Running with the Buffaloes Page 17
Friday, September 25, 1998
Potts Field
6:25 a.m.
We Believe in Our Fitness
The sun lies low on the horizon. The sky is burnt orange. Most of the men are here, switching into their spikes and stretching after having warmed up. Wetmore launches into a story: “I saw an article in the paper this morning. Only ten percent of all non-human species are monogamous.
Of those ten percent, only two percent are really monogamous. I guess the point of the article was to forgive our president. What I want to know is, of that ten percent, how many lie about it?” He looks at Mary Baretto, one of the freshman women. “You think many lie about it, Mary?” She shrugs her shoulders. She, like the others, is not nearly awake enough for this.
As usual, the men notice Wetmore’s demeanor. Ponce looks at Robbie, and says, “Wetmore’s vocal this morning, dude.” “Yeah, he’s fired up.”
Wetmore checks his watch before continuing his monologue. “We’re going to be late this morning, I can tell, there are certain late people.” The comment is aimed at Severy, who walks in through the gate to the track as Wetmore says this. Sev just grins sheepishly.
Wetmore turns to Friedberg: “Mike Friedberg! Today you’re going for your 10k PR. Forget the heart rate monitor! Fuck the document! There’s a 53-second NCAA [altitude] conversion today, boys! If you’re within the qualifying time, fuck it and go!”
Reese does strides while Wetmore rants. Every twenty steps or so, like a frisky colt feeling his legs, he snaps a leg back towards his butt.
Two former Buff cross country All-Americans are going to do the workout with the boys. Wetmore announces their presence: “We have some guest leaders today. Zeke [Tiernen] and Clint [Wells] are our guest rabbits. They’re going out in 6:40!” Everyone laughs at this one and Robbie joins in, “Zeke trains all week for Friday morning.” “No,” says Wetmore,
“he doesn’t train all week, then he comes.”
Now that he has spoken up, Robbie has made himself a target for Wetmore’s humor. “Robbie, are you ready? Have you done your strides?” He does not miss a beat. “Yes, Coach,” he says, needling Wetmore, “I thought the workout started at 6:30.” It says something about the importance of the workout that Wetmore does not rush the men.
“All right,” he says, “let’s get cracking, a couple of strides.” He is bouncing around. “Man,” says Goucher, “he is fired up!”
Robbie is still needling Wetmore about the time. “All right,” he says to 108
CHRIS LEAR
Lear 102-149:Lear 102-149 1/5/11 1:24 PM Page 109
Robbie, “here’s what you do. Go over there and just stand on the starting line.” The guys crack up as Robbie does it.
Wetmore and JD position themselves at the starting line as Goucher heads out on his own. He is scheduled to run 74’s, or 4:55 a mile. If he is concerned about doing it, it does not show. Most of the guys are in spikes, but Goucher is wearing his trainers, hoping to minimize the damage to his calves.
Everyone else is running 77 or 5:10 a mile. Friedberg, Napier, and Severy are running a full 10k, while the others will stop at 9k. Sev is re-liable, so he sets the pace. He is a bit more nervous than the others, because he ran his easy day yesterday with Goucher; in other words, it was not very easy. As he passes the first quarter right on pace, JD notices how fit he appears, “He’s looking thin. I’ve never seen him that thin.”
Wells and Tierman go through the mile in 5:07, and Sev comes
through, on pace, in 5:10. He looks anxiously at Wetmore as he passes on every lap. “Calm down, Sev Dog, calm down.” Then Wetmore adds, “Sev, you’re looking good, I can see two of your ribs.” “Great,” Sev answers,
“only six to go.”
It is brisk — standing still, you can see your breath — but the chill is welcomed by the runners because it is perfect distance-running weather.
Goucher comes by two miles in 9:45, looking effortless.
Eleven laps in Reese flashes a big grin as he passes. Wetmore sees this, and remarks, “Good guys, just training, just training. We race next week.”
Sev has gotten nervous and pulled away with Wells and Tiernan. Napier is all alone leading the pack past three miles in 15:30. “Am I all right?”
Napier asks. “Little fast,” Wetmore replies, “but OK.”
Tiernan and Wells pull off at 8k, having run 25:25. Sev keeps going.
