Thornton – Anguel Tolev was born to run through fields, up streets, across oceans, through language barriers, weighty textbooks and anything else life can prop in front of a teenager.
Have strong legs and a strong mind – will travel.
Tolev, a senior at Thornton High School, immigrated to Denver from Bulgaria with his family when he was 9 years old after his father won the citizenship lottery, the first step toward getting a green card.
Tolev has done everything possible in the past eight years to build a foundation for his own American Dream. He speaks three languages, is enrolled with Thornton’s International Baccalaureate program, is student body vice president, president of the honor society and maintains a 4.22 grade-point average.
But what presses on his mind a little more is the state cross country championships Oct. 28, when Tolev’s test will be trying to unseat two-time Class 5A state champion Steven Weeks of Arvada.
Tolev placed 30th at state in 2004 after recovering from offseason hernia surgery, and placed fourth last year. But Tolev is undefeated this season against 5A runners, including a 27-second victory over Weeks at last month’s Runners Roost, a week after Tolev ran a personal best of 15 minutes, 30.9 seconds at the Liberty Bell.
“It just gave me the confidence that I can run with him and beat him,” Tolev said of Weeks, also a senior. “I just had it that day. Everything went right. The entire week went right.”
Of course, Tolev is too smart to assume he has any advantages over Weeks heading down the stretch. In fact, he considers himself on “alert” and more wary of Weeks than ever. Weeks is known for gearing his training solely for running his best at the state meet at El Pomar Youth Sports Complex, where last season Weeks ran 15:42.1 and Tolev came in at 16:16.
“Since I beat him, now I’m not letting my guard down,” Tolev said.
Letting down seems like a foreign phrase to Tolev, who burst on the scene as a top freshman and understudy to teammate Bradley Harkrader, state champion in 2003 and now at the University of Colorado.
Tolev and Harkrader still train together – a ritual Tolev considers a daily learning experience about how to run and win.
What made Harkrader’s championship so sweet was that he beat heavy favorite and phenom Ryan Deak by a whopping 15 seconds. That’s just the kind of upset Tolev would like to be remembered for this season.
Aspirations like that are what Thornton coach Suzanne Hammerschmidt saw in Tolev when she watched him compete as a freshman.
“What I could see from him the first time I met him was his dedication,” Hammerschmidt said. “He had that discipline. From the start, he had a goal in mind and his goal was to be one of the best runners at Thornton High School, and one of the best runners in the state.”
Tolev, who runs 60 miles a week, credits his natural ability to years of playing soccer in Bulgaria, where he grew up in a small village outside the city of Plovdiv. He returned there for four weeks this summer to visit relatives. Roughly less than half the size of Colorado but with a population of more than 7 million, Bulgaria isn’t the ideal place to train, but Tolev made do each day by running from city to city.
Returning to his roots, training for the race of his life and mulling the many paths he could choose after high school, Tolev doesn’t need years to realize how far he has come.
“It gives me more opportunity to succeed, and I’m just trying to take advantage of what I’m offered here,” Tolev said of living in the United States. “In Bulgaria, you can only go so far in school, and here, the possibilities are endless.”
It’s anyone’s guess how far he will go.
