ORANGE COUNTY CROSS-COUNTRY CHAMPIONSHIPS : Choice Is Hers, but It Runs in the Family

Taryn Lawson, a freshman cross-country runner at Ocean View High School, wasn’t pushed, bribed or coerced into the sport. She began running because she wanted to.

But when Lawson was growing up, it might have been easy for someone to persuade her to lace on a pair of running shoes and run her heart out because she showed talent and she had endurance. And because her name was Lawson.

The Lawson name is well-known in age-group running circles. Sheri and Craig Lawson, Taryn’s cousins, were born one year apart and began running at 9. After a successful age-group career, Craig won the 1988 L.A. City Section cross-country championship while at Granada Hills High; Sheri was the section 3,200-meter champion in track and field at Granada Hills’ Kennedy High.

Sheri and Craig’s siblings, Marc, Marci, Emili and Juli, also run. Taryn Lawson, 15, grew up around the sport--two of her brothers also ran--but she was never forced into it. She started running in seventh grade. The choice was hers--and still is.

“It started with my brothers,” says Taryn, who is the No. 1 runner for the Seahawks, who will compete in today’s Orange County Championships at Irvine Regional Park in Orange.

“Whenever my cousins came down to Huntington Beach . . . we just all ran.”

But Taryn, who kept a low-key approach, jogging through the neighborhood with friends and participating in jog-a-thons, says she has never felt pressure from her parents or siblings.

“I wanted running to be her idea,” says her mother, Elsie Lawson. “ . . . I never ask her if she’s run today because I try to not put pressure on her.”

Elsie says her daughter is self-motivated. Taryn comes across as such.

Taryn shows a reporter a school report she did for an eighth-grade class. The 21-page typewritten report is on her grandfather, Sterling Macfarlane, 75, who lives in Pioneer, Calif. His life, telling what he did growing up and what he does and likes now, leaps from the pages.

Taryn received an A-plus on the paper, but she downplays the effort, saying she had four months to do the report and it wasn’t really all that difficult. The paper suggests otherwise. But that’s the way Lawson is. She seems to give the extra effort not only in her school projects, but also in her running.

“What impresses me about Taryn is her consistency,” says Ocean View Coach Beth Chilcott, who first saw Lawson run in Huntington Beach Park and Recreation meets two years ago. “She’s so tiny (5 feet 1, 85 pounds), but she’s determined. She makes up (for it) in spunk.”

Chilcott remembers the Sept. 28 Dana Hills Invitational. Lawson was leading the freshman race, but Edison’s Jennifer Formosa passed her 30 yards before the finish. A lot of runners would have given up at this point, Chilcott says, but Lawson didn’t and eventually passed Formosa to win the race.

--At the Sept. 14 Buena-Ventura invitational, Lawson was second in the frosh/soph race in 18 minutes 8 seconds.

--At the Stanford Invitational on Oct. 5, Lawson led her team to the Division I title, placing seventh over the 5,000-meter course in 19 minutes 47 seconds, less than a minute behind winner Krissy Look of Shasta, who placed fifth in the Division II State meet last season.

--At last week’s Mt. San Antonio College Invitational, which was halted because of hot, smoggy weather conditions, Lawson placed 13th in the individual sweepstakes race in 19:58, leading her team to second place.

It was at the Stanford meet, held on the school’s golf course, that Taryn first saw her cousin Marci, a freshman at Clovis West, compete. Marci, 14, who started running when she was 5, finished 20th in the Division II race. Marci took up running at an early age, but so did Taryn’s other cousins, Sheri (21), Craig (20), Marc (16), Emili (13) and Juli (11).

Sheri, a senior at Brigham Young who quit running competitively when she got to college, started running when she was 9 after her soccer coach suggested to her father that she join a running club. A few years later, Sheri and Craig were running for the Northridge Pacers.

“The whole family ran; every time a kid was ready to start running, they ran for the Northridge Pacers,” said Taryn’s uncle, Roger Lawson, who coached the club’s distance runners until 1989 when he moved his family to Fresno.

“My hat is off to Taryn as far as achieving what she has--I know because my brother Jon is supportive, but he’s taking a passive role. It’s coming from her own.”

Roger admits, after nine consecutive years, Sheri is burned out on the sport.

“As it worked out, she had a great career from age group up to high school,” he said. “Then she did burn out by the time she got to college.”

But Taryn, who once tried a running club but didn’t like it, avoided burnout. Running is still fresh and new to her, she says.

“Running relaxes you,” she says. “It feels like you’re in charge. It’s you .”