As Simi Valley High School’s Acacia Rojas left the team tent for the start of last fall’s CIF Girls’ Cross Country Finals at Mt. San Antonio College, she didn’t wince; she didn’t grimace; she didn’t let on just how bad that searing pain in her hip was.
“You’re injured,” head coach Francois Wolman had told her before the race. “You’re not running.”
“Coach, I’m OK,” she insisted, before limping to the starting line.
Having finally solved the medical mystery that sidelined her as a freshman and kept her at the back of the pack throughout a dismal sophomore fall, starting that race was something Rojas needed to do. Finishing it proved to be a major turning point for Rojas, whose sudden, meteoric rise up the cross country ranks takes on a new dimension Friday as she returns to Mt. SAC for the CIF-Southern Section prelims.
“I’ve never seen anybody like this,” said Wolman, a former University of Oregon distance runner who has coached the sport for 38 years. “She wants to run. No matter what.”
Last spring, Rojas became the nation’s most-improved long-distance runner in both the 3200m and the 1600m, shattering her previous personal best in the latter by 1:44.29 (the second-most improved runner at that distance posted a 1:19.10 margin). She began this cross country season by shredding her 3-mile best by nearly a full minute at the Woodbridge Invitational, her 17:30.8 time good for 21st out of 248 runners.
“It’s always a gradual leap,” Wolman said. “When I was coaching at Granada, I had girls running low-18 minutes [in the 3-mile], and every year, they improved 15 seconds, 20 seconds, but not like that. That’s unbelievable.”
Rojas’s rise is even more unbelievable considering the dizzying constellation of symptoms that plagued her first two years at Simi Valley, when she ran in the shadow of her star brother, Elijah, and older sister Abigail. Floating knee and shin pain sidelined Rojas for her entire freshman season, and even gave her reason to consider quitting, albeit briefly.
“I felt left behind,” said Rojas, whose father, Dave, is Simi Valley’s assistant coach, and a former track and cross country runner at Moorpark High School and UCLA. “I barely ran. I was just kind of standing there.”
Given the go-ahead to run as a sophomore, she approached training with an intense, single-minded focus, picking up as many extra miles as she could, despite battling constant aches and fatigue.
“I think Steve Prefontaine said it: To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift,” Rojas said. “I guess I just really wanted to be dedicated, even if I was really bad.”
Still, she never finished higher than eighth in her six frosh/soph races. At times, she had difficulty breathing, nearly losing consciousness on several occasions when she would stand up too quickly.
Nobody in her circle had thought to link all of her symptoms to a single underlying cause until Rojas’ habitual craving and chewing of ice — a behavior linked with iron deficiency — prompted a blood test at the end of her sophomore year. A common condition in adolescent women, iron deficiency becomes even more acute for those who engage in high-intensity athletic training. With less oxygen transported to their muscles, individuals with iron deficiency suffer increased levels of lethargy and fatigue, as well as other symptoms that mimic the body’s reaction to over-training — all of which Rojas had experienced. Her blood test revealed that instead of the ideal 70-90 nanograms per milliliter of ferritin (the protein that stores iron) in her bloodstream, she had just 2.
With the mystery solved and a new regimen of iron supplement pills in hand, Rojas quickly came into her own as a runner and as a team leader. That’s why, even though she couldn’t even finish her pre-race warm-up, she didn’t even consider pulling out of the Finals a year ago. Even so, her father posted up at the one-mile mark, prepared to pull his daughter from the race if she looked like she was hurting too much. As Rojas started passing runner after runner, finally hitting a set of uphill switchbacks just in time to blow past her dad, she thought, “There’s no way I’m backing out now.”
By the time she finished, she was in so much pain that Dave had to carry her, piggyback, to the team bus. Wolman had never witnessed any runner in that much pain even deign to start a race, to say nothing of being competitive in one, but Rojas finished 63rd out of 124 runners. Still, her father said, “she hated ending the season like that, and not being able to race her best. I think it propelled her.”
Already possessed of a work ethic bordering on obsessive, Rojas ran nearly every day this past summer, and this fall, went on training runs with the varsity boys to challenge herself, bringing junior star-in-the-making Cecilia Vasquez along with her. Not only has her work paid off in a scholarship to run with her brother Elijah at The Master’s University in Santa Clarita next fall, but after a midseason lull, she’s now peaking at just the right time.
Rojas has described running as an escape, where all her cares and worries fall away, and all that’s left is her and the road. When she’s running, she said, “I’m just thinking about what’s ahead of me.”