Coming Thursday: football and volleyball Athletes of the Year.

CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea – It takes balance, dedication and accountability, Cassandra Jarzabek says, to be a successful cross country runner.

The Humphreys sophomore was indeed successful during the just completed season, winning all but one race, setting the Pacific 5-kilometer record and capturing the Asia-Pacific Invitational and Far East Division I titles.

Jarzabek has also earned Stars and Stripes Pacific high school cross country Athlete of the Year honors.

From training methods down to what to eat in the morning, it takes more to be a champion than just running fast, Jarzabek said.

“You make sure you take the easy days easy and the hard days hard,” she said during an interview last month at Humphreys High School.

“You make sure you get the proper recovery, the proper diet, the proper mentality; there are a lot of things that go into it. And it’s not easy. It’s a difficult balance.”

Jarzabek trained and ran during the summer at altitude in Oregon, working with a nutritionist, Madeline Riley, and a running coach, Jeff Boele of Elevated Performance — both based in Colorado — to help her strike a better balance.

“Cassie and I worked on finding go-to options for meals and snacks and how to time foods before runs and races,” Riley said. “We also talked about red flags and signs to look for to make sure she was eating enough so that avoid injuries and feel good once training ramped up.”

“The biggest thing was helping figure out … a comprehensive program that was more than ‘just go out and run more,’” Boele said, crediting Jarzabek’s Humphreys coaches, Amy Gleason and David Elger. “They have been doing an amazing job these past few months.”

It also took having a good training partner in fellow sophomore Joey Brown. “Over the summer, we would meet and run,” Jarzabek said.

“It’s not just us (Brown and Jarzabek); it’s our teammates, consistently pushing us to greater limits,” Brown said.

Jarzabek’s successes during the 2024 season may have taken root during the 2023 Far East cross country meet at Misawa Air Base, Japan, where she finished 12th and watched Jane Williams of Matthew C. Perry win the Division II and overall race titles.

“I didn’t want to feel that way again,” Jarzabek said of her 2023 Far East finish. “I wanted to win. I wanted to beat her records.”

She wasted little time, winning the season-opening race Aug. 31 on her home course in 19 minutes, 35 seconds, nearly a full minute ahead of her nearest competitor, teammate Annelise Parker.

One after another, she assembled victory after victory, on Sept. 7 at Daegu, Sept. 28 at Osan and Oct. 5 at Cheongna Dalton in Incheon, leading up to her record race Oct. 12, again on her home course.

Jarzabek clocked 17:58.0 in that race, the first Pacific athlete to break 18 minutes and breaking Williams’ old region record of 18:12.4 set on Sept. 30, 2023, at Iwakuni.

Then came the Far East and API meets, which were run concurrently at Risol no Mori in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture on Oct. 21-22.

There – despite taking a wrong turn early in the race – she came in first overall in 20:09.6 in the 5-kilometer individual race, 47.3 seconds faster than her nearest challenger, Lydia Ro of Yongsan International.

The next day, she teamed with Brown to win the 9.4-kilometer team relay, giving her a sweep of the two Far East and API events.

Her only loss of the season came in the Korean-American Interscholastic Activities Council finals four days later on Oct. 26, coming in second to two-time league champion Madeline Payne of Seoul Foreign.

But winning Far East and API, and setting a new Pacific record, were big dividends for all that work, training and balance, Gleason said.

“They (Jarzabek and Brown) changed the way they ate, slept, trained; they took it more seriously than most teen-agers, and it paid off for them,” Gleason said.

Cassandra Anthony Jarzabek

Age: 16

Place of birth: Falls Church, Va.

Other sports: Swimming, track and field.

Favorite subject: Advanced Placement World.

Least favorite subject: Math.

Favorite athletes: Parker Valby, Kara Goucher, Olympic distance runners.