BUTTE, Mont. -- Alyssa Plant needed a break.

She had been running her entire life, it seemed. And after an injury cut short her freshman season for the Montana Tech cross country team, she decided she was done with the sport.

Fast-forward five years, and Plant is fresh off a Frontier Conference championship—both individual and the Oredigger team—and will toe the line alongside her teammates Friday morning at the NAIA national championship meet. The men's race on the Gans Creek Cross Country Course in Columbia, Mo. goes off at 9:30 a.m. Mountain time; the women race an hour later.

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"I was so burnt out of it," Plant, now a graduate student, remembered of her freshman year. "And now it's something that is my entire life."

Late last summer, Plant was running on the Montana's Copperway trail just down the hill from the Montana Tech campus, and she ran into the team on a training run. Tech was in need of another runner to round out the lineup, and somebody asked if she was interested in coming back.

She thought about it, asked her parents in Helena for counsel ("Don't be a wimp," they said.), and rejoined the team just a week before its first meet.

"I wasn't necessarily in shape to run a race," Plant said, "but I had been running consistently."

In that first meet back, the Providence Open in Great Falls, Plant raced to 18th place and was the third Oredigger across the line.

She went on to a successful 2023 season, taking 14th at the Frontier Conference championship and qualifying for the national meet, where she finished 221st in the 331-woman field. But more importantly, she fell back in love with the sport.

And as she was preparing for graduate school—Plant is chasing a master's degree in environmental engineering after finishing her undergraduate work in the same last spring—she began to set expectations for her swan-song season.

"I knew I was going to up the mileage, and with a full summer of training, I could only go up from there," she said. "I was really motivated by the fact that this is my last year, and I only had one chance to get it right."

All she's done is log three top-five finishes in five races this season, including winning the Frontier meet and leading Montana Tech to its first-ever conference title in the sport, an accomplishment few outside the program acknowledged as a possibility heading into the meet.

Plant said she saw the team rounding into form in the days leading up to the championship meet.

"You can't go out and compete like crazy until you believe in yourselves … and they really believed in themselves at conference," she said. "All of them showed up in ways that they didn't expect, and I think they'll do even better at nationals."

As for Plant, she has a simple goal for her final collegiate cross country meet: a top-40 finish and All-America honors.

"I know I can run faster when I have the right competition," she said.