SPORTSTALK : He’s on a Fast Track To the Top

With each passing lap, Margarito Casillas increases his pace around the dilapidated dirt track at Hoover High in Glendale. Cross-country practice has ended and his teammates have left. Only Casillas and the football team remain.

“Slow down, Margo, you’ve done enough!” one player shouts.

“Hey, marathon man, go ahead and stop!” yells another.

The slightly built Casillas, 18, wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, stares ahead, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. He gazes up long enough to acknowledge the players’ comments before returning his sights forward.

Running on the track or nearby hills and streets of Glendale, the 5-foot-7, 115-pound senior trains year-round and often twice a day. He usually runs 65 to 70 miles a week, but sometimes logs as many as 90 miles a week.

The soft-spoken Casillas, though, contemplates very little on the countless miles and hours of training. Instead, his thoughts often wander to drawing.

“I like to draw animals, eagles and hawks,” Casillas says. “I try to block out my competition and see myself like a wild animal. I’m free with no problems. I’m like a beast on a trail and there’s nobody pushing you.”

Not many have been close to Casillas this season. He has won the Bell-Jeff, Woodbridge and Kenny Staub invitationals. Casillas also broke his course record set as a junior to win the Santa Clarita invitational at College of the Canyons.

He is among the favorites to win the State Division I individual title Nov. 28 in Fresno after placing second last season. Casillas also won the Kinney Western Regional championship as a junior and placed fifth in the national meet in San Diego. Cross-country races, typically three miles, are often run at parks on grass and dirt trails over undulating terrain.

During the track season last spring, Casillas ran 4 minutes 20.55 seconds and 9:05.79 in the 1,600 and the 3,200 meters, placing seventh in the state meet in the longer race.

Those achievements have brought Casillas unexpected notice.

“People call my name when I’m running or at school, they come to me and say: ‘You’re the fast runner,’ ” Casillas says. “Everybody expects you to do good. You can take it in a bad way or you can use it to motivate yourself.”

Much of his motivation comes from within. He often trains alone in the morning and does an extended workout at practice in the afternoon. Casillas, however, has been forced to make concessions to maintain his strict training regimen.

“Sometimes there’s a party or my friends say let’s go out and do this or whatever and I can’t go because I have a race the next day or I have to go run,” Casillas says. “It’s kind of hard sometimes.”

Casillas has also learned to cope with his first losing season at Hoover. The Tornadoes’ string of 27 consecutive dual meet victories was broken in a loss to South Pasadena in the season’s first meet. Hoover, coached by Greg Switzer, won its fifth Pacific League title in a row last year, but its chances for a sixth are slim.

Casillas and Alvaro Lopez, who finished second behind Casillas at the Staub meet, are the team’s only seniors. The rest are first-or second-year runners. Casillas, though, hopes he can inspire the newcomers to continue with the sport.

“It’s kind of strange after winning all those years to lose your league title,” Casillas says. “I tell the beginners to keep at it and next season or in a couple of years they can be awesome.”

Lopez also appreciates Casillas’ sincerity.

“Margo’s quite modest and very humble,” Lopez says. “After he won (at Kenny Staub), the whole time he spent talking about how well I did and not on what he had done. That’s kind of nice coming from somebody that good.”

Early in his career, Margarito looked to brother Angel, 19, now competing for Mt. San Antonio College, for inspiration. Margarito began running in the seventh grade but had no plans of pursuing it in high school until Angel joined the cross-country and track teams at Hoover and brought home a medal from a track meet.

Now, Margarito, an aspiring architect, has designs on earning a university scholarship. He has attracted interest from UCLA, Oregon, Wisconsin, Arizona, Arkansas and the Air Force Academy.

His father, Angel Sr., works as a janitor at a convalescent home to support a family of eight, including Rosario, a freshman on the Hoover cross-country team. Margarito works part time at a video store for money to buy clothes and running shoes.

“(My father) takes care of all of us and a scholarship would be nice,” Casillas says. “Running is a main part of my life but . . . without an education you’re nothing.”

Should Casillas chose UCLA, he would be reunited with former Hoover teammates Eliazar Herrera and Creighton Harris. The two were seniors at Hoover when Casillas was a freshman in 1989. Herrera and Harris often offered encouragement and advice to the upstart ninth-grader.

Herrera’s older brother, Pablo, who also had competed at Hoover, helped coach Casillas. Pablo was killed at age 20 when his car slid off a rain-slicked road near Glendale College where he had been running.

Casillas still looks to Eliazar Herrera and Harris for advice and moral support. He occasionally trains with the two on weekends and talks with them by telephone several times a week.

“When I went to big meets and saw how easy they won, I was like, aw, man! I wish I was like that,” Casillas says. “Pablo told me if you want to be good, there’s no secret to running fast. It’s just how bad you want it. You’ve got to train hard to get there.”

That has never been a problem for Casillas.