Mirjam Swanson
It wouldn't be a sport without expectations.
After all, expectations are what hatch surprises -- and
disappointments.
At the CIF Southern Section cross-country championships held Saturday
at Mt. San Antonio College, the young Burbank boys' squad ran better than
they'd thought they would, the Flintridge Prep girls raced exactly how
they wanted to and the La Canada girls' team didn't achieve nearly what
it planned to.
Hoover High's Efrain Oliveras ran better than he'd dared hope and his
teammate, Anita Siraki, didn't have to.
Siraki, very much a headliner in the meet that was 1,055 runners
strong, won her ninth straight race with slightly less ease than usual.
She clocked 16 minutes 53.70 seconds, the fastest time in the meet's
history and the second-fastest ever at the Mt. SAC course, behind her own
16:38 course record set last month. She now has four of the seven
all-time fastest times on the course.
Hoover Coach Greg Switzer couldn't help but fret about whether the
course-record performance by Big Bear's Ryan Hall less than a half hour
before Siraki's race, fearing it might cause the Hoover senior to feel
the need to match the record, and thus overexpend herself.
Siraki did pull away faster than Switzer would have liked, and she
admittedly felt the full week of training during the race, but still she
beat runner-up Liza Pasciuto by 30 seconds and then had a familiar retort
to a familiar question about her specific pre-race expectations: "Just to
win, I justwanted to win. "I had a really hard interval workout last
week and I could still feel that today. People were like, 'It would be
great to have two course records today,' amd I'm like, 'Yeah, it would,
but...' It is two records in the same, year, so that's good."
Siraki, unlike the majority of the other runners at Saturday's meet,
hadn't yet started tapering her training, becuase her schedule is set up
to prepare her for the Foot Locker national meet three weeks from now.
In the first race of the morning, Oliveras qualified for the state
meet next Saturday in Fresno by finishing his final Southern Section
Division I cross-country race in fifth place with a time of 15:14.70.
Crescenta Valley High sophomore Chris Snyder also ran well, placing 17th
in 15:34.90.
Oliveras' effort shaved a significant 16 seconds offof his previous
personal record.
"It's pretty gratifying to watch them run well when they're supposed
to," Switzer said. "That's what's most gratifying is working with the
