Prep Wednesday : Hitting Their Marks : Petersen Twins (Plus Two) Tracking Records

The Laguna Beach townfolk probably nod knowingly to themselves when they pass two blond, tanned, pony-tailed girls running on the hilly town streets, the Laguna Beach High School track or--best of all--the beach: Yes, there go the Petersen twins.

Wendy and Kirsten--or to be fair about it and alphabetize, Kirsten and Wendy--are the daughters of Sue and Pete Petersen, well-known Laguna Beach marathoners. They are identical twins, giving them that existence so fascinating to those who were not born with an extra self and often so frustrating to those who were.

Chances are good, though, that the girls folks see running around town are not Kirsten and Wendy, but some other version of blond, tanned, pony-tailed Laguna Beach High runners.

There are four of them, all seniors, and all unmistakeably in the mold of the California beach girl. Besides Kirsten and Wendy, there is Kim Snip--Kirsten’s best friend--and Meagan Barnett, Wendy’s best friend. They have been the mainstay of the team since stepping onto the track as freshmen. At every meet the four wear identical high-on-the-head pony tails, held in place by identically colored ribbon. And at every meet they are the subject of both admiration and derision--”They impress en masse,” said Stuart Calderwood, Laguna Beach coach.

They are also pretty good. Laguna Beach, with an enrollment of only 900, won the Pacific Coast League cross-country title in the fall. Last Saturday at the Arcadia Invitational, which attracts the premier athletes in the West, the Laguna Beach medley relay team placed ninth. For three legs of the event, each runner set a personal record, propelling the team into third place before the final leg--the mile. Only a too-fast start and subsequent fade in the mile by the anchor, Meagan, dropped them out of the top three.

For Calderwood, that race may have been the highlight of these 3 1/2 years of coaching, and of all the jealousies, mistaken identities and lackadaisical attitudes that sometimes went with coaching four look-alike girls whose greatest joy sometimes seemed saved for the days when Calderwood would walk out to the track, look around and say that on that day, they would run on the beach.

Saturday, they set three personal records and a school-record among them.

“I’ve really come around to admiring them,” Calderwood said.

Here’s how the race unfolded:

Three-Quarter-Mile

Wendy ran the three-quarter-mile Saturday, the first leg. She started slowly and, after one lap, was second to last.

When she and her sister began running, Wendy was best at distances of more than a mile, and Kirsten, the slightly bigger and taller of the two, at the shorter distances. Later, Wendy usurped Kirsten in some of the shorter distances, though never the quarter-mile. Being edged out by someone with the same genes was so frustrating for Kirsten that Calderwood says she began veering toward pursuits other than running. The twins refused to do the same things, wear the same clothes or ride in the same car. If they both left home for practice, they most often took two cars.

“It was Kirsten beating Wendy and then Wendy beating Kirsten,” Kim remembers. “It was hard for them to see why one of them would be faster than the other.”

The pressure of being twins, and of being the daughters of such well-known runners as Pete and Sue Petersen--who, at 43, has qualified for the 1988 U.S. Olympic women’s marathon trials by running a 2:47.03 marathon--made it difficult.

“It was like they couldn’t succeed,” Calderwood said. “They were automatically perceived to be great runners, just because of their parents. They had to meet those expectations or fail. They never had a chance to surprise anyone.”

To an extent, Kirsten and Wendy dealt with the pressures by going to extremes to be different, such as the two-car bit. During that time, it was a grievous sin to make the easy mistake of calling Kirsten by Wendy’s name or vice-versa.

“If you came up behind them and one of them was wearing the other’s hair style and you called her by the wrong name, you were likely to be crossed off their list of friends,” Calderwood said.

But they also seemed to take to the defense mechanisms of not trying too hard, of pretending the races weren’t important and of each refusing to cross the line ahead of the other--always together.

Saturday, Wendy ran what Calderwood calls “the race of her life.”

“It was the smartest, most mature, tough race,” Calderwood said.

After the deliberate, slow-paced start, Wendy finished the leg in 3:45.8--a five-minute-mile pace, a personal best and a school record. Laguna Beach was in third place when Wendy handed off to Felicia Chalmers.

Quarter-Mile

Felicia Chalmers is not mistaken for a twin, triplet or quadruplet. But she does have the trademark identical hair-ribbon, given to her by the others as a token of initiation. This is the first track season for Chalmers, a multisport athlete at Laguna Beach who decided to try track instead of swimming in her senior year and has broken into the school’s all-time top 10 in three events--the quarter-mile, the high jump and the triple jump.

Kim no longer runs in the medley relay, but concentrates on the mile and the two-mile, both of which she has set personal bests in this season. She is a tad slower than the others, her hair a shade darker.

“Back in freshman year, people would mistake Kirsten and I for twins,” Kim said. “Sophomore year, it was Wendy and I. Junior year, we were triplets, and this year people think we’re quadruplets.”

Chalmers was passed by one runner during the race--but she returned the favor, passing the runner at the tape in a personal-best 63.9. Laguna Beach was still in third.

Half-Mile

Kirsten, the beachiest of these beachy girls, wears her bathing suit top under her T-shirt at workouts and is the only surfer among the four. She has a tendency to go out too fast and get discouraged, but Saturday she caught herself after a fast start and held off.

Like the others, Kirsten cultivates the persona of a beach girl and considers the term a compliment.

“You wouldn’t want to be called inland girl ,” she said. “I would die if I didn’t live by the beach. Whenever we’re not home, people go look for us at the beach.”

Anyone looking can usually find them at either Anita Street beach or Oak Street beach.

In the past year, Kirsten, who would like you to know that she caught her first wave at San Onofre with her father, has taken up surfing and all its accompanying gear and tackle and trim. Surfers, to be more precise.

“I met a pro surfer and he called and asked me out,” Kirsten said. “I was really stoked.”

Saturday, Kirsten, who said she had considered leaving the track team last year, ran a personal best.

It may have helped that she wasn’t running against her sister, but the twins seem to have matured enough to put that aside.

“We were always in the same grade, had the same friends and wanted to do the same things,” Kirsten said. “Now that we’re going away to college, that has kind of changed. It’s not so important to be apart.

Kirsten will attend San Diego State next year, as will Kim. Wendy is going to another school in a blissful spot, UC Santa Barbara. Meagan, whose father is Newport Harbor water polo Coach Bill Barnett, will attend UCLA or Cal.

Kirsten kicked in for a personal best Saturday at 2:24.5. With Laguna Beach in third, she handed the baton to Meagan.

Mile

Meagan was not one of the top runners on the team when she was a freshman, but she has improved so much that her times are often the best. Because she and Wendy, her best friend, match strides when they run, she is often dubbed a Petersen twin. But there have been times, Calderwood says, when people have run up to the Petersen twins after a race, ignoring Meagan, who finished ahead of both.

The competition, not only between the twins but among the four, used to be difficult to bear, Meagan said.

“When we’re doing intervals (a type of workout), you’re not supposed to race, you’re supposed to run together. But somebody used to always be trying to win. Now if one day somebody feels good, they try to really push us all.”

Saturday, Meagan, excited by the big crowd, ran her first lap in 72 seconds, a time for a 4:48 mile, which would have approached a national record.

“At that point, her race was predetermined by the laws of physics,” Calderwood said.

Meagan: “I just pooped out. I ran the first lap too fast.”

She finished with a 5:35 mile, and the total of 12:48.4 gave Laguna Beach ninth place.

A ninth-place finish at the prestigious Arcadia Invitational is no small accomplishment. And, they can remember, they were almost third.

It was no day at the beach, but it would do.