By Brandon HENSLEY

Crescenta Valley Park offers the members of CV High School’s cross country team and its competitors a place to run during the season. This summer, CV coach Mark Evans is allowing not only his team but people of all ages a chance to get out and run the park’s terrain.

On July 20, the first of three cross country races began at the park, and for a first event with little time for Evans to get the word out, the run seemed successful.

The purposes for the run are to fundraise for the CV cross country team – registration is $5 – and to get parents and kids out to enjoy themselves as well.

“I thought it’d be nice to have one is this area,” Evans said of the event. “This is a nice park; it’s fairly cool compared to where everything else is. It’s a course where a lot of teams run.”

There were two races: a 1.5-mile race and a three-mile race. Many younger kids, including one who was 4 years old, ran the shorter one.

“I wanted to get younger kids to come out and race, and going the full [three-mile run] wasn’t going to be real appropriate for them, but let’s do something short that they can get a feel for racing,” Evans said.

The starting line was near the baseball fields at New York and Honolulu avenues and everyone was timed.

Evans said he received approval from the park late. He emailed other schools to notify them of joining but the only school that did was Golden Valley located in Santa Clarita. Evans’ two sons, Rob and Chris, are coaches there and live in Crescenta Valley, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to have them on hand for the event.

“I think it’s cool that Crescenta Valley is hosting this and doing something for the community to kind of encourage not only fitness … but also for people to come down, check out the beautiful park we have and get some races in,” said Rob.

Evans said he was hopeful more schools and people would come for the next races which are on Wednesday and Aug. 17.

“It just takes a little word of mouth,” he said.

Rob said his runners were competing to gauge how their summer training is going so far, and CV junior Kali King, who ran the three-mile race, expressed the same sentiment for her team.  CV is training six days a week this summer, including Saturdays.

“I think it helps,” King said. “It keeps us [stay] in shape.”

King also said since CV faces Golden Valley during the season, it’s fun to compete against some of their runners in the summer.

“We race against them and we want to see how [we stack up] right now,” she said.

King knows a couple of the Golden Valley girls personally and said, “It’s friendly off the track, but we get really competitive when we race.”

For the last two races, registration begins at 5 p.m. and the first run, 1.5 miles, starts at 6 p.m. Everyone is encouraged to join.

For photos, visit www.cvweekly.com.

  Brandon Hensley