NOT STANDING STILL

It’s a typical Thursday for Heather Killeen-Frisone.

She and her husband, Steve Frisone, are awake by 5:30 a.m., and, no more than an hour later, are on their way to Harbor City for their jobs as teachers at Narbonne High.

It’s almost an hour’s drive from their Fullerton home before their workday can begin. Then, after it ends, they’re back fighting the rush-hour traffic, bound for classes they need to earn teaching credentials.

They don’t arrive home until after 10:30 p.m.

Then, around 11, the two former Cal State Fullerton track and cross-country athletes, who have been married since early July, really do hit the ground running.

“It’s usually only about five miles on Thursdays,” she says, sounding almost apologetic about the distance of their workout. “The other days we get home earlier, get started running earlier and make up for it.”

They run about 75-80 miles a week. It’s part of the commitment Killeen-Frisone made when she decided to pass up her final season of college track to begin her teaching career in January.

“Running is still a huge part of me,” she said at the time. “And I’m not giving that up.”

She hasn’t, though her college career as one of Fullerton’s most successful female athletes did end a little earlier than expected.

The highlight of that career was a sweep of the 3,000-, 5,000- and 10,000-meter events in the 1995 Big West Championships. It marked the first time an athlete won all three events in the conference meet. She also finished 11th that spring in the 10,000 at the NCAA Championships.

It was a year of honors.

She was chosen the university’s outstanding senior, a reflection of her academic record and her involvement in campus activities. She made the dean’s list eight of nine semesters and graduated with honors. She also was one of 10 finalists for the NCAA’s woman-of-the-year award.

When she enrolled in a master’s degree program that fall, she intended to compete one more time for the Titans with eligibility remaining from a season she missed because of an injury. But those plans suddenly changed.

A vacancy in January at Narbonne High, where Steve already was teaching math, was too tempting to pass up. She applied for the job teaching ninth-grade English, and was hired.

“Steve would come back from a day teaching, and I was always asking him questions about what had happened that day at school,” she said. “The more we talked, the more I realized that I wanted to be doing what he was doing.”

Nine months later, she has no regrets.

“I know I made the right decision,” she said. “I don’t know if I’d done as well running last spring if I had stayed in school. I just know I wasn’t happy at the time.”

Part of the problem was not being able to get some of the classes she needed in her master’s program.

“The teaching experience has been great,” she said. “It’s just hard for me to leave it at school. It takes on some of the same things that running did for me. You keep thinking, ‘How can I improve? How can I do it better tomorrow?’ ”

She found, however, that merely standing in a classroom a big part of the day is as challenging as a sprint to the finish line. “Your legs kill you after a day of teaching,” she said. “That really surprised me.”

But she also continued to train as a runner and competed in a few meets last spring while teaching and preparing for her wedding.

“I think I actually trained harder last spring than I did most of the time when I was running in college,” she said.

At the Mt. San Antonio College Relays in Walnut, she ran a personal-best 34 minutes 22 seconds in the 10,000. The winning time in the event in the NCAA Championships last spring was 32:56.63.

“That was the best I’d done by 55 seconds, so that was a huge improvement,” she said. “But then, the next time I ran the 10,000 in a meet in Canada, it was a bomb. I ran horrible. I don’t remember what my time was. I don’t even know if I ran the right number of laps. It was that bad.”

Her goal was to run in the Olympic trials, but she missed the provisional qualifying time in the 10,000 by about 12 seconds. John Elders, her coach throughout her college career, says the mixed results aren’t that surprising under the circumstances.

“I’m sure that having to juggle so many things at that time, with her first semester teaching and getting ready for her wedding, probably was a factor in that,” Elders said.

“But Heather has a lot of potential to improve as a runner, and I’m sure that with her dedication she’ll do that. One of the things she has going for her is that she really enjoys running. Some runners mostly enjoy the competitive side of it, while others really enjoy the experience of running. Heather, even though she’s very competitive, really loves to run.”

She also is a perfectionist.

Even now, she complains she should have done better in what turned out to be her final season of college track.

“I did a good job that year and it’s great that I won the three events, but I felt I could have run faster,” she said. “And I didn’t think I did as well at nationals as I could have.”

Elite female distance runners frequently don’t reach their peak performances during their college years, and that’s encouraging to a 23-year-old runner.

“It’s true, and I really don’t know why, but that’s the wonderful part of distance running,” she said. “I think I’ll get even more competitive as I do get a little older. I think I’ll have at least another 10 years of being competitive. At least, I hope I do.

“But at this point I’m not willing to give up anything else. I’m not willing to say that running is everything. It probably makes it difficult for me sometimes, but it also controls me. I have to be able to balance everything, and I think I can do that.”

She did it well at Fullerton, where she was a quintessential student-athlete: a star in the classroom, as well as in cross-country and track. But she thinks her health might have suffered from the demands she placed on herself. She had epilepsy as a child but has had no recurring problems from that illness.

“As an English major, I used to do all-nighters all the time when papers were due or I was studying for a test, but my life is more structured now,” she said. “It seems like I did get sick a few times just before some big meets, but I haven’t been sick at all in the last year.”

Killeen-Frisone plans to begin coaching track at Narbonne this spring.

“It’s something both Steve and I have talked about doing,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s the best time to do it with all that we’ve already taken on, but I think it will be a lot of fun.”

She also is starting to refocus on competitive running. She plans to compete in some road races this fall, and then a few track events in the spring. She also hopes to run in the U.S. Track and Field Championships.

She will run Sunday in the Orange County Race For The Cure, which raises money to fight breast cancer. Several world-class runners, including Darcy Arreola and Ruth Wysocki, are entered in the 5K race with prize money of $5,000.

“It’s not often you get to race against competitors like that,” Killeen-Frisone said. “In college, you race mostly against your peers, and they’re really good, but it’s nice to be able to race with people you read about all the time in Runner’s World, the big names in track.”

She also plans to run in the National Cross-Country Championships in early December in San Francisco.

It’s still a long way down the road, but her goal is to make it to the Olympic trials in four years.

By then, she also expects to be running the marathon. Distance runner Marco Ochoa of Fullerton, who was fifth in the marathon in the Olympic trials, helped her and her husband train this spring, and Killeen says Ochoa believes it will be her best event when she matures.

“I’d love to run a marathon now, but when I talked to Marco about it he says I’m still too young, and I should save my body,” she said. “It would be fun to run the L.A. Marathon, or at Boston, but I probably need to develop my speed more before trying that.”

But, for her, the event isn’t the most important thing. “I’m just glad I’m in this sport,” she said. “I do love running, and I want to be in it for a long time.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Race for the Cure

Where: Fashion Island, Newport Beach

When: Sunday, Sept. 22.

Time: 8:30 a.m.

Reason: Raises money to fight breast cancer

Course Record: 15:52 (Jody Hawkins, 1994)

1995 winer: Sylvia Mosqueda in 15:58

Participants: Among the elite runners are Darcy Arreola of Valencia, Teresa Barrios of Huntington Beach, Heather Killeen-Frisone of Placentia, Laura La Mena-Coll of Eugene, Ore., PattiSue Plumer of Menlo Park, Polly Plumer of San Francisco, Katrina Price of Austin, Texas, Maria Trujillo of Salinas, Valerie Vaughn of Costa Mesa and Ruth Wysocki of Canyon Lake, Calif.

Information: (619) 434-7706