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South's Custance: swift pace, little grace Photo from Mail Tribune files South Medford's Perry Custance, left, guts out a victory in the 1,500 earlier this season. Runner beats foes with grit By DON HUNT When the starting gun sounds and Perry Custance charges around the track, his chin rises, his teeth clinch and his arms flail somewhat wildly. The South Medford High middle distance runner wins no points for style or grace. But Custance wins race after race, and in the big scheme of things, what else matters? "The bottom line is he's a power runner who doesn't have to be pretty," South Medford coach Bill Rowan says. "The more important thing is, there are very few runners in the Southern Oregon Conference who run with the heart that he does. "Perry will compete until his last breath." Rowan compares Custance's running form to Jim Ryun, who broke the four-minute barrier as a high school runner in the early 1960s and later shattered the world record in the event. "Ryun didn't run with a lot of style, either, but he did all right, didn't he?" Rowan says. "There are certain things you can modify in a runner, but you've also got to let them express themselves." Custance will be the favorite in the 800 meters at the SOC district meet Saturday and will be one of the favorites in the 1,500. The meet kicks off Thursday at 11 a.m. at Russ Werner Field in Grants Pass with preliminaries and selected finals, and concludes Saturday. Custance owns the third-fastest time in the state in the 800 (1:55.9) and has lost only once at that distance this spring. That came on May 6 when North Medford's Nick Dunn outkicked him down the home stretch and edged Custance by a couple of feet. In Custance's defense, he had run the 1,500 less than an hour before while Dunn was fresh, and the South runner had gone through some grueling workouts the previous three days. But the quiet, low-keyed junior declines to make excuses. Custance won't have a chance at revenge Saturday since Dunn won't run the 800 -- he's entered in the 400, the 300 intermediate hurdles and both relays -- but Custance isn't losing any sleep over that, either. "All I'm really worried about is how I run," Custance says. "I'd like to get a PR (personal record) and head up to state on a high note. That's where my focus is." If Custance learned anything from the loss to Dunn, it's that he makes himself vulnerable when he doesn't take the pace to the competition. Not blessed with a lot of raw speed, Custance must go out hard on the first lap of an 800 and zap the energy from his foes. He made the same tactical error at the state meet last year and failed to get past the preliminaries. "Sometimes you're afraid to go out real hard on the first lap but you can't let fear beat you down," says Custance, whose best time in the open 400 is 52.6. He has run a 50.9 split in the 4 x 400 relay. "I know that if I'm going to run a fast time that I have to run a fast first lap and then just see how much guts I have left," Custance says. Although Custance is a self-motivated runner who doesn't need to be pushed, he admits not having another runner of his caliber to train with has made improvement more difficult. Last year, teammate Tim Meador won the state championship in the 800 and set a school record of 1:54.6. "I was always behind him (Meador) in the workouts but he definitely pushed me," says Custance, who has closed to within 1.3 seconds of Meador's school record and seems destined to break it by the time he graduates in the spring of 2000. "He helped me realize just how much (work) I could take." If Custance is a glutton for punishment during workouts, he truly got punished at the state cross country meet last fall when he fell about 200 yards from the starting line and got trampled by several other runners. While others might have crawled off the course in agony and embarrassment, the bruised and muddied Custance jumped to his feet and finished the 5,000-meter run in a respectable 13th place. As is his custom, Custance didn't complain about his calamitous fate that day. As usual, he didn't say much of anything. And that spoke volumes. Today's Sports Index Mail Tribune Copyright� The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, OR U.S.A.