Eric Hulst and Ralph Serna
donated by Stephen D. Isham
Mostly about Eric Hulst.
Ran a 9:00.4 as a HS freshman. Won the World Junior X-C Championship in '76, but then faded from the running scene.
As a junior in HS, Hulst won one of the best high school races of all time as he edged my friend and teammate Ralph Serna in the California state 2 mile finals. Hulst ran 8:44 to Ralph's 8:45. From the opening gun to the final few yards, they were never more than a second apart. Hulst's blistering pace sucked the life out of Serna's fabulous kick, and Hulst held off three or four surges from Ralph on the last lap to win it.
As a senior in HS, Eric went on to win the World Junior Cross Country Championships, leading the American team (including Ralph) to victory. The May 1976 Runner's World has a photo of him on the cover winning the the World Junior XC.
Hulst was a nototiously hard worker, doing three track sessions a week, long runs in the hills about the Pacific Ocean while wearing a weight vest, and four or five weight workouts a week. He and Serna were perfect rivals. Hulst was rather stocky, with pale freckled skin and short cropped red hair. Ralph was whippet thin, and his Hispanic heritage left gave him bronzed skin darkened further by his hours of training, and a head of long flowing black hair. Hulst was a powerful, bull of a runner. He seemed to beat the air out of the way with his fists, and you expected his spikes to rip pieces of Tartan track up and fling them in the air behind him. Serna was a matador, a graceful, elegant, smooth runner who seemd to not even displace air. His eyes would be half closed while he raced, as if the lack of effort to run so fast was boring to him, and there was no evidence that his feet ever actually contacted the ground. They were Ali and Frazier, the butcher and the surgeon. It was a glorious time.
Though Serna and Hulst had been bitter rivals in high school, they both ended up at UC-Irvine to become friends and teammates. After his senior year in HS, Hulst was beset by injuries. While I believe he helped UCI to one or two div II national cross country championships, I think he was a mid-packer on those teams, which included Serna (who was twice the NCCA div II individual XC champ) and a guy who proved better at the mile than at cross country, Steve Scott.
It seems that Hulst was plagued by injuries thereafter, occasionally mounting a comeback and getting in decent shape (by his standards) before dropping off again.
In 1993 or 1994 Eric Hulst died of a brain tumor at the age of 35. A great loss of one of the most tremendous high school runners in US history.
