As a freshman at Saugus High School, Shannon Murakami didn’t think too highly of running.
“A lot of people choose to run, but running kind of found me,” she said.
Having played soccer since age 7, cross country was just a conditioning tool in the offseason.
A 10th place finish in the California State Championships suggested otherwise.
“To me, I felt like it was a fluke,” she said.
For Murakami, running was still not the focal point of her athletic endeavors and was out of the picture.
Then came the sub-five-minute mile, titles in the 1,600 meters and 3,200m, and eventually, the all-league and all-state honors, one after another.
Soon there was no more room for soccer.
Murakami left the team her sophomore year in high school, right before track season began.
“I became more serious about (cross country),” Murakami said. “I trained with my high school coach all the time, and I realized that it might be the sport for me and I might be able to go somewhere with this.”
It was as if Murakami had found her perfect sport, her home.
But after her second year running collegiately, she needed something. A reminder, maybe.
Perhaps she just needed summer and time with her tightly knit family to come together, maybe even Jet Ski a bit.
But a fresh start would do, something that would feel like home.
The now-junior cross country runner found just that something as she returned to Saugus High School, where she again trained with her coach, Rene Paragas.
After being in a place that felt so different, Murakami was finally home, running.
“I remembered this is why I love it,” she said. “I would go on these 15 mile runs, and I wouldn’t want to stop. And I would be so happy to be out there.”
This comfort level was largely lacking for her first two years under former UCLA coach Eric Peterson.
“Coach Peterson and I had our differences,” Murakami said. “Sometimes I felt he wasn’t doing something right, and he felt like I was disrespecting him. It is hard to be OK with somebody coaching you and training you when you don’t have that mutual respect.”
In 2008, the team had a last place finish in the Pac-10 Championships.
“We were lacking closeness outside of practice, but I think for a lot of people when it got really hard, (they) lost motivation,” she said.
Murakami admitted her excitement in the offseason when UCLA hired new distance coaches Forest Braden and Johnny Gray.
She was even more excited when she found that their main objective was to unify a somewhat scattered and unmotivated team.
“It’s really about them searching inside themselves, finding that extra motivation, that extra level that they need to get to,” Braden said. “And a lot of that is up to the coaching staff to bring that out of them. The talent is there, but now it’s about getting the confidence and the experience to run and move up.”
Murakami has responded with a resounding first place finish at Brigham Young’s Autumn Classic, where she covered the five kilometer course in 17:59.2, 25 seconds ahead of the second place finisher.
“Shannon was huge at BYU and had a very impressive first race,” Braden said. “Anytime you go to BYU and run at that altitude and win as handily as she won really shows something. She’s going to be huge for us.”
The team recently traveled north to Mammoth for high altitude training, where the regime and dynamic was noticeably different.
“One thing last year was when we would do our long runs, most of the time it would be on our own,” Murakami said. “Now, all of our practices are together ““ we do stretching together, push-ups, everything. I think that it’s bringing the team together as a family.”
With this no-person-left-behind philosophy, practices are no longer strictly races, they are chances for the team to come together.
“This year, if someone falls behind, we go back and motivate them,” Murakami said. “Now we’re trying to better ourselves and our teammates and make this team the best it can be.”
For Murakami, it seems as if a sport that found her finally has a final resting place ““ a place of family, of togetherness.
Of home.