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garycohenrunning.com
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"All in a Day’s Run" is for competitive runners,
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Ric Rojas twice broke the World Record for 15k on the roads, winning the 1978 Nike Challenge 15k in 43:41 and 1981 Gasparilla 15k in 43:12. He was a consistent top performer as he ranked among the top 10 U.S. Road Racers from 1977 through 1981 by Track and Field News. Ric won numerous major road races, including the 1975 San Francisco Bay-to-Breakers, 1978 Utica Boilermaker, 1979 Bolder-Boulder, 1979 Lilac Bloomsday Run, 1978 Tucson Sun Run, 1978 Garden of the Gods 10-Mile, 1979 Springbank International Road Race, 1980 Salt Lake City Deseret 10K Run, and 1978 Schlitz Light National Championship. He also won the 1976 U.S. AAU National Cross-Country Championship at Belmont Park in Philadelphia. Ric was U.S. Track and Field Championships Silver Medalist at 10,000 meters in 1977 and 1979. He was fourth in the 1979 Pan American Games 10,000 meters. His marathon highlights include winning the 1979 San Antonio Marathon and finishing first at the 1975 Pan American Games Marathon Trials at altitude with a time six minutes faster than the 1968 Olympic Trials Marathon winner on the same course. The 1974 Harvard graduate set the three-mile school record in 13:30 at the 1974 Penn Relays, won numerous Greater Boston Track and Cross-Country Championships, and was ‘All-Ivy League’ in Track and Cross Country. Ric graduated from Los Alamos (New Mexico) High School in 1970 where he won four New Mexico State High School Championships in Cross Country (1968, 1969) and in the mile (1969, 1970). He won the high school mile at the USATF National Indoor Championships at the Houston Astrodome in February 1970 in 4:11.6. His personal best times include: 10k (track) - 28:24.2; 10k (road) - 28:34; 15k - 43:12 and Marathon - 2:20:35. While living in Boulder, Colorado, Ric has coached hundreds of masters, open, and junior runners including his highly successful daughter, Nell, the 2019 Grandma’s Marathon champion. He also provides on-line coaching at www.trainingpeaks.com. Ric was very kind to spend nearly two hours on the telephone for this interview in early 2020.
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As we look back 35 to 45 years to the running boom in the United States when road racing was developing and there was a tremendous depth of runners, how exciting was it to be in the middle of this amazing group of talented runners?
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Oh my gosh – it was unbelievable. It was kind of to the point where it didn’t register. I was racing against the likes of Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers. The first race I had against Bill was when I was a senior at Harvard. I liked to run in the local road races, much to the dismay of my coaching staff at Harvard who didn’t want me to run those races. But I was more of a road racer at heart. I entered the Lexington to Cambridge 15-kilometer race, that they probably still contest, and it finished right in downtown Cambridge. I got to the starting line and was thinking, ‘I can win this one. I’m going to win this.’ The gun goes off and I’m running at a good pace. Pretty soon I see this blond hair in from of me, bobbing up and down. I figured I could catch this guy, but the hair was bobbing up and down and was disappearing off into the distance. It was Bill Rodgers and, little did we know, he was going to win the Boston marathon, I believe the next year. He was on his comeback trail after taking some time off when he graduated from Wesleyan. Lo and behold – there he was. That was probably one of his first road races when he got serious about running and I just happened to be in that race – Lexington to Cambridge. I don’t think I said anything to him after the race as I couldn’t find him. Usually, I would talk with my competitors after a race.
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Bill Rodgers was at the top of road racing in the ensuing years as were you from 1977 through 1981 when you ranked each year among the top 10 US Road Racers by Track and Field News. With competitors like Frank Shorter, Craig Virgin, Bill Rodgers and Alberto Salazar, what does it say when there were twenty-five top road racers and you ranked consistently in the top ten?
