It can be funny what kind of habits and customs some athletes have to help get them ready for competition.

For Jason Karbelk of the SF State men’s cross country team, it’s watching kung-fu movies before a big race. These Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films help him relax and take his mind off the next day’s race, he said.

Odd though it may be, watching these movies the night before must work for Karbelk as he delivered outstanding performances in the last two races of this season.

Karbelk finished 14th in the California Collegiate Athletic Association Championship on Oct. 25, earning him the All-Conference title, and 24th in the Regional Championships on Nov. 8, only nine spots short of qualifying for the National Championships.

“He steps up and buckles down... He believes in himself and it’s been great being teammates with him,” team captain Kyle Fujitsubo said of Karbelk’s efforts.

“Late in the season, Josh Babiak and I decided to pretty much leave the group and started training on our own at practice time to increase our speed on basically every run,” Karbelk said of how he trained for these last two races.

Babiak, who was the top runner for the men’s team this season, suffered a foot injury about midway through the season. The injury occurred just before the races that really mattered for ranking, and he was dogged by it through the remainder of competition. Though the injury kept him from competing at the level he was used to, Babiak kept racing and helping his teammates.

“He pretty much decided to focus the training on helping everyone else, especially me,” Karbelk said.

“It built confidence in me that running in the front pack at a faster pace wasn’t going to bother me at all. I knew that I could mentally handle it and physically handle it and it just gave me confidence that I could stay in the pack. Because of that I was not afraid at all. I pretty much took out all the fear in me, comparing last year to this year and I think I did pretty well.”

“I like to train kind of fast and he likes to train really fast,” Babiak said.

“He actually has a remarkable—let’s call it a gas tank—and he can hold a steady, fast pace for the good part of a 15 or 18-mile run. So he’s got a motor on him... I tried to go up there and help him out and there are some days where I just couldn’t hang with the guy... I think that he’s so motivated that he would have put in the work regardless. I helped him a little bit, but I think that he’s really a motivated guy to go out there and work really hard.”

When asked what else prepared him for being a runner, Karbelk said, “My roots were soccer. I played AYSO [American Youth Soccer Association] all my life. I played defense; that’s where I got my endurance and speed.”

But he also mentioned other, more unorthodox sports experiences.

“I love skating for the art and expression in skate style and being able to put your body on the line for tricks. [And] I love skating for the joy of being out in the city or on a friend’s mini ramp and just having fun,” Karbelk said.

He said he has been skateboarding and riding BMX since he was in middle school at his hometown of La Crescenta, in the foothills above Glendale in Los Angeles County.

“It gave me an experience of being tougher and doing things I’d never try,” he said.

“For example, if I was going to do a handrail, I would pump myself up to do that and just go for it. And in the race, I’d do stuff I never used to do, like go for the front pack. It’s kind of the same mentality; you just have to give it a shot.”

BMX helped, too. “That was the first time I felt the pain in my legs that hurt so bad from the lactic acid. I just got really tough out of that,” he said.

Karbelk, who is now a 21-year-old senior majoring in business management with a focus on marketing, said he had a quiet childhood growing up in the suburban community.

“Not too much [to do], we had a movie theater. What I did was skateboard with my friends like every day,” Karbelk said.

He still skates since moving to San Francisco, but said he has not skated this year to avoid injury during the cross country season.

“Mostly, I do it for fun and just to make videos of each other,” he said.

“[San Francisco] is one of the meccas of skateboarding. There’s many pros that live here and a lot of historic spots. It’s definitely good.”

It was Karbelk’s older brother, Ryan, who got him into his other three sports. With running, he made the transition on his own and was soon hooked.

“With cross country it was in eighth grade, in middle school. I trained in that for this race in Griffith Park and it just happened that I got first place,” he said.

He has kept running since as he competed on both the cross country and track teams at La Crescenta High School and Pasadena Community College.

“We focus more on long runs, recovery and longer speed runs out here and the terrain is really different,” Karbelk said about making the transition from PCC to SF State.

“Back at home we would drive out to the hills, Angel’s Crest, and run there a lot. Here we did a lot of flat runs around Lake Merced or Sunset and I just wasn’t comfortable with that. I was kind of rebelling against Tom Lyon’s training a little bit. I was used to a different style.”

“This year, I 100 percent believed in what he was trying to get us to do,” he continued.

Karbelk’s plans for the future, now that he has used up his college eligibility, include training with the men’s track club here at SF State and two of the local running clubs. He said he will be a volunteer assistant coach for next year’s cross country team as he still has one final year of school left. He also plans on competing in the San Diego Marathon on June 5.

“He’s got a lot of potential for the long duration [races] and it’s going to be great to see him run a couple marathons,” Babiak said.

“He’s a good guy to have had on a team, I’ll tell you that much.”