“Nice and controlled, nice and controlled. Feel good.” He is running all alone, in Goucher territory.
Goucher, meanwhile, is just flying and making it look easy. He passed 8k in 24:11. Every mile has gotten progressively faster. 4:53, 4:52, 4:52, 4:49, 4:45. Tiernan watches him and shouts encouragement, “Good job, Big Dog, looking hot!” “Look at Goucher,” he exclaims, “he’s an amazing runner. He’s going to run 10k in 30 minutes! That’s an automatic NCAA qualifier right there!”
He would come close. He runs the sixth mile in 4:42 before closing the last quarter in 70 for a 30:09. That converts to 29:16 at sea level. The mark would be a provisional qualifier for NCAA’s, and he does this at 6:30 in the morning, in training shoes, at the end of a hundred-mile week, with 95 miles in singles. Wetmore gives his star the data: “30:09 — that’s a 29:16. That’s what you ran at Furman [at the NCAA Cross Country RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
109
Lear 102-149:Lear 102-149 1/5/11 1:24 PM Page 110
Championships] a year ago. Compare the efforts.” It does not take him long. Says Goucher, “I’m fired up. I feel good.”
Goucher is continuing an incredible run of training that even his teammates and former teammates, like Wells, find hard to fathom. Says Reese, “Last year I was running with him on Tuesday workouts, and now there’s no way I can hang. He’s stepped it up. He was training last year like the Dog [Sev] is now.” Goucher’s run is all the more impressive when one considers that he ran eighteen miles yesterday, and that this is his seventh consecutive 90-plus mile week, mostly in singles. “Man,” Reese tells Goucher, “it hurts to get that much.” “No,” Goucher replies. “I’m used to it now. I felt good, really good, really under control. It got hard toward the end, but that’s expected. I was close to my heart rate threshold today. I’m still stuffy though.”
Leave it to Goucher to find something to complain about. Such a temperament is why he has been tagged with the nickname “Groucho”
from the guys. In Goucher’s defense, he has an uncanny ability of getting screwed. Sev recalls such an instance: “We were in Pasco, Washington, our sophomore year. We go to a Dairy Queen and I wanted a small cone.
It was huge. Gouch got one too, and his was puny. Another time, we were in Washington at Dairy Queen, and we all got cones for 99 cents. He goes to a different window and pays a dollar seventy-nine.” Incidents like these happen so often that the team refers to getting screwed as getting
“Gouchered.” There is a caveat though. “It’s only on the small stuff,” says Sev. “On the big stuff, I don’t think he gets Gouchered.”
Severy finishes ahead of schedule, running 31:39. Napier follows in 31:51 and Friedberg runs 31:54. Sev is more excited about Wetmore’s comments than about his performance. “That was the first time I’ve ever heard that from him. I only hear, you’re looking fat. I guess I’m getting in shape, huh?” There’s no doubt about it.
But what about Friedberg? He runs a 30-second PR. Clearly, Goucher is not the only one making big leaps.
And the pack? Valenti and Robbie, the tenth and eleventh guys on the depth chart, run 25:40, right with everyone. For Robbie, it’s an 8k PR that converts to 25 and change at sea level. It is amazing to think this is a guy they were going to cut from the team. Berkshire, Reese, Roybal, Ponce, and Tessman stay together, running a stellar 28:50 for 9k. The shocker here is Roybal. In the last anaerobic threshold run he was off the back and on Wednesday he had to get a ride back to the van. But today he looks great.
The improvement in the pack helps soften the late
st blow to the team. Blondeau is out for the season with a stress fracture in his back.
Wetmore called him last night to console him and convince him “that it’s not a tragedy.” But as the injuries mount, Wetmore is forced to look at 110
CHRIS LEAR
Lear 102-149:Lear 102-149 1/5/11 1:24 PM Page 111
the training to see what is causing the rash of injuries. In Blondeau’s case, the challenge is discovering “why he’s had two stress fractures in six months on 60 miles a week. Particularly because it’s not in the same spot as last time, that’s the confusion.”
Still, Wetmore’s mood is jocular and upbeat. His moods, like his practices, are to a certain degree orchestrated. They know that he is pleased.