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You hit on it with the word ‘consistency.’ When I evaluate anyone’s career, I look at consistency and continuity. There were many runners who were a whole lot better than I was. But I trained more consistently and raced more consistently over the period of my career which was eight years or so. And I never really got injured. I retired because of other reasons – I started my career with Nike, I got married and started my family. During that time period there were twenty-five or thirty runners who were better than I was and should have been ranked up there, but they couldn’t keep it together. It boiled down to whether we could show up to the starting line healthy and be consistent over time. I was able to do that for a good eight years or so.
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You may be a little humble when you say that twenty-five guys were better than you. In 1978 you won the Nike Challenge over 15 kilometers with the world's best time of 43:41 and three years later broke the 15k World Record at the 1981 Gasparilla Distance Classic in 43:12. What does it say that you broke the World Record twice at 15k which was a tough distance that combined speed with strong endurance?
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My talent lay in that 10-mile and 15k range. I think that, if they had a 10-mile race or 15k race at the Olympic Trials, I probably would have made the Olympic team. The 10k was a bit too short for me and the marathon was too long. I hit my sweet spot at fifteen kilometers. And I was always well prepared. One of the reasons I always ran so well is that I wrote my plans out and the more faithful I was, the more I stuck to my guns, keeping to my plans, the more successful I was. That was always true with me. I would sit down at the beginning of the year and write down what I was going to do every day for a block of time. I had specific numbers for goals. I did this back before there were spreadsheets and I would run very well. A lot of it was also being smart about racing. In the races where I ran well, I was smart and didn’t go out to make a statement. I hung in there and ran my own race. Then I would emerge in the top two or three or I would win the race. I had the approach that in any race I could win. Even when I was in over my head, I sometimes was able to win against better competition. Gasparilla in 1981 was one of those examples. Greg Meyer was there along with Stan Mavis and others in a very good field and deep field.
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I remember two years after that, at the Gasparilla 15k in 1983, I was back with the sub-elite runners in 47:25, a 5:05 pace, that got me only 81st place overall and 49th in the 25-29 age group. Do you feel that us sub-elites were pushing the bottom part of the elites who, in turn, were pushing the top elites which made everybody better?
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Particularly in the marathon that was true. There was this push-pull dynamic. There were a whole bunch of guys, maybe twenty-five, under 2:15, and then another hundred guys under 2:20. The marathon back in the day was much more competitive here in the United States. I believe one of the reasons was that a lot of the runners were coming from a track background. They didn’t go directly to the marathon but stuck with the 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters on the track. They stayed true to their speed roots and that translated to the marathon when they moved up. If you look at the Ethiopians, the Kenyans, all the top marathoners – they could run a sub-four-minute mile. They could jog a 3:59 mile and many could run close to 3:50. I always believed that speed translates up from 5k and 10k to the marathon. That was born out by Rod Dixon when he won the New York City Marathon in 1983 after moving up from 1,500 meters and 5,000 meters.
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From my experience when I graduated from Appalachian State in 1979, as did a lot of other runners, we were self-coached and in graduate school, and most of us seemed to continue with our 5k and 10k workouts while adding more mileage and extending our long runs. We were still doing the fast stuff while increasing our weekly mileage from 80 or 90 miles to 100 plus miles and upping our long runs from 15 miles to 20 or 22 miles. What do you think of our being marathoners, but training like track runners?
