OLYMPIC DREAMING; ELITE U.S. RUNNERS CAMP INSPIRES LOCAL STANDOUT.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

Lauren Fleshman's prowess in cross country and track during her three years at Canyon High School recently won her a trip to an elite camp sponsored by the United States Olympic Committee - where she hardly ran at all for a week.

``I thought it would be a training camp, but I guess they wanted to work on the other parts and emphasize that it isn't all physical - that the sport has a lot of other parts,'' said Fleshman, 16, after being honored this week by the board of the William S. Hart Union High School District for her achievements as an athlete.

From June 30 to July 5, Fleshman attended the United States Olympic Committee's 150-acre camp in Chula Vista. The camp in San Diego County is one of four the USOC operates. Others are in Michigan, Colorado and New York.

Twenty athletes at a time are invited to a weeklong session focusing on their sport. Room, board and instruction is free at the Chula Vista camp, open only to girls and young women, said Lyle Knudson, director of the program and a volunteer with USA Track and Field, the sport's governing body.

Fleshman, who will be a senior in the fall, placed 14th in December in the 5,000-meter race at the cross country national championships. She placed first overall in the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section in the girls' 1,600-meter and 3,200-meter events.

After winning Southern Section titles, Fleshman placed fourth at the state CIF meet in the 3,200-meter race.

At the Olympic camp, she met girls who are track-and-field stars from other parts of the country. Together, they got instruction on nutrition, carbohydrate loading, cross training, techniques and race strategies, as well as things to avoid, such as steroids and eating disorders.

``Running is a lot more complicated than you think, and to succeed in it you have to do a lot more than just train hard and run a lot of miles,'' Fleshman said.

``You have to have a lot more mental preparedness, and a lot of high school students are weak on that. You have to learn to thrive on competition instead of fear it.''

Since the USOC opened its first junior training center opened in Colorado Springs 20 years ago, about 75 percent of U.S. Olympians in winter and summer sports have gone through the committee's camps, Knudson said. Athletes attend with their high school or college coaches.

``They go there to learn how to prepare themselves to be an international athlete or an Olympian,'' Knudson said. ``They start classes at 8 o'clock in the morning, and they go to 10 o'clock at night.

``These are truly our great hopes for the future as far as sports are concerned. They go home tired and motivated.''

For Fleshman, the camp inspired interest in aiming for the Olympic trials. She is determined to get accepted to a university strong in architecture and engineering - subjects that interest her - and track and cross country. Stanford and the University of California, Los Angeles, are now at the top of her college wish list, she said.

She took up running as a freshman after playing eight years of Canyon Country Little League softball, and she maintains a 4.1 grade-point average, enhanced by Advanced Placement and honors classes. This summer, she is splitting her time between morning workouts with the Canyon High cross country team and her job at In-N-Out Burger.

At camp, she and her peers compared notes on individual training regimens. ``Everyone has their little sly ways of finding out if what they're doing is normal, like saying, What's your best time and how many miles do you run a week?'' Fleshman said.

``It was real interesting to be able to talk to other runners of my ability, . . . the people I usually bare my teeth at,'' she said.

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Photo

PHOTO (Color) Local track star Lauren Fleshman, 16, models a T-shirt from a U.S. Olympic invitational training camp that she attended.

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News