A recipe for running

Look closely and you can still see the two scars on Katie Averill’s forehead.

The Laguna Beach resident is more used to talking about her cooking. The former owner of Mirabeau Bistro in Dana Point, she is now a corporate pastry chef for Balboa Dessert Co.

Yet that day nearly 20 years ago, when she fell off a 50-foot cliff in Toledo, Spain, shapes her as well.

“The locals said the best view of the city was to go up this path,” Averill said. “It got really gravelly and 50 feet up, like a cartoon, I just went off the side.”

Averill, then halfway through college at UCLA, had shattered her arm and suffered a Hangman’s fracture. She was put in a halo cast for five months, hence the scars on her forehead, and was told she was lucky to walk again.

“It was a cage,” she said. “They make fun of it in the movies. It’s a metal cage, and they screw into your skull, and put it in line with your shoulders and down to your waist. You can’t really move, but the gnarly part is that it’s screwed into your brain. It’s stupid and funny now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.”

Her physical therapist told Averill she would never run again. It was hard at first, true, but she rejected that prognosis.

A couple of years later she had started running 10k races. Now, Averill is preparing for the Surf City USA half-marathon Feb. 7 in Huntington Beach.

Averill, 37, said she has been running about five miles a day in preparation. She likes to run at the trails in Crystal Cove.

Yet, It hasn’t necessarily been an easy road back.

Her hips were out of alignment, which meant they would lock up if she ran up an incline. Even to this day, she lives on a cliff but she can’t run like that.

Sometimes, it’s hard to fit the running in. A chef’s schedule can be all over the place, and she has her son Colby, 12, to take care of. Averill also recently got engaged to Aaron Martin, a motion picture composer who was one of five composers who worked on “Avatar.”

Martin won’t get in the way of Averill’s running. No one does — it’s her alone time.

“She runs for herself, because it’s a moment of freedom for her,” Martin said. “It’s a good way to release the stress. She also has a treadmill at home. It’s really her private time.”

Running, though, has been crucial for Averill. It’s also a constant in a career where few other things have been. After college, she went to culinary school in San Francisco before moving to Las Vegas and working at Charlie Palmer’s Aureole in the Mandalay Bay Resort. Then, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she opened Olives restaurant for her mentor, celebrity chef Todd English.

Opening Mirabeau, which she sold three years ago, in Orange County made sense.

“I went to UCLA and I kind of wanted to open a restaurant not in my parents’ backyard [San Diego] and L.A., I had enough of,” Averill said. “So, kind of in the middle was Laguna Beach. I love it here. I just wanted [Colby] to be in a sheltered little perfect world. So far, so good.”

Averill would love to open another restaurant someday, although she has no definite plans. Cooking, she said, allows her to take care of people.

“When I get up in the morning, if I can make a dessert that lights someone’s eyes up, then I’m a happy camper,” she said. “I absolutely love cooking, because you give something to somebody and you make their day. When I teach, I [make] bread, and bread makes people happy like nothing else. It’s a nurturing thing.”

She stays plenty busy with Balboa, with clients ranging from retail chains to the television shopping channel QVC.

And as a dessert chef, she definitely appreciates a good run.

“We all get together and sample the desserts I’ve made, or that someone else wants me to make,” Averill said. “It’s just a fattening thing; it’s 100% fat. My job is ridiculous. I sit around and I eat cake all day, so I have to run.”

Averill said she’d like to run with Colby in the Newport Beach Spirit Run, a 10k in March. For the Surf City USA half-marathon next weekend, she said her goal is to run every mile under nine minutes.

The accident in Spain was just a temporary hiccup. She never planned to stop running, even on the day when the physical therapist told her she’d never run again.

“It was one of those challenges,” said Averill, who has never been known to mind a good challenge.