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It reminds me of when I went up to Boulder, Colorado in 1977 expressly to train with Frank Shorter and his group. He had just opened his running store at the time. Everybody would jump in and train with Frank. He loved it because he didn’t have to do quite as much work. Runners would compete with him when he did his 220s up at Farrand Field on the Colorado University campus. People would hammer and get a high-quality workout doing 220s. That was Frank’s favorite outdoor workout. He would do those 220-yard repeats on Farrand Field on grass. He didn’t do them on a track. In fact, Frank very rarely ran on the outdoor track in Boulder. He did most of his workouts on Farrand Field. Indoors, Frank competed against the best runners and always challenged himself. I just saw an old video of him racing Steve Prefontaine and Gerry Lindgren somewhere in California in an indoor race when Pre was a senior in high school. Pre was second behind a runner from another country and Frank was a good fifteen seconds behind Pre in that race. Frank loved to train at Ball’s Fieldhouse, which is a tiny 200-meter track on campus. Back in the 1970s, it was open to the public and anyone could run there. This was before there were treadmills and there wasn’t anyplace else to run inside in the winter in Boulder when it got very cold. Everybody migrated to the indoor track. Frank loved to do repeat miles in there and he would just crush them. He would run in the 4:20s for four or five times a mile. He may have some mechanical issues today from running on that little track. The point is, like you said, we stuck to our high-quality roots. During indoor season, I raced two miles against Frank in Albuquerque several times. I would also try to seek out 5k track races that I could get to and be somewhat competitive. Again, it was all about maintaining speedwork while training for the marathon and racing at shorter distances to prepare for marathons.
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Switching gears a bit, you were the 1976 US Cross-Country champion, with a tight group of eleven men within twenty seconds of you including Terry Cotton, Kirk Pfeffer, Mark Finucane, Barry Brown, Ted Castaneda, Ed Mendoza, Tom Fleming and George Malley. Please tell us about that race as you beat a stellar field – was there a strong pack, did you come from behind – what did you do to top this great group?
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That particular year my mission was to try to win the national cross-country championship. It was somewhat arbitrary. I had always wanted to win a national championship and I had run in a bunch of them. I think my best previous finish was around tenth place or so at California at Belmont Park in 1973 or 1974. So, in 1976 I trained hard and averaged a hundred miles a week for a good ten or twelve weeks. I knew about the course and knew there was a gigantic monster hill. If you weren’t prepared for it, you were in trouble. That hill came up somewhere around halfway through the 10k course. When I got there, I was still with the pack. But when I got to the top of the hill, I was all alone and I surged to gap the field by several meters. From there, I was running scared the rest of the way. I never looked over my shoulder. I never knew where anyone was behind me but I probably, at some point in time, had a good fifty meters on the field. That is a lot in a competitive field. I hadn’t run the course before and just got there to the race in time to warm up. I was running blind and reliant on the course being well-marked and the officials telling me which way to go. I ended up winning by a few seconds as Terry Cotton closed on me, but I was able to hold him off. More than anything, I was well-prepared for the race. I had found a hill in Los Alamos, New Mexico at 7,500 feet of elevation, where I was living at the time, and it was pretty much the same hill as on the racecourse. It was down the canyon in one of the mesas and I did a lot of repeats on that hill. I would try to push them as hard as I could. It turned out that hill was almost an exact replica of the hill that came up on the course and the specificity of training and the high intensity at altitude told the tale for that race. I clicked on the day. I didn’t feel good the day before but, when I woke up that morning, I was feeling good and I was able to run a smart race. Other runners set the pace for the first half and it was a bit on the conservative side for me, mostly because I was so well-prepared. Then I popped that hill and took off.
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That race helped you to punch your ticket to the World Cross-Country Championships and you were also a member of two Pan Am Games teams. How special was it to pull on the USA uniform, to have it on your chest and to represent your country?
