, she placed second in the mile and fifth in the 800 at the region meet. This year, she hopes to win the mile and finish on the podium in the 800.  

As talented as she is on the track and in the 3200 meters she has had to run for middle school cross country, Marci Honeycutt doesn’t think these events show her daughter’s true potential. The longer the race, the better her children perform. “She won’t know what she’s capable of until she can run a 5K. Hunter is better at 10Ks. They both know how to out-suffer their opponents,” she says. •

---