Her Magnificent Seven

Although she is one of the nation’s top all-around high school track-and-field athletes, no one at the L.A. Invitational indoor meet at the Sports Arena on Saturday will see Liz Giltner of Chaminade High in her best event.

Giltner, who placed sixth in the high jump in the 1994 and ’95 State championships, will be one of the favorites in that event. But the heptathlon is the event in which she posted the nation’s second-highest high school score last year.

The heptathlon is not contested indoors so she will settle for competing in her former specialty Saturday.

“Last year, I felt like a high jumper who was competing in the heptathlon,” Giltner said. “But I’m starting to feel more and more like a heptathlete who’s a good high jumper.”

Giltner has excelled in the high jump since 1991, but Chaminade Coach Stefan Hoelzel encouraged her to try the heptathlon last year because she was heavier than most elite high jumpers and had the competitive mettle and athletic versatility necessary to excel in the event.

“She can fight and this is what you need in the heptathlon,” said Hoelzel, a national-class high jumper for East Germany in the early 1980s. “She also has pretty good coordination and can switch from one event to the other pretty easily.”

Despite Hoelzel’s rave review of her abilities, the 5-foot-10 1/2 junior had reservations about the heptathlon, which consists of the 100-meter high hurdles, high jump, shotput and 200 on the first day, and the long jump, javelin and 800 on the second.

“I didn’t necessarily like the idea because I knew how exhausting [the heptathlon] could be,” Giltner said. “I knew how much of a toll it could take on you.”

Giltner’s views were based on her experiences in the indoor pentathlon, in which participants compete in the 60-meter hurdles, high jump, shotput, long jump and 800 in the same day. But after totaling 4,586 points to win the heptathlon in the intermediate division (ages 15-16) of the USA Track & Field Southern California Junior Olympics last June, she had a change of heart.

It turned out that competing in seven events over two days was not as taxing as taking part in five in one.

“After that first one, I thought, ‘OK. This isn’t so bad,’ ” Giltner said. “I actually started to like it.”

In July, she raised her personal best to 4,609 points while finishing second to Mission Viejo freshman Ashley Bethel in the USATF Regional Junior Olympics. She improved to 4,799 points in the USATF National Junior Olympics in San Jose later that month.

Although Bethel, third in the 100 hurdles and fifth in the long jump in last year’s State championships, topped her with a nation-leading total of 4,836 points, Giltner was hooked on the heptathlon.

“I think I can still accomplish a great deal in the high jump,” Giltner said. “But ultimately the heptathlon is going to be my best event.”

Giltner also relishes the heptathlon’s uniqueness and the challenge of excelling in seven events.

“You get to hurdle, you get to jump, you get to throw and you get to run,” she said. “I love trying to do all of those things well. . . . It’s very challenging physically as well as mentally.”

Giltner’s mental toughness was tested on the first day of the Junior Olympics in San Jose. She opened the competition with a personal best of 15.14 seconds in the 100 hurdles and came within an inch of her best in the high jump by clearing 5-7. But a 32-11 3/4 effort in the shotput was nearly two feet off her best.

“I was devastated,” she said. “I was crying. I felt sure that [the shotput] would shoot my chances of doing well.”

It didn’t.

Giltner ran a personal best of 25.84 in the 200 and registered heptathlon bests of 17-3 1/4 in the long jump, 114-10 in the javelin and 2 minutes 39.85 seconds in the 800 on the second day of competition.

The 800 is her weakest event, but she was encouraged because she broke 2:40 for the first time.

“I was really happy that I was able to run my best,” she said. “I really don’t like the 800 anyway and after six events it seems like an eternity.”

Whether it’s on the track or in the classroom, where she has a 3.94 grade-point-average, the outgoing Giltner is a self-described perfectionist. She wants to excel in everything she does, but there are times when she is her own worst critic.

“She will drive herself past the point of diminishing returns,” said her father, Larry. “The national Junior Olympics is a great example of that. She was really upset about the shotput, but it wasn’t that big a deal. Even though her mark was short of her best, it cost her only 34 points.”

Of course, losing 34 points in one event was crucial in a competition that she lost by 37.

“It’s the ultimate woulda, shoulda, coulda event,” Liz Giltner said. “But you can’t think about that too much during a competition. If you don’t perform well in one event, you need to put it behind you and concentrate on the next one.”

The seasoning gained last summer and the improvement expected to come with another year of maturity has Giltner shooting for big things this season. She figures she’s capable of raising her personal best in the high jump to 6 feet, which would make her a state-title contender, and hopes to break the 5,100-point barrier in the heptathlon during the summer. The heptathlon is not contested in the State championships.

Only six U.S. high school athletes have broken 5,100 points in the heptathlon, but Hoelzel says Giltner is capable of scoring substantially more during the next two high school seasons.

Hoelzel was an instructor at one of East Germany’s elite sports universities during the late 1980s, coaching heptathlete Heike Tischler, who scored 6,589 in 1988 and was ranked eighth in the world by Track & Field News magazine.

“I enjoy coaching Liz because her attitude is that [track and field] is what she really wants to do right now,” he said. “She’s really interested in being a good athlete and I’d like to see if I can help her be a great one.”