Appreciation Runs Deep for Track Star

From a triple victory in the first track and field meet of the season to a pair of meet records in an invitational Saturday, Olga Aulet-Leon of Rolling Hills Estates Peninsula has regained her place as one of the top girl distance runners in the Southland.

Aulet-Leon finished a disappointing 97th in the Division I race of the Southern Section cross-country championships in November while competing with a severely bruised right heel that made it difficult for her to walk, let alone run.

She says this season, however, has been more about appreciation than redemption.

“I think [the injury] was a good thing, because it made me realize how much I love running itself,” said Aulet-Leon, who will run in the girls’ 1,600 meters in the 37th Arcadia Invitational on Saturday night.

“It’s made me realize that I didn’t start running because I won races but because I just loved to run. I think it’s a case of until something is taken away from you, you don’t realize how important it is to you.”

Brooke Lademan, who finished eighth for Peninsula in the Division I final of the section cross-country championships, has noticed a change in Aulet-Leon’s attitude.

“She runs more based on what she likes” now, Lademan said. “Because she was winning races before, it soon became something that she had to do instead of just running for fun.”

Aulet-Leon, who said running was her favorite part about playing soccer as a child, ran at the junior varsity level during her freshman year at Peninsula.

She moved up to varsity as a sophomore and played a key role in Peninsula’s upset victory in the Division I race of the state cross-country championships in 2001, when she finished 31st only one week after placing 78th in the section finals.

“That was definitely a huge race for me,” said Aulet-Leon, who helped Peninsula win the state title for their retiring coach, Joe Kelly, after the Panthers finished fifth in the section championships. “To go from 78th in [the section final] to 31st in the state made me think, ‘I can do this. I can be good at this.’ ”

After finishing ninth in the Division I race of the state championships while leading Peninsula to a fifth-place finish as a junior, Aulet-Leon began her senior season with visions of a top-three finish for herself and her teammates.

But things began to unravel in the Bay League finals Nov. 6, when she experienced severe pain in her heel as she strode toward her second consecutive individual league title.

“I felt it with about a half-mile left,” said Aulet-Leon, who first injured the heel during the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Invitational three weeks earlier. “It hurt a lot and it got worse afterward.”

Not one to give up easily, Aulet-Leon ran in the section preliminaries nine days later and in the finals a week after that. But she was a shell of herself and Peninsula fell three points short of advancing to the state championships.

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh, if I had had a good race, the team would have made it,’ ” Aulet-Leon said. “But then I realized that it wasn’t meant to happen and there was nothing I could do about it.”

Rebecca Kieft, the girls’ cross-country coach at Peninsula, said Aulet-Leon was “very frustrated” with the way her season ended. But Kieft added that Aulet-Leon “is the type of person who takes a bad situation and turns it into a positive.”

That meant looking forward to the start of track season instead of dwelling on the end of cross-country.

Still, Aulet-Leon was “real scared” when Peninsula traveled to Beverly Hills for a season-opening meet March 4.

“I hadn’t run a race since [finishing 108th in the West Region championships Dec. 6] and was asking myself before, ‘Can I do this?’ ” she said.

Her answer came quickly as she won the 1,600 in a hand-timed 5 minutes 6.9 seconds, a career best at the time, and followed that with victories in the 800 and 3,200.

She lowered her best in the 1,600 to 5:03.50 to win that event in the San Pedro Easter Relays on March 27 and set meets records of 5:07.11 in the 1,600 and 10:51.40 in the 3,200 in the Track Is Back Invitational at West Torrance on Saturday.

She ranks second on the yearly Southland performer list in both the 1,600 and 3,200, and refuses to dwell on the might-have-beens at the end of her cross-country season.

“I’m just glad to be running again,” she said. “Because I missed out on so much in cross-country, I feel really fortunate to have an opportunity to do this again.”