Daily Journal Girls’ Cross Country Runner of the Year: Woodside’s Elle Marsyla

These are all triumphs, for sure. But Marsyla’s ability to emerge confident and successful from an eating disorder that has followed her since the start of her high school running career is perhaps the greatest triumph at all. Her problems, she said, stemmed from misconceptions about self-image and the sport of cross country itself — a problem that is more common in the girls’ running world than one might think.

“I think it really is the culture in cross country — the skinnier the faster,” Marsyla said.

Coming from a family of accomplished runners, Marsyla has been running most of her life. Her great aunt Joyce Gibbs (nee Swannack) won the second ever women’s Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run in 1979. Her cousin Megan McCandless competed as a runner at MIT and her other cousin Colleen McCandless currently runs at Cal Poly. And her little sister, Pearl, won her first middle school race at Corte Madera School as a fifth grader in the overall grades 5-8 race.

Marsyla and her best friend Gigi Pistilli began running competitively in the fifth grade and have been paired as teammates since arriving at Woodside. In fact, this year the two were the only fourth-year varsity seniors on a team that otherwise featured mostly freshmen.

“I was captain so obviously I felt like I had a leadership responsibility, since it was me and Gigi and five freshman girls on the team,” Marsyla said. “So, definitely a really young team. … I felt like this year I just tried to foster a healthy community and wanted to work on our mental strength.”

Mental strength is what it’s all about for Marsyla. When she arrived at Woodside, she felt like an outsider around other cross-country runners, she said. Her outlook was clouded by ideas she didn’t look like a prototypical runner and couldn’t perform like one unless she fulfilled a certain archetype.

“I started dealing with it in the beginning of high school,” Marsyla said. “Mostly it related to running. I guess it just goes back to that culture in cross country — the skinnier the better — and just feeling like I didn’t look like other runners.”

Now, Marsyla is invested in healing. Not just her own healing but that of others. When she was in eighth grade, she began volunteering for SafeSpace, a Menlo Park-based organization dedicated to the mental health of modern-day youth. She has given presentations not just on her home turf at Woodside, but also at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, focused on the topic of how to help a friend in need, she said.

The work has helped Marsyla, herself, who excelled as a senior cross-country runner this year with one quite specific outlook driving her.

“Honestly, I feel like I was running faster without having to change myself in any way,” Marsyla said. “I just ran more and more miles and I started to see I could compete at a high level still looking like me and still feeling like myself. … For the first time I felt like I deserved to be with [other runners].”

Marsyla enjoyed her first breakout success in the spring, running in the PAL track-and-field finals. Then a junior, she took second place in a contentious 1,600-meter run. The podium finish propelled her into the CCS finals, the first time she had ever qualified for the section meet.

Advancing to the CCS championships, in and of itself, was a major triumph for Marsyla, not just in a competitive sense, but also in helping her to outrun her demons.

“When it was me making it, it was kind of validating,” Marsyla said. “I felt like: I can do this too.”

Come her senior cross-country season, it was a different kind of motivation that sparked her program-record run at the CIF state championships.

Woodside head coach Al Hernandez has a saying for runners who start races too fast: “Don’t get happy feet.”

This was an issue Marsyla contended with during her underclassman years and began to solve during her turnaround as a junior. During the PAL championships Nov. 6 at Crystal Springs, she nearly perfected the strategy, turning in a first-place time of 18 minutes, 2.7 seconds. It was her penultimate race on the renowned course, and Marsyla resolved to break the 18-minute mark in her Crystal Springs finale the next week at the CCS championships.

That didn’t happen, however. A sweltering day at the Nov. 13 section meet left her feeling off her game as she prepared for the Division II race. Sure, her fourth-place finish was enough to propel her into the state championships for the first time in her career. But her performance at the 2.95-mile Crystal Springs course swelled nearly 30 seconds— she recorded a time of 18:31.2 — leaving her frustrated.

That frustration, however, helped fuel her fire for the state meet.

“I think she was going in (to the state meet) mentally tough because of what happened to her at the section,” Hernandez said. “And that’s the thing I tell them, you survive. … Now, here’s your redeemer. You have a chance to come back and do it. And she beat two of those girls that beat her in section.”

Marsyla credited an unlikely heroine in contributing to her program-record time at Woodward Park — a competitor from Bella Vista-Fair Oaks, Leila Swenson, for helping calm her nerves prior to the starting gun.

“On the line, I was really nervous, but I was next to this really sweet girl and her energy was really good,” Marsyla said. “She was getting us all hyped up. So, I felt like it was calming, like I could clear my mind right before the race.”

The calming effect did the trick despite Marsyla contending with some “happy feet.” She got off the mark fast but maintained her pace in nearly hitting her first-mile goal of 5:35 — she did it in 5:36.4 — while holding her own in 31st place. The second mile “was kind of quiet,” she said, an atmosphere where she often excels.

But Marsyla excels even better on inclines. And when she started passing runners on the hilly third mile, and the adrenaline started to kick, she found herself neck-and-neck with the very runner with whom she started the race in Swenson.

“At the end, actually I was like neck-and-neck with the girl I had been talking to on the line, which was kind of a cool moment,” Marsyla said. “And I ended up beating her right at the end. So, it was kind of full circle at the end.”

And Marsyla was met at the finish line with an auspicious greeting from her coach, who told her she had just shattered the school record at the state meet.

“Well, I knew that she didn’t know that,” Hernandez said. “So, I picked her up off the ground and gave her a big hug. I told her: ‘You got the school record for the state meet!’”

Marsyla actually did know. She was shooting for the record and had memorized the times of her teammates in recent years who broke and re-broke the mark. Sarah Perry, in 2018, ran the Woodward Park course in 19:13.2. In 2019, sophomore Elise Arana bettered the record with a time of 19:07.9.

Marsyla’s time on the three-mile course — 18:32.9.

“I knew coming into the finish, but it was also cool to hear from coach that he was proud of me and excited that I had done that,” Marsyla said.

The celebration was a culmination of Marsyla’s cross-country career at Woodside. In a sport so often measured by individual achievement, her quest to realize her individuality, and find herself through it, is perhaps her greatest accomplishment of all. With it, she leaves a legacy, she hopes, that will serve to help those battling the same demons she has faced over the past four years.

“She’s come a long, long way,” Hernandez said. “Her mind is in the right place.”