Winning the Race Against the Clock : Track: Santa Monica Track Club runner has third-fastest 1,500-meter time by an American this year.

UCLA track Coach Bob Larsen encourages his distance runners to give the 3,000-meter steeplechase a try before each season.

Christian Cushing-murray, however, had aspirations of becoming a 1,500-meter runner instead of a steeplechaser and tried his best to discourage Larsen as a redshirt freshman in 1986. The thought of competing in a race that included 28 three-foot-high barriers and seven water jumps was not particularly appealing to Cushing-murray.

“I would purposely exaggerate my form over the barriers and make it look worse than I actually was,” said Cushing-murray, the City Section runner-up at 1,600-meters for North Hollywood High in 1984. “I would stick my right arm out when I was going over at the same time to look more uncoordinated. To this day, I don’t know if (Larsen) ever knew.”

And as fate would have it, Cushing-murray, 23, got his wish and has become quite adept at his preferred event. He now competes for the Santa Monica Track Club.

He has run the third-fastest 1,500-meter time by an American this year. Cushing-murray ran a lifetime-best of 3 minutes 38.81 seconds in placing third in the Santa Monica Distance Classic at Santa Monica College on May 17.

Steve Scott, a three-time Olympian and the U.S. record-holder in the mile (3:47.69) won in 3:37.34, followed by Treg Scott in 3:38.61.

Cushing-murray’s time was nearly three seconds faster than his previous best of 3:41.33, set in Barcelona in July, and also qualified him for the U.S. Olympic Trials in New Orleans next summer.

“When I came across the finish (in Santa Monica) I knew I had a (personal record), but I was surprised how quick it was,” said Cushing-murray, the 17th-fastest U.S. runner at 1,500 meters in 1990.

Cushing-murray, who placed 11th at The Athletics Congress outdoor national championships on Randalls Island in New York City last week, recently resigned as a full-time instructor at Tobinworld, a private school for autistic children in Glendale. He is preparing for races in Switzerland, the Netherlands, France and Yugoslavia this summer.

Cushing-murray, who lives in Santa Monica, is hopeful that a good showing in Europe will result in product endorsements and increased appearance fees.

“I have committed myself to do the best I can under the circumstances,” said Cushing-murray, who married former UCLA distance runner Kathy Kiernan last month and also coaches cross-country at Windward High in West Los Angeles.

“I’ve been getting some money to run in meets, but it’s only chump change. You can probably add two or three zeros to that to give you an idea of what the big guys get.”

As a senior at North Hollywood, Cushing-murray finished fourth in the City Section cross-country championships.

In track, he clipped more than 15 seconds off his 1,600-meter best in the final three weeks of the season to place second at City finals in 4:15.07, but he failed to attract any scholarship offers and went to UCLA as a walk-on.

“I had planned to go to UCLA all along,” said Cushing-murray, whose father James and his uncle Geoffrey competed on the cycling and fencing teams at UCLA.

“I never thought about continuing running beyond high school. Running was just an afterthought and I did it because I thought it was a cool thing. I didn’t have a lot of incentive and didn’t know how serious I was.”

Cushing-murray’s grandfather is responsible for the unorthodox punctuation of the surname, coming up with the notion after Cushing-murray’s great-grandmother remarried.

“From what I heard from relatives, he was a little bit eccentric and wanted to be different, so he didn’t capitalize the murray,” said Cushing-murray, who is listed as Cushing-Murray in the 1991 UCLA track and field press guide.

“I’ve given up trying to tell people not to capitalize it. It’s hard enough getting them to spell it right. In high school, I was always the last one filling in my name on bubble tests.”

Cushing-murray concedes that he also often brought up the rear in workouts and races his freshman year at UCLA in 1985. He failed to improve upon his high school times, running the equivalent of a 4:30 mile.

“He didn’t look too promising in workouts his first year,” said Jim Ortiz, a teammate of Cushing-murray’s at UCLA and on the Santa Monica Track Club. “There was some talk that he might not be back for his second year.”

Skipping a grade in elementary school and graduating from high school at 16 did not help matters.

“I was young for my year as it was because my birthday is in October,” the 5-foot-11, 140-pound Cushing-murray said. “I was underdeveloped and looked like I was 16 going on 14.”

Cushing-murray ran 3:47.90 in the 1,500 as a redshirt freshman in 1986 and improved to 3:46.30 as a sophomore. He finished fourth and fifth in the Pacific 10 Conference championships in 1988 and 1989, respectively.

“I knew fairly early that he had great talent,” Larsen said. “Other kids had run the types of times he ran at North Hollywood, but he was definitely going to be a four-minute miler. It was a slow process because he was so young.”

Cushing-murray’s biggest breakthrough at UCLA came in 1989 when he won the 1,500 in 3:42.81 in a double-dual meet against Louisiana State and Houston as a senior. His victory helped UCLA emerge with a 77-77 tie with LSU to preserve a 43-meet unbeaten streak. Texas halted the seven-year streak at 52 in March 1991.

“We had the meet doped out that we were going to lose,” Cushing-murray said. “LSU had two other guys who had run substantially under 3:45 consistently during the season and everybody expected them to sweep the 1,500.”

Only a week earlier, Cushing-murray had been expecting to hang up his spikes at the end of the season.

“I had just run a miserable 800 in Florida and I was convinced that I was never going to run after college,” he said. “I was stuck at 3:46 or 47 for so long that I thought I had done the best I was capable of. The 3:42 kind of rearranged my main motivation.

“I didn’t want to look back later and wonder if I could have done this or done that.”

Cushing-murray credits Larsen’s training philosophy for keeping him involved in the sport.

“He brought me along slowly and didn’t burn me out,” said Cushing-murray, who runs 75 to 80 miles a week under the guidance of Joe Douglas, the manager of the Santa Monica Track Club.

“I am putting in a lot more quality work as well as quantity. It was not something I could have handled if I had not been brought up little by little.”

The transition to the European track circuit last summer was not as gentle. Cushing-murray sprained his right ankle while warming up for his first overseas 1,500 race in Lille, France.

“The ankle swelled up and there was no way I could run,” Cushing-murray said. “I was so upset because I had to take time off and peaked for the race.”

Cushing-murray could only jog for the next five days. His performance (3:52.23) in his next meet in Vigo, Spain did little to raise his confidence. A week later, he ran 3:41.33 in Barcelona.

Douglass anticipates more improvements for Cushing-murray.

“Carl Lewis calls him Santa Monica’s throwback to the ‘60s,” Douglas said. “He always has a positive aggressive attitude and I think that has helped him, especially in Europe.

“He has made sacrifices to make success a high priority. He is approaching a level where he has a chance to make the world championships and the Olympic team.”

The biggest barriers for Cushing-murray, however, have already been overcome.