Daily Journal Girls’ Cross Country Runner of the Year: M-A’s Tatum Olesen

Properly and completely is the only way Olesen knows how to do things, and it’s because of these virtues she flourished at the top girls’ distance running in the county this season, repeating as both Peninsula Athletic League and Central Coast Section Division I champion. It is also the reason why she is the runaway winner of Daily Journal Girls’ Cross Country Runner of the Year honors.

“I was definitely excited for the season, and I think, coming into it, I had had the biggest base of running in the summer I had ever had,” Olesen said. “Then I think going into it also, my training was to hopefully have my fastest and best races toward the end of CCS and state and stuff. So, I think the beginning was all toward building up toward that.”

Olesen is no stranger to Daily Journal honors either. As a junior, she earned the prestigious Girls’ Athlete of the Year award for her overall performance as a three-sport athlete through the 2022-23 school year.

Distance running has become her forte, though, even if this wasn’t apparent a few years ago. Had you asked Menlo-Atherton cross country head coach Eric Wilmurt at the start of Olesen’s sophomore year — her first season with the cross country team — his answer might have surprised you.

“Even when I met her, she was more focused on soccer and didn’t even know she wanted to run cross country,” Wilmurt said.

There’s a good reason for this. During the fall of her sophomore, Olesen tried to bargain with Wilmurt, asking if she could have a few days off practice each week to make time to concurrently play club soccer. Wilmurt, however, drew the line, insisting she commit fulltime to cross country if she wanted a spot on the team.

“I put my foot down … without realizing how amazing she was going to be,” Wilmurt said.

Olesen chose a place on the M-A cross country team, and what a rewarding choice it turned out to be. In October, she committed to run competitively at the NCAA Division I level for University of Virginia.

“The bug bit her … and it’s been heaven ever since,” Wilmurt said.

Olesen tells a different story of yesteryear, and her freshman outlook on running long-term. She was already running competitively with the Woodside Wildebeests cross country club. And the only reason she didn’t run competitively as a high school freshman was because it was the year of pandemic, with a year’s worth of sports on the conventional school calendar being played in the same spring season of 2021.

While Olesen enlisted with the M-A girls’ soccer team as a freshman, this didn’t stop her from officially debuting as a runner. With her older sister Kendall — a middle-distance standout for the M-A track team — being a senior that year, Olesen would train with her regularly. And since there was a special waiver during the spring of 2021 allowing students to compete in more than one sport at a time, Olesen managed to sneak her way onto the track to compete in two varsity races.

“I think when I did those two races freshman year … I think I knew I would focus more on running for the actual team, of doing the track season and cross country season,” Olesen said. “So, I think I knew then that during sophomore year I wanted to run more consistently and get more summer miles in.”

A standout as a sophomore, and a burgeoning star as a junior — not only did she win PAL and CCS titles in 2022, she reached the podium as a seventh-place finisher for Division I at the CIF State Cross Country Championships — she realized her star power as one of the elite in 2023.

At the CCS championships, Olesen turned in the second fastest time over all five divisions and was one of just two runners on the day to crack the 18-minute plateau with a time of 17 minutes, 54.8 seconds. This also helped M-A to a second-place finish in the team element, qualifying the Bears for the state meet as a team. Olesen went on to improve on her time at the state meet by nearly seven seconds from the previous year, running the course at Woodward Park in 17:39 to earn a sixth-place finish.

“I was pleased with the result,” Olesen said. “I think it was a good way to finish the cross country season. I think my team was also pleased with their results, both individually and a team. So, it was a good finish to a lot of our seasons.”

Olesen is the first one to admit her success wouldn’t have been possible without the depth of talented seniors on M-A’s cross country roster this season in Annie Pflaum, Cleo Rehkopf and Sofia Melani.

“They’re just a bunch of best friends out there and it’s been that way for three years,” Wilmurt said. “And they’re super lucky. They go out there and laugh for 20 minutes, and they go on their run, and they come back and laugh some more. And they do their training, and they take their training very seriously.”

M-A’s quartet of seniors is going to be a tough act to follow, for sure.

“You don’t’ get that very often,” Wilmurt said. “And since the pandemic, kind of coming out of it, all these girls wanted to start running, and it just made for a positive experience for everybody.”

And without them, Olesen said she doesn’t know if she’d be where she is now as a competitive runner.

“We all got close really fast, and we all get along really well,” Olesen said. “They were all super helpful and motivating to keep me wanting to run and keep me wanting to be on the team.”