If he were mad, he would not have to tell them. Says Wetmore, “They know I’m pissed when I withdraw my affection.”
Every guy ran better than expected this morning. Their depth right now is better than any previous CU team. Reese says, “Freaking Wes!
How is he able to do that? He ran 28:40 through 9k. Any other year, that makes our top seven. I think he’s got issues with leg turnover. That’s the only thing stopping guys like him and Jason Robbie.” Adds Wells, “That’s what [All-Americans] Cleckler, Cooper, and [Tim] Catalano were all running when we got second at Arkansas [at NCAA’s].” Reese credits Wetmore for the result. “With Mark, it’s the power of suggestion. He says it and you just do it, even though you may not be fit enough to do that.”
If Wetmore has a fault, in Reese’s eyes, it is that he does not encourage them to take a leap of faith in their own ability come Nationals.
Wetmore’s faith is based in fact. Reese admits, “We believe in our fitness.”
Reese also knows Wetmore analyzes an athlete’s practices and results to predict what they should be able to run in the next race. So, Reese understands that Wetmore is not going to give a rah-rah speech asking someone to run a superhuman performance to get the job done at race time. He just wants his athletes to do what the data tells them they can do. But, to win it all, Reese thinks they need a little more. “At Nationals, you have to believe in big things. You gotta believe in miracles. After Nationals last year I wrote in my log, ‘Ran pretty well, but I gotta get out a little better.’ We believe in our fitness, not in miracles. But somewhere I think we got to have faith that we can have a breakthrough performance.” But for now, Reese’s focus is not on NCAA’s. He is looking no further ahead than the Shootout, or “N-Day” as he referred to it on the first day of practice. “It’s going to be weird remembering the pain of racing again. I haven’t gone in a long time.”
Before the Shootout, the men are running on Sunday on the Sante Fe Trail in Colorado Springs. Wetmore knows the training can get monotonous, so he spices things up by taking his runners to cool places to get in the miles. The Sante Fe trail promises to be one such run. Goucher asks Wetmore if it’s cool if he meets them there so he can go home to Colorado Springs until Sunday morning. “I don’t know if it’s cool,” Wetmore replies, “but it’s OK. You’ll have to check with MTV to see if it’s cool.”
RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
111
Lear 102-149:Lear 102-149 1/5/11 1:24 PM Page 112
Potts Field
3:45 p.m.
Bluebirds
The Bluebirds now get their opportunity to match the morning’s heroics. Johnson, the Mooch, and the freshmen fall five seconds short of their goal, running 27:12 for 8k — 5:26 per mile. No one overexerts himself to hit the pace. “Good,” Wetmore says to them with a mile remaining, “that’s the way I like it, nice and controlled. When in doubt, slow down.”
Wetmore addresses them when they switch into their trainers.
“Good run, nice and controlled. I’m proud of you guys.” He chit-chats with Slattery before speaking to the group. “You want a story?” No one responds. “Well, I’ll give you one even though you don’t want one. I had an essay once in high school: Explain the meaning of life. I wrote, ‘Life is a sugary sweet cereal made by the Quaker Oats Company.’ I got a D.” Wetmore never was one for sitting in class. “I was too fidgety,” he says. “I hated it.” He laughs with the others, before addressing Adam Loomis, the Portland transfer who has been battling injury problems, and himself. “Stick to the plan,” Wetmore says, “and you’ll be surprised what you can do. There are no miracles in running. I don’t know about other sports. Actually, I know about wrestling and there are no miracles in wrestling. There may be in other sports, but there are no miracles in running.”
112
CHRIS LEAR
Lear 102-149:Lear 102-149 1/5/11 1:24 PM Page 113
Sunday, September 27, 1998
The Sante Fe Trail, Colorado Springs
8:00 a.m.
Death March
After the long two-hour ride to the Sante Fe Trail, Tessman is ready to roll. On the way out, he really pushes the pace, jumping way ahead of the pack. He has not been putting in the volume that some of the others have; he has “only” been averaging 70 miles a week, but he has been pushing the hard and long days. He cuts down his load by often running an easy six or seven miles around Kitt Field on recovery days.