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If you talk to people from different sports about what their peak experience is or was or could be, it’s making a national team. It was very special to have that uniform and to make the trip. It was almost surreal when I traveled to Europe and stayed in hotels. The European vibe made it even more special. We competed against some of the best athletes in the world. Some of the runners I followed in the sport were out there and there was an ‘Oh, my God’ moment though they were just normal people. I remember running at Cinque Mulini in Torino, Italy and Mike Boit was in the race. He got kind of a big lead and I was toward the back someplace. After a couple loops, he started to slow down. Then he came to a complete stop to sign autographs. He dropped out of the race and continued signing autographs for people in the crowd. It was funny even when I was in the race. An experience like that I will never forget. The day before the race, I went out with Donald Walsh, from Ireland, who had run at Villanova. We had a couple beers and then they started singing these Irish ditties and they were so funny. They had such a good time. Those are the kind of experiences we have on these trips when we make connections with people from different cultures and different countries. They were great runners. Not only did it enable me to race against the best runners in the world on these national teams, but we had a chance to meet people from these different places. At the Pan Am Games, I became the default translator for the team with the press. So, I got to know the reporters and photographers and all who were covering the Games in Mexico City in 1975. There was a nice picture of Bruce, now Caitlin, Jenner at the time as I interviewed him. Kenny Moore had me interview the sprinters from Cuba for Sports Illustrated. That was interesting because the Cubans were very arrogant. They were good athletes who were supported with funding from the Soviet Union and stipends for their athletes who made the national team. Again, it was a great chance to meet some of the top athletes in the world such as Alberto Juantorena.
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Speaking of the Pan Am Games, where you competed in 1975 and 1979, when we look at the latter year, you finished in fourth place in the 10,000 meters with a time of 29:09.8 in San Juan, Puerto Rico behind Rodolfo Gomez in 29:02.4, Enrique Aquino in 29:03.9 and Frank Shorter in 29:06.4. What were highlights of that race?
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I had raced well earlier in the year, beating Frank at Nationals and the Bolder Boulder 10k, but my timing was a bit off for the Pan Am Games. I thought I could run better there, but I didn’t click. I didn’t have the kick I needed to be competitive with those guys. It turned out that the two Mexicans had very good kicks. They were also more experienced than I was in international competition and seemed to have the attitude that I wasn’t going to beat them. They ran away from Frank, rather than away from me. But I was in the mix with one lap to go and then they just took off. It was also warm down there with temperatures in the nineties and high humidity which had an impact on the race.
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Many runners of our generation watched the Olympics, were inspired to compete and had a dream of running in the Olympics. When you were a youth did you think about possibly becoming an Olympian one day and, even though you didn’t make it, how exciting was it to pursue that goal?
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Making the Olympic team, like making the National team, would be any runner’s goal from the time they were a kid. I watched the Olympic Games on ABC in 1964 and my inspiration was Bob Hayes. He was the guy more than anyone else because he was spectacular. What he did was awe-inspiring. They played back his relay a couple of times where he ran eight point seven seconds. If you look at it, he ran a legit eight point seven seconds. He completely overpowered the rest of the field in that final leg of the relay. Of course, he won the one hundred meters going away. He was my first real inspiration. They didn’t cover Billy Mills that much, so he didn’t really impact me that much until later. His influence was more after the fact. When the running boom hit, Billy Mills became famous, though before that he was kind of in the background. I watched the 1972 Olympics and saw Frank Shorter win the Olympic marathon. Frank invented the marathon. There’s no other way to put it. He invented the marathon because nobody gave it much credit as a real event until Frank won the Olympic marathon. Then people reconsidered and realized there was an Olympic marathon. The last time an American had won was Johnny Hayes in 1908. That was a long time ago. Frank finished fifth in the Olympic 10,000 meters and ran in the 27:40s, I believe, in the finals the week before his marathon. What that taught us was that you need to have 10,000-meter speed in order to run a fast marathon. He kept true to that principle throughout his career. Frank running that marathon was amazing. What’s interesting is that when I went to Harvard, Eric Segal was an English professor there. He would come down to the track and run sometimes. He was a little guy, about five feet five or six inches and I bet he didn’t weigh more than a hundred and fifteen pounds. He was the nicest guy and most sincere guy I had ever met. He did some commentating for the Olympics, so these people kind of converged in my life. One of my classmates at Harvard’s father was close friends with Eric Segal because he was in the movie business.
