Although she said she likes a good beer — she’s even begun brewing it — and she enjoys a fine cigar, too, the 22-year-old from Centerville won’t be recovering from too much graduation-eve partying at her Lawnview Avenue house in the Student Ghetto.
When it comes to celebration of self-accomplishment, Crasto takes it to a whole different level.
Saturday, she planned to press herself to the limits for some 13 hours straight — swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles and then running a 26.2-mile marathon — through the strong headwinds and 2,800-foot elevation that makes the St. George Ironman Triathlon in Utah so grueling.
And it comes just two weeks after she competed in the 2010 Collegiate National Triathlon Championships in Lubbock, Texas — where she finished 46th of 328 women — and only 12 days after she ran the Boston Marathon.
Mind you, all this was done while she was finishing up her final semester at UD, where she took an unheard of 25 credit hours to complete her chemical engineering and pre-med double major.
Oh, and before heading to her post-college job on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig — which she’ll have prepped for by co-oping for five of her UD semesters at oil refineries and research facilities around the country, as well as upcoming studies in Texas, going to an Oklahoma school to get a commercial trucker’s license and studying nine months in France — she’ll spend the summer in Ethiopia.
She leaves May 23 for Addis Ababa, where she and two other students will work on a UD engineering project that will team them with a German organization building institutional rocket stoves.
With all that in mind, you figure the cigar smoke must be clouding her vision when she says:
“I know the graduation ceremony is all about recognition for what you did in school, but I didn’t have any honors in college. I didn’t have any specific achievements or awards. ... I was just a student.”
That’s like saying the Ironman is just a little workout.
Gaining confidence
Growing up in Centerville with three fit, athletic brothers and two accomplished parents — her dad, Allan, is the Associate Director of the UD Research Institute; her mom, Elsie, is the technology coordinator of St. Margaret of York school in Loveland — Crasto said she had some self-esteem issues:
“I was overweight as a kid and I wasn’t very good in sports. I played soccer, went out for the basketball team and tried gymnastics. I pretty much sat the bench on all team sports and I never passed the first level in gymnastics.
“Part of it was I didn’t start with sports until the fourth, fifth, or sixth grade and the other kids had been doing it longer. And part of it was just self-consciousness.”
Crasto said there was a time she was just 5 feet tall and weighed 145 pounds: “I had a negative self image. And, of course, in school you get teased, whether you wear glasses, have a different name or, like me, you’re a little chubby.”
Her parents were both born in India and she said a trait of the family’s culture played into that as well: “In the Indian culture, when families get together, they are very frank. They’ll just say, ‘Hey, you’re overweight.’
“As a young girl, you look at the girls in the magazines — they’re all skinny — and that works on your confidence, too.”
But just as sports had initially fueled her insecurities, they also beautifully transformed her.
When she got to Centerville High School, she said she started rowing: “I was decent at it, so I stuck with it. From there I joined the cross country team and I was better at that. With individual endurance sports, I seemed to be able to push myself to my own goals.”
She slimmed down and grew up a little — well, to 5-foot-3 — and she even did some modeling.
At UD she was on the women’s rowing team and then joined the triathlon club.
Her first endurance event was the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati. Self-trained, she found she still had a lot to learn. Although she had done all her running work, she knew nothing about nutrition.
“I consumed maybe 200 calories the whole race, but I burned closer to 3,000,” she said shaking her head.
“At the end of the race I was miserable. I was exhausted. It took me forever to recover and I had injuries from overuse. And I started thinking, ‘There’s no way that’s the easiest way to do a marathon.’ ”
She learned about nutrition before her next race — the San Diego Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon — consumed 1,500 calories as she ran, took 20 minutes off her time and said she felt “excellent” afterward.
Yet this weekend’s event — her first Ironman — is another story.
Thinking globally
That her parents will be there with her is huge, she said: “They give me the kind of support I need. It might sound strange, but any of these endurance events I do — when no one is there with me — I start crying after about three hours.
“It’s just your body is in such pain and no one knows your name. You’ve got no support. I need someone to say, ‘You’re doing great. You’ll be fine.’ ”
Another reason her folks are there is that it will be one of the last times they’ll spend time with their daughter — she’s headed on an eight-day trip back out West next week with two friends — before she leaves for Ethiopia, which will be followed by a trip to Egypt.
So with life a constant three-ring circus, does she have anything else on the horizon?
Crasto nodded and started to laugh:
“Last summer during our co-op in Washington, I lived with this girl who goes to Montana State. We realized at some point engineering wasn’t gonna be our lives forever.
“It might seem crazy, but we decided we’d like to move to Brazil and open a shop that sells coffee, chocolate, cigars and flowers. She enjoys making chocolate and pastries. I worked at Boston Stoker for a few years and I learned about coffee and learned to appreciate different cigars. Then we thought flowers might be nice, too. So that’s our goal in five to 10 years.
“And once that business is doing well, I have one other thought. My good friend is into brewing beer. It even was his option for a lab experiment for chemical engineering.
“We both love good beers — stouts, RPAs (rye pale ale) and porters. We brewed one batch together — a chocolate, raspberry stout — and it tasted pretty good.
“In fact, once every three to four weeks on campus, I get together with a few of my good buddies and we have some good beers and smoke cigars.
“So we’re thinking of opening a brew pub in Oregon. My friend will be the brewmaster. One guy will be our chef and I’ll be the bartender, the face out front.
“The way I look at it, you can go through life two ways: Just working and making as much money as you can. Or, trying different things that are really interesting and getting as much out of living as possible. I think you can make life one big adventure.”
That’s why, instead of marching today, she was swimming, biking and running on Saturday.
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