St. Louis Park Senior Mara Olson Sets Sights on Finish, New Start

By her own admission, Mara Olson is a “pretty mediocre” guitar player. She started taking lessons a couple of summers ago, but she still wants to get better.

“It’s definitely a creative outlet,” she said.

But that may be the only endeavor in which the senior could be considered mediocre.

Olson has a 4.0 grade point average (on a 4.0 scale) and edits, writes and does artwork for her school newspaper. She led the Orioles’ basketball team in scoring this past season, earning her second straight team MVP award. She was named all-conference in the North Suburban and all-state honorable mention by the Associated Press.

On the soccer field last fall, she earned her third straight all-conference honor while being named all-state honorable mention by the state coaches’ association.

And that doesn’t even touch on Olson’s track exploits, where she has had the most athletic success in high school. She has qualified for the Class AA state meet the past three seasons in the 1,600 meters (mile) and the 3,200 meters (two-miles), winning the former event as a freshman.

By the end of her high school career, she will have earned 12 athletic letters—three in basketball, four in soccer and five in track.

Those achievements have garnered Olson the Athena Award, given to the school’s top female athlete. She will be honored at a May 6 luncheon in downtown Minneapolis with other Athena winners from area schools.

To top it off, she has a full scholarship in academics and track at Butler University in Indianapolis, where she will start next fall. The school first caught her eye while she was watching the school’s mens basketball team play in the 2010 Final Four. The size (about 4,000 undergraduates) and academics appealed to her, so she applied and was accepted.

Just starting college is a tough enough transition, but Olson will be doing that and beginning a sport in which she has never competed.

Unlike most top distance runners in track, Olson never ran cross country in the fall. Instead, she played soccer. But Butler’s coaches “highly encouraged” Olson to join cross country.

“I’m a little nervous,” she said. “I’m an impatient runner. When I go out for runs, I just like to get my runs over with.”

That won’t be as easy in college, where cross country races are either 3.1 miles or 3.7 miles. While Olson knows she will have to adjust, her high school track success has already changed her view of how hard it is to be a top-tier runner.

Of winning the mile at state as a freshman, she said:  “I didn’t really understand what that meant (then). I’ve really begun to realize how hard it is to win a state competition.”

While she would love to win again to cap her high school career, her goal right now is time- related.

“I really want to go under five minutes in the mile,” Olson said.

She is extremely close, having run a 5:00.63 last year. That is the school record, as is the 11:04 she ran in the two-mile as a junior.

Olson also said she hopes to help lead the Orioles’ 4x400 meter relay team to state.

Orioles’ track coach Brad Brubaker knows the importance of not making a mistake when coaching an athlete of Olson’s caliber.

“You want to do right by that kid,” said Brubaker, who is also an assistant coach on the Orioles’ girls soccer team.

From all he has seen of Olson, Brubaker said he thinks she will be just fine.

“Her best days and times are ahead of her,” he said. “She’s so driven. Every workout (is) 100 percent."

Brubaker said Olson will sometimes come to him after a workout and ask if there is more she can do. He often sends her home so that she doesn’t overwork herself.

She won’t get to work as hard as she wants this summer, however. For several years, Olson, who calls soccer “definitely my favorite sport,” has played on club teams during the high-school off-season. But the Butler track coaches told her that she couldn’t play this year because of the chance she could get injured.

“It was a really hard week,” she said of finding out she couldn’t play. “I feel like a piece of me is dying.”

So Olson will focus on running—first on breaking five minutes in the mile and finishing her high school career strongly, and then on getting comfortable running longer distances.

And she will keep working on the guitar, too. She plans to start taking lessons again this summer.