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Let’s talk about coaching. From what I have read, it sounds like your experience in high school was like mine. We had two great men coaching us in track and field but didn’t have good distance coaches. When our top miler graduated after my sophomore year and went to the University of Florida, he mailed me running advice based on what Coach Roy Benson was doing in Gainesville and I ended up coaching the distance runners my junior and senior year. I understand that you had a similar experience at Los Alamos High School. Could you tell us about that?
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It was similar to your situation. My first year running in high school was back in 1967. The Olympics were happening the next year at altitude in Mexico City, so Oregon’s Coach Bill Bowerman sent many of his athletes down to Los Alamos to train for two reasons – we were at altitude and we had one of the only synthetic tracks in the country. Kenny Moore, Bob Williams, Wade Bell and Roscoe Divine did their interval training on the track. Arne Kvalheim and Knut Kvalheim, their two Norwegians, were also there. So, I had exposure to what these guys did. It was extremely valuable because I saw what they were doing in real life rather than reading about it in a book. For example, Kenny Moore, who was a fast 10,000-meter runner, taught me about kicking in 10,000-meter races. He would run in track meets in Los Alamos and stride along before kicking the last 400 meters in sixty seconds. I also learned about endurance running from him. Kenny would run from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, which was about thirty miles, as part of his training.
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Didn’t Oregon Coach Bill Bowerman’s methods also form a part of your training program?
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Bill Bowerman became friends with my coach and taught him some workouts. What I found out is that they were short staccato workouts. They were quick as opposed to Jim Ryun’s type of workouts with many repeat quarter miles. Bowerman had his miler guys, like Roscoe Divine, do repeats 150 meters. A typical workout would be ten to fifteen by 150 meters, but fast. This is the same thing that he had Pre do later – fast, shorter workouts that translated into fast times for the mile and fast times for 5,000 meters. From a coaching perspective, I was able to take advantage of the knowledge and experience of Bill Bowerman’s program. Interestingly, Bowerman never published his programs. He kept them secret. I don’t think he wanted to reveal what he did with his athletes. He wrote his ‘Jogging’ book, but never wrote a training manual.
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How did the influences of Kenny Moore, Coach Bowerman and your high school coach finally combine to help you succeed as a high school runner?
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My high school coach, Bob Cox, who played fullback for the Chicago Bears in the 1930s, gave me some workouts and he helped me with them. But then I started to develop my own programs. I was out on the track trying to figure out how to do the workouts as best as I could to make them as productive as possible. Pretty soon, I was the only person left on the track. All my teammates and even the coaches had taken off. I got pretty good. I ran 4:15 as a junior and 4:11.6 as a senior when I won the USATF Championship in 1970 in Houston. Along the way, Bob Cox said, ‘Go ahead and coach the distance guys.’ I would write up the workouts and everybody had a lot of confidence in my training. In cross country we were second in the state my junior year and third in the state my senior year even though we were the smallest New Mexico Class 5A school. I was leading the way and writing workouts for the distance squad. It was the same as you were doing – I was getting workouts from someone else, interpreting them and trying to figure out what worked best.
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Over the years you have coached hundreds of runners of varying ages, ability levels and both men and women. What are some of the similarities and differences in your training program amongst the athletes you worked with and did many of them have unique training regimens?
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I stick to certain principles from a psychological point of view and physiological point of view and they always apply no matter who I coach. They deal with frequency of intense workouts and consistency over time. I focus on being consistent, not missing workouts and continuity. The same physiological principles apply to each athlete. I just take the formula, try to fit it to each person and, hopefully, it will work for them. Over the course of time that I coached athletes from sprinters to endurance athletes to ultramarathoners, more than ninety-five percent of them achieved their goals. The ones who didn’t were the ones that weren’t coachable. They would pay me to coach them and then do their own thing. If they were coachable, they would get what they aimed for in personal goals. But, if they insisted on doing their own thing, they weren’t quite as successful.
