Unleashed Arce Will Run With Big Dogs : Track: Palmdale senior saves energy for surge in two distance events.

Like one of Pavlov’s dogs who’d just heard a bell ring, Antonio Arce of Palmdale High began to salivate 2,000 meters into the boys’ 3,200 during last week’s Southern Section Masters meet at Cerritos College.

Jeff McLarty of Chino Hills Ayala had opened a small lead with three laps remaining and Arce’s initial reaction was to set out in pursuit of the Bulldog senior with a lethal kick in the race’s final stages.

Yet Arce reminded himself that his goal was simply to finish among the top five and qualify for the State track and field championships, which start today at Cerritos College in Norwalk.

So, while McLarty won with a state-leading time of 9 minutes 1.00 second, Arce was content to place third behind Thousand Oaks’ Jeff Fischer (9:08.16) with a season-best 9:08.29.

“It’s hard when someone goes like that,” Arce said. “It’s not easy to just let them go, especially when you’re feeling good, but I didn’t want to kill myself. I wanted to save myself for State and then go for it.”

Arce, the runner-up in the 3,200 in last year’s State meet, will compete in the 1,600 and 3,200 this time around, which made energy conservation a must last week. He’ll run in a qualifying heat in the 1,600 this afternoon--and if he qualifies as expected--in the finals of the 1,600 and 3,200 on Saturday.

Arce and Carmichael Jesuit junior Michael Stember are the only high-profile runners who are entered in the 1,600 and 3,200, a fact that had high school track aficionados questioning Arce’s sanity last week. But the Palmdale senior is confident that his training will allow him to perform well in both events.

“There’s so many possible conditions that’s it’s hard to predict times,” Arce said. “But I feel like I’m in shape to break 4:10 [in the 1,600] and 9 minutes [in the 3,200] if the conditions are right.”

Times of that caliber would lower Arce’s personal bests of 4:12.05 and 9:03.19 by substantial margins, but considering the source, they wouldn’t come as a shock.

The Notre Dame-bound Arce is not one to make idle boasts and none of the state’s top runners have timed their peaks any better than he during the past two years.

Last year, Arce cut more than 22 seconds off his personal best in the 3,200 over the last three weeks of the season, capped by the 9:03.19 in the State meet.

During the 1994 cross-country season, he suffered three early-season losses, but won Division II titles in the section and State championships, placed third in the Foot Locker West regional and seventh in the national championships to end the season.

Despite his success, Arce said there is no secret to peaking.

“I think that it’s a little bit mental and a little bit physical,” he said. “Some of it is just preparing yourself mentally to run faster than you’ve ever run before and some of it is doing the right workouts at the end of the season. Coach [Rob] Fairley has done a great job of giving me the right workouts.”

Fairley was the boys’ cross-country and track coach during Arce’s first three years at Palmdale, but moved to Folsom last summer when he was offered a teaching position.

Although he’s now the boys’ track coach at El Dorado Hills Oak Ridge High, Fairley has given Arce his workouts by telephone this season and been present at most of his big races.

“We talk on the phone like it’s just another day in practice,” Fairley said. “I think it says a lot about Antonio’s maturity that he hasn’t missed a beat this season.”

That’s quite a statement about a person who was so shy as a freshman that Fairley had difficulty making eye contact with him when they met in the fall of 1991.

“I remember when he and Angel [Gonzalez] walked into my office,” Fairley recalled. “Here were these two little guys, who looked like they should be in seventh grade or even younger, who wanted to know if this was where they could sign up for the cross-country team.

“I told them they were in the right place, and when I asked Antonio if he’d like to be called Antonio or Tony, he shrugged his shoulders, looked at the ground and said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ ”

Despite his diminutive size at the time (5 feet 1, 93 pounds), Arce showed promise in his first season of distance running. He placed 10th in the frosh-soph division of the Golden League finals and his characteristic light-on-his-feet stride was already evident.

Nonetheless, Arce planned to continue his career in baseball, the sport he had been playing for several years. Like a lot of kids, he dreamed of one day making it to the major leagues, but reality set in during his first season at Palmdale.

Nicknamed “Rainbow” by his freshman teammates because of his tendency to one-hop throws to first base, Arce was a shortstop with good range, but no arm.

Finally, he listened to his mother Carmen, who told him, “God didn’t make you to be a baseball player. He made you to be a runner.”

It was good advice.

As a sophomore, Arce finished third in the league varsity cross-country finals to help Palmdale to its first boys’ title and lowered his personal bests to 4:26 in the 1,600 and 9:38 in the 3,200 in track.

The 1993 cross-country season produced a breakthrough for Arce, who was born in Mexico City and raised in the San Fernando Valley before moving to Palmdale prior to his freshman year.

He finished fifth in the team sweepstakes race of the prestigious Mt. San Antonio College Invitational, third in the section Division I championships and eighth in the State Division I finals.

Then came a superb track season in which he had the third-fastest time in the country in the 3,200.

Heady stuff for a guy who was in awe of competitors in the 1992 State track championships.

“I remember thinking, ‘Man, those guys are gods out there,’ ” Arce said.

Younger runners now view the 5-foot-9, 130-pound Arce with the same kind of reverence, but he hasn’t let it go to his head.

“Everything that I do, academic or athletic, I do for myself,” said Arce, who has a 3.92 grade-point-average. “I don’t do it for attention or because people might think any more of me. I want people to know my whole personality. I don’t want to be viewed as just a good runner.”

According to his brother Mario, a junior and the No. 2 runner on the Falcon cross-country team that won the 1994 section Division II title, Antonio isn’t regarded as another dense jock.

Mario said that his older brother is one of the more-popular students at Palmdale and that his success in running has been instrumental in Antonio becoming more outgoing.

“He’s always been a little bit more reserved and less apt to confide in people than myself,” Mario said. “But there’s definitely been a change the last couple of years.”

The transformation was evident at the Masters meet where Antonio was one of the first people to wish opponents well before a race and to congratulate them afterward.

Antonio said he didn’t just wake up one day and decide to come out of his shell, but he’s glad that he’s no longer the shy “small fry” who hardly spoke as a freshman.

“We race against each other, but it’s important that we’re friends,” Arce said of his opponents. “I don’t want to be big-headed and not talk to them just because we compete against each other.”

Arce lists Fischer and Keith O’Doherty of Thousand Oaks, Brett Strahan of Hart and fellow Mexican natives Eleazar Hernandez of Camarillo and Adalberto Sanchez of Capistrano Valley as some of his closest fellow competitors. He adds that he spent time with double-distance-threat Stember of Jesuit on a recruiting trip to Cal State Sacramento earlier this year.

“He’s a cool guy,” Arce said.

Cool and the biggest of several obstacles standing between Arce and a pair of state titles.

Stember finished second in the 1,600 in the ’94 State meet and has run 4:08.79 in the mile and 9:02.36 in the 3,200 this season.

With a best of 1:50.29 in the 800, he also possesses the type of speed that can neutralize Arce’s potent last-lap abilities. But Arce never gave serious thought to giving up the 1,600 to focus on the 3,200 in the State meet after winning both events in the section Division I championships May 20, according to Fairley.

“I was warming down with him afterwards and I said, ‘Hey, if we back off the 1,600, you’re going to shatter nine minutes in the 3,200,’ ” Fairley said. “But he just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want to drop the 1,600. I want to run against Stember.’ ”