Canchola Disrupts Pecking Order : Cross-country: Dramatic improvement of Nordhoff freshman has stunned experts.

Jack Farrell, the long-time cross-country coach at Thousand Oaks High, made the remarks during the awards ceremony at last Saturday’s Foot Locker West regional in Fresno, but he could have been summing up the thoughts of anyone involved in high school distance running.

“That’s a girl who’s gone from running 21 minutes (for three-miles) two months ago to (17:33) today,” Farrell said of Nordhoff freshman Elaine Canchola as she accepted her medal for finishing second. “It’s absolutely amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Neither has Nordhoff Coach Ken Reeves, who has been training high school distance runners for the past two decades.

Neither has Doug Speck, an editor for Track & Field News and one of the nation’s foremost high school cross-country authorities.

Canchola, who will run in the Foot Locker national championships at San Diego’s Morley Field today, has made a meteoric rise through the high school distance-running ranks since placing fifth in the Blue Lagoon Invitational at UC Santa Barbara on Sept. 24 with a time of 20 minutes 46 seconds for three miles.

“She is an amazing commodity,” Speck said. “Most of the kids who qualify for the national championships have a fairly extensive background in youth competition, but not her. She has less experience than anyone I can ever remember running in this meet.”

Canchola, who is in her first cross-country season, didn’t start running track until last year, when she timed 5:39 in the mile.

Although that was a fine mark for someone her age, Reeves would have been happy if she’d dipped under 19 minutes by the end of the season.

“There’s no way in the world that I would have envisioned that she would have run this fast,” he said. “After the Ventura County meet, I jokingly said, ‘I think she’ll run 17:48.’ I kept saying that, but I had no basis at all to do so.”

The Ventura County championships, which were held at Lake Casitas in Ojai on Oct. 28, is where the 5-foot, 90-pound Canchola first gained attention.

She had run a promising 19:00 to finish 13th in the Division III sweepstakes race of the Mt. San Antonio College Invitational the previous week. But when she raced to a 20-meter lead over Amy Skieresz of Agoura--the defending State Division I champion--after the first half-mile of the county meet, more than one spectator asked, “Who the heck is that?”

Reeves joked that Canchola was the secret weapon he’d been waiting to unleash, but he too was surprised.

“I was a little apprehensive when she blasted out and took the lead,” he said. “But when I saw her at the mile mark, she looked under control so I didn’t worry.”

Although Canchola (18:32) eventually finished third behind Skieresz (17:48) and Thousand Oaks’ Kim Mortensen (18:23), it was the last time she would take a back seat to that talented duo.

Canchola ran 18:27 at Lake Casitas to win the Frontier League title Nov. 3, and then came the stunner, a 17:53 clocking at Mt. SAC to win her heat of the Southern Section Division III prelims Nov. 12.

“I’ve seen a lot of things since I’ve been coaching and been surprised a lot of times,” Reeves said. “But that was the first time I was truly shocked.”

Canchola proved the race wasn’t a fluke by running a freshman course record of 17:35 to win the Division III title at Mt. SAC the following week.

Although Buena Park freshman Heather Garritson, the runner-up in the section finals, defeated Canchola in the State Division III final at Fresno’s Woodward Park two weeks ago, Canchola wasn’t disappointed.

“I just learned some things at state,” Canchola said. “My goal (at the West regional) was to try and beat her. I was pretty sure I could do that.”

She not only beat Garritson, who finished seventh, she also topped Skieresz (fifth) and Mortensen (10th) in cutting 34 seconds from her time at the State meet.

Today, she’ll shoot for a top-10 finish in a meet she hadn’t heard of until a few weeks ago.

“(This season) has been a very, very big surprise, but I’m really thankful that it happened,” Canchola said. “My only goal at the start of the season was to try and get a lower time each week and I’ve pretty much done that.”

Canchola’s rise to stardom has people asking about her athletic background, but it is nothing extraordinary.

Born in Ventura and raised in Ojai, she is the third of six children. Canchola’s parents are natives of Guadalajara, Mexico.

Neither were competitive athletes, but Canchola says that her father and both her grandfathers were known for being fleet of foot as youngsters.

“I guess some of that has been passed onto me,” she said.

All of the above, combined with a low-mileage training regimen that averages less than 25 miles a week, has people wondering how much faster Canchola can run this season or during track season in the spring.

Speck figures she could run “10:45 for two miles right now,” but he sees no reason to try to set limits.

“It’s neat to see things like this happen because when you’ve been around this sport for a while, you have a tendency to establish a pecking order in how runners should stack up against each other,” he said. “But not with her. She has just blown those lists away.”