Early Friday afternoon, Tessman stopped by Wetmore’s office to see what time the buses were leaving on Sunday morning to the Springs just as JD and Wetmore were talking about how much he has improved since practice started in late August. “Tessman,” Wetmore said to him, reclin-ing in his black leather chair, “there’s a consensus around here that you’re going to be the X-Factor for us in November.” Tessman’s eyes lit up at the thought. “Oh definitely, I definitely think I can be.”
Already in front, Tessman crushes everybody on the way back, finishing sixteen miles a full five minutes ahead of the pack in 1:37. That is just a shade over six minutes a mile, at an elevation over 7000 feet. “I wanted to make it a death march,” he says afterwards while sitting under a tree,
“I wanted to hurt.”
He accomplished both objectives, and Roybal was a victim of the first. After cranking most of the way, Roybal, Mr. Inconsistency, walks and jogs the last two miles back to the bus because of hamstring pain.
The mileage hogs — Berkshire, Friedberg, Napier, and Ponce — finish in a pack. They run a solid 1:53 for eighteen miles. Only Goucher and Severy have yet to return from their run. Although they are doing twenty miles, Goucher arrives just a few minutes after the eighteeners. Sev hung tough with Goucher until they reached ten miles together in 57:25, but on the way back, Goucher was too much for the Bus. Goucher’s time for twenty miles is a blazing 1:56:20. Severy finishes only a minute behind Goucher, completing a tremendous run of his own.
A year ago the team ran this same trail. Batliner remembers it well.
“It was kind of a bummer. We drove all the way out there and there was this super-thick fog. It was kind of rainy, and it got worse as we went along. In spots it was so bad that you would be running along, and it wouldn’t be until someone was 30 meters out that you would see them coming at you.”
RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
113
Lear 102-149:Lear 102-149 1/5/11 1:24 PM Page 114
Today the sun is oppressively unrelenting, and everyone is grasping for water and searching for shade when they roll in. Goucher, though, seems remarkably unaffected by the endeavor. Perhaps it is because today’s run is yet another demonstration of the improvement he has made since last year. In last year’s fog, he ran 1:58 for eighteen miles, two minutes slower than he ran this year for twenty.
114
CHRIS LEAR
Lear 102-149:Lear 102-149 1/5/11 1:24 PM Page 115
Tuesday, September 29, 1998
The Buffalo Ranch
4:00 p.m.
Milers
Sev has a bruise the size of a fist on his quad, courtesy of Binesh. He is not the only one battling sore legs now. Goucher is starting to break down under the weight of his training. As he does his strides, he occa-sionally breaks form, his r
ight leg buckling beneath him. It is a disconcerting sight for everyone on the team. “I don’t know what it is. My IT
[iliotibial band] is sore, but I can’t put a finger on it. The pain builds, then I take a step and it gives.” “Great,” says Wetmore, “that’s all I need to hear.” Sev and Goucher do not let their aches affect their workout. No one does.
They are doing the same workout as the one on September 8th.
Wetmore is looking for continued improvement to signify that, again, his runners are advancing their fitness. Here are the results:
NAME
9/8 PACE
9/29 GOAL
ACTUAL
Slattery
4 x 5:18
5 x 5:25
5:10
Ruhl
4 x 5:32
5 x 5:25
5:14
Crandall
4 x 5:30
5 x 5:25
5:20
Elmuccio
5 x 5:25
5 x 5:20
5:08
Johnson
NT
5 x 5:20
5:17
Harrison
4 x 5:24
5 x 5:20
5:17
Smith
NT
5 x 5:20
5:16
Loomis
4 x 5:22
5 x 5:15
5:12
Robbie
5 x 5:21
5 x 5:15
5:12
Valenti
4 x 5:19
6 x 5:10
5:06
Schafer
5 x 5:18
5 x 5:10
5:08
Roybal
NT
5 x 5:10
5:12
Napier
5 x 5:16
6 x 5:10
5:06
Tessman
5 x 5:14
6 x 5:10
5:06
Reese
5 x 5:14
6 x 5:10
5:10
Ponce
5 x 5:12
6 x 5:10
5:06
Berkshire
5 x 5:11
6 x 5:10