Geoff Mott
Sports Scene
BRECKENRIDGE — Kevin Olling admits that it’s not a pretty scene when his daughter Kirsten Olling loses a race.
“You don’t even want to talk to her after a loss,” he said of his daughter, the two-time defending individual cross country state champion from Breckenridge High School.
“She doesn’t like to lose. It’s not a bad trait to have, because she’s still a good sport.”
Usually life pleasant for Kirsten’s family after a race. The junior has never lost a high school cross country race to a Michigan High School Athletic Association athlete. She’s hunting for her third-straight Division 4 state championship on Saturday, November 3, at Brooklyn’s Michigan International Speedway. Last fall as a sophomore, Olling won the title by more than 40 seconds.
“I don’t like saying it is easy, because it never is,” the 17-year-old Kirsten Olling said. “There’s always going to be competition, and I’m always looking forward to it.”
Olling yearns for competition. She’s won three-straight individual conference and regional titles to go with those state title medals, and this year she hopes her team advances from the regional meet at Carson City-Crystal.
“We’re doing good right now. The State meet is our biggest goal,” she said.
Olling is always pushing herself to improve times. She’ll match her times with the Division 1, Division 2, and Division 3 state champions to see where she stacks up.
She’ll also see where her times stack up against Lauren Benstead, a senior from Charyl Stockwell Academy in Howell. The school is not a member of the MHSAA and Benstead will not compete at the state meet. But Benstead handed Olling a loss at the Portage Invitational on October 6. Benstead finished the meet in 17 minutes, 52 seconds, while Olling clipped the 18-minute mark with a 17:59. The race was neck-and-neck throughout.
“I usually race her at the Holly Invitational and Breckenridge got moved up a division this year,” said Olling, who also lost an open “exhibition” race last year at a meet. “We’ve been running the same split times, so it’s really cool when I get to race her.
“She keeps me on my toes.”
Benstead’s results stoke the competitive fire inside Olling. While she’s dominated competition at her level in Division 4 — including back-to-back girls’ track state titles in 3,200-meter run — she’s looking for a rival who can push her personal best times.
“I don’t want to win states and sit back and think that if [Benstead] was in the race, she would beat me,” Olling said. “I want to make sure I’m at my best for states and get a time that would have beaten her in those conditions, as though she is there.”
Not many runners, male or female, will outwork Olling. She trains with the boys’ team and has a streak of training every day for more than 900 consecutive days.
“I’m getting real close to running for 1,000 days straight,” said Olling, who doesn’t plan to end the streak after reaching that milestone. “I came close last winter [to quitting.] I got sick and didn’t go to school. But I still made it out to run. That’s the toughest it got for me.”
Olling has a good pedigree in running. Kevin Olling was an all-state cross country runner and his brother and Kirsten’s uncle Brian Olling finished runner-up at the state meet in the early 1980s.
Kirsten began her athletic career in gymnastics and dancing, but an injury in fifth grade scared her away from the gym, Kevin Olling said.
“I was running and she started jogging with me,” the elder Olling recalls. “If she hadn’t got injured in gymnastics, she’d probably still be there.”
Kevin Olling is proud of how his daughter’s hard work off the track has been rewarded on it.
“She started running everyday that winter of her eighth grade year,” Kevin Olling said. “Even on the big snow days, I’d hop in the four-wheel drive truck and drive behind her. She has that drive that you don’t always see in a high school kid.
“I like watching running. I like watching all the kids on the team, not just her. But it is real rewarding to see her perform. She has the natural talent God gave her, but she also works real hard for it.”
Kirsten is a strong student with an A-minus average and is unsure what she’ll study in college. She plans on running cross country in college and has started to research schools for their academic and athletic programs.
She keeps a tight schedule, as she must because she maintains a hypoglycemic diet. With low blood-sugar, Kirsten Olling has to keep a strict diet.
“I have to eat every two hours or so and it’s always healthy food,” she said. “No sugar, no sweets, no candy. Lots of fruits and veggies, peanut butter. It always seems like I’m eating.
“It can be a challenge. If I’m working too hard and don’t get that food, I’ll have a sugar drop and it shoots me down. I won’t have that push. But the benefit is that I don’t have those urges to eat bad food.”
Her running routines through the rural areas of Breckenridge can get monotonous, Olling said. Practices are run at the same courses, which many times include cemeteries.
“But to me, it’s still fun,” Olling said. “Let’s go out, have fun, run hard, and see how well I perform at meets. I just want to get better and better and better and that helps push me.
“I’ll experiment with what works for me. See if I can run that first mile faster and maintain that pace. I look for good strategies.”
One way Olling combats the repetitiveness of workouts is through music. She tries to avoid having a bad song stuck in her head by listening to tunes that are uplifting.
“I always try to get a certain song in my head that keeps me motivated,” she said. “I’ll get a song that gets my feet moving and I’ll want to keep it in my head. I’ll listen to it 20 times before a race.”
One of Olling’s favorite songs to train to is “The Fighter” by the Gym Class Heroes.
“It’s that one song I always end up coming back to,” Olling said.
Olling will continue to seek out the toughest competition she can find. She’ll run in the Footlocker and Nike Cross Country Championships in November and the big track meets in the summer. Last summer, she finished eighth in the 3,000-meter run at the Footlocker Track and FIeld Championships, two places from an All-American finish.
“I like to win, but I love it when I have competition,” Kirsten Olling said. “It makes the races that much more fun. I don’t want to be out on a stroll by myself.
“I want somebody to keep pushing and keep pushing me.”