LEWISTON – Through one mile, the mud was already starting to dry up and harden on Matt Driscoll’s legs.

By the second mile, the mud was thick, his shoes were sopping wet, and the sweat beaded down from his forehead.

But Driscoll, a senior at Lewiston High School, remained in the lead, in front of more than 1,000 other runners at the 2008 Festival of Champions in Belfast.

Driscoll faded a bit late, but stayed in the top 10. Almost as importantly, for the first time this season, Driscoll finished in front of teammate Robbie Leeman.

“I was 50 seconds slower,” Leeman admitted.

“That was a PR, too,” Driscoll said with a calculated smirk. “It was weird, because (the conditions) were so crappy with the mud and everything.”

All that did was push Leeman harder.

“It’s good to have each other to push each other, and there’s never an easy day in practice, because you’re always trying to be the top runner on the team,” Leeman said.

Leeman and Driscoll, the only two seniors on a deep, talented Lewiston cross country team, are a big reason the squad will have a shot at repeating its 2007 state title.

“You can have a good runner, and meet to meet, he or she isn’t going to have competition,” Lewiston coach Ray Putnam said. “But more importantly, who’s going to push them in practice every day? When you have two guys like that, they’re going to push each other, and they’re going to push the rest of the team. That’s the important thing.”

The contrast between the pair of runners is wide.

Leeman was a hockey player and an outfielder, making his statements on sheets of ice and large diamonds.

Still is, as a matter of fact.

But a desire to improve on the ice pushed him onto the trails.

“I knew I wanted to make varsity (hockey) as a freshman,” Leeman said. “I wanted something to keep my endurance up, so I started running five miles from my house every day. My dad said, ‘Well, what about cross country?’ I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of it before, and Lewiston didn’t even make states the year I was in eighth grade. I went out to try it, and I ended up finishing 17th in the state as a freshman.”

Putnam agreed that Leeman’s choice of a third sport was a bit unorthodox.

“He came here as a baseball player/hockey player trying cross country, and in the process turned into a cross country runner,” Putnam said, and then started to laugh a bit. “He’s one of the toughest kids you’re going to see. You’ve four or five guys up in the front, and there are some kids out there who love to throw elbows. No one’s throwing elbows at our kids with him there.”

Driscoll, on the other hand, started running in the seventh grade.

“I wasn’t really good at any other sports, so I started running,” Driscoll said. “I liked it, enjoyed it and it stuck.”

“He’s a runner, he came in as a runner and he runs year ’round,” Putnam said. “He’s run some incredible times, he was in the lead at the Festival of Champions for almost two-and-a-half miles, then some quality runners passed him.”

Even with their impressive seasons, Leeman and Driscoll aren’t safe atop the Blue Devils’ depth chart, either. With a religion-based fast over, Nos. 3 and 4, Hossein Ibrahim and Faisal Abdillahi, are starting to catch up, too.

“Hossein is capable of being up there, too,” Putnam said. “That fast (the Muslim runners) have, they’ve only been off that fast for a week. The first two weeks after the fast, they’re a little iffy, but they’ll all get a lot stronger. Who’s going to be the No. 1 runner at the end of the year? I wouldn’t even dare to guess.”

Their emergence has helped Lewiston at least partially forget that another top runner, Saddam Abdi, transferred to Minnesota over the summer. He would have been only a junior.

“He ran a 15:53 5K on the track the day before he left,” Putnam said. “Anybody else who loses a kid who can run 15:53, they’re done. We’re still in the hunt for a state title because of our depth.”

Depth, apparently, starts from the top.