Fraser had running and Cardinal in her sights — in 3rd grade
The 10,000 meters isn’t Vanessa Fraser’s best distance. In the Pac-12 track and field championships, however, Stanford’s coaches thought putting her in the event would be a good chance for the Cardinal to collect some team points.
For Fraser, it would be a great strength workout.
“I always knew I’d focus on the 5,000” in the NCAA championships, she said, “so running twice the distance was going to be a really good workout.”
Really good, indeed. She broke out of the pack on the last lap and won the race in 33 minutes, 10.84 seconds. She had run the 10,000 only twice previously in competition.
“It was an honest pace, but it wasn’t a full-out effort for me,” Fraser said. “I had a lot left in the tank the last 400 meters.”
She’ll run the 5,000 in the NCAA West Preliminaries this week at Sacramento State. Defending NCAA champion Karissa Schweizer of Missouri is probably the favorite in a field that will include Marie Bouchard of USF and Fiona O’Keeffe of Stanford.
The top 12 in each event advance to the NCAA meet, June 6-9 in Eugene, Ore. Fraser is ranked second in the nation in the 5K, fourth in the 1,500 and 11th in the 10K.
Elizabeth DeBole, Stanford’s cross-country coach and the assistant coach in charge of the distance runners, calls her “an aerobic beast.”
She’s also an academic beast. The daughter of a neurologist and a neuropsychologist from Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz County), Fraser earned her degree in symbolic systems with a concentration on neuroscience in June. Next month, she’ll add a master’s in management, science and engineering.
“I grew up hearing a lot of talk about the brain,” she said. “I’m inherently interested in it.”
She was keenly interested in Stanford, too, from an early age. Her father, Jeff, an alum, started taking her to Cardinal football games when she was 4. She did a school report on the university and its history when she was in third grade. She included several photos she had taken of the campus.
It was about the same time that she joined the Girls on the Run program in Santa Cruz, a hotbed of young distance runners. She loved running so much she won a “Just One More Lap Please” award for repeatedly asking for just one more.
In eighth grade, she went to a Stanford track meet and got every Cardinal woman to autograph her T-shirt.
She eventually won a state cross-country title for Scotts Valley High and went to Stanford as a preferred walk-on. She didn’t start getting scholarship help until her junior year.
“She wasn’t even in the top seven her sophomore year,” DeBole said. “She’s worked herself up to a two-time AllAmerican in cross country and multi-time All-American in track.
“She always knew she could be really good. Having that belief and confidence in yourself is hard to do when you’re a walk-on, and you’re surrounded by everything here. She always believed it and was willing to take those steps.”
She and the coaches decided Fraser should redshirt the 2017 outdoor season, so she could go for a graduate degree and the Cardinal women could prepare for the 2018 track season, featuring her, distance runner Elise Cranny, 800-meter runner Olivia Baker, discus thrower Valarie Allman, shot-putter Lena Giger and javelin thrower Mackenzie Little.
The Stanford women finished third in the Pac-12 meet behind USC and Oregon, matching the team’s highest finish since 2012. Cranny won the 5,000, Little the javelin, and 23 Stanford women qualified for Sacramento, along with 15 men.
DeBole said she thinks the redshirt year was good for Fraser because “she had been going for so long consistently,” DeBole said. “She still raced three times (unattached). That set her up really well for this year.”
That is, it set her up mentally as well as physically. The brain happens to be something about which she knows quite a bit.
She describes her major as “a combination of understanding how the mind works and how computers work, and looking at the intersection of those two things.
“Everything in this world, if you think about it, boils down to symbols. It’s getting down to the logic of how we think and how we represent everything through symbols. It’s understanding how computation and cognition really work.”