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When we talked earlier, you mentioned figuring out that 15k and ten miles were your best distances. How hard is it to find the best distance of athletes you coach, especially when it may not be the distance on which they want to focus? And how hard is it to get an athlete to train for what you perceive as their best distance when they wish to focus elsewhere?
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That is a perceptive question because that situation comes up all the time. In Boulder, where I live and work, it is an endurance-biased community. Almost everyone wants to run a marathon at some point in time and to run their best marathon. They will hire a coach and start training for a marathon even though it may not be their best distance. I have a couple of examples. I trained this guy, Chet Thompson, a couple of years ago. He came to me and wanted to run the marathon. We prepared for the Houston Marathon and he went down there with another client of mine. That year there was an ice storm, but they finished in around five hours in the nasty conditions. When he came back, he said, ‘I’m never going to run another marathon again!’ I asked him what he wanted to run, and we brought him down to 10,000 meters where he was a good runner. Then we ran some practice 5ks and he was a good 5k runner. He was in his 50s and was racing in the mid 17 minutes. After a while I told him, ‘You’re pretty quick. Let’s try some 400s and 800 meters.’ He did that and was very fast. It turned out his best events were 400 and 800 meters. He won the National Championship at the Senior Games when he was in his fifties. He ran well, running a 2:15. This was a guy who didn’t know he could run that fast. He had no idea. It was a process and it took a couple years of my coaching him from when we started until he won the national championship. It may have been three years as it was a long process. I coach a woman named Lori Rubinstein who is now in her seventies. She ran national class for her age group at the Boston Marathon for many years. It was beating her body completely up, so I suggested that she run short races. She became All-American in her age group at every distance from 100 meters to 10,000 meters. Not only was she All-American at her age, but she was All-American three age groups below her age. She ran 400 meters in 75 seconds when she was in her late sixties and was second in the National championships. She won a couple 5,000-meter titles and was very competitive on a World Class basis. She was a speedy lady and never knew it or would have known it had she stayed with the marathon. I can say confidently that we extended her career. She is still running today. Had she continued to run the marathon; she would have had a considerably shorter running career given her injury profile. There are many athletes I have coached whose best event was 800 meters or 1,500 meters, but they got caught up in the endurance scene and felt they had to do a marathon. I never tried to talk them out of that, but eventually they self-selected shorter distances.
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Let’s talk about someone you are coaching who is very close to you - your daughter, Nell. She ran 5:18 for 1,600 meters and 2:18 for 800 meters in high school and then a 16:28 for 5,000 meters and 10:17 steeplechase in college. While focusing on the triathlon as an adult and training for her first ironman triathlon, she ran a tune-up at the 2018 California International Marathon in 2:31:23 and then won the 2019 Grandma’s Marathon in 2:28:09. How amazing was it that your own daughter had more talent than even you knew in an event that hadn’t been her focus?
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Nell’s story starts with her being very athletic. She played basketball and soccer in high school and was a good varsity basketball player. She probably could have played basketball or soccer on the NCAA level. She was a decent runner in high school. She wet to Northern Arizona University and was conference champion a few times. She went to Nationals in cross-country and was a good solid contributor on the team, though she didn’t have any super outstanding times. After she graduated, she wasn’t sure what to do, so she spent a couple years in Spain working as a teacher. She ran the whole time and raced cross country and track for a Spanish club. He first half marathon was around 1:25 while in Spain. She did give longer distances a try when she was in her early twenties. She came back to Boulder and I suggested she try the triathlon because she was an incredible cyclist, a strong runner and a pretty good swimmer. She did earn her Pro Card in triathlon. She qualified for it in her first year. But, it’s so competitive, so expensive and so time-consuming that she just couldn’t make it pay off from a performance point of view or financial perspective. Unbeknownst to both of us, all the time she was really training for the marathon. She was doing her long runs, brick runs after long rides, swimming and staying healthy all the time.
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What was the impetus for Nell to race her first marathon?
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She had been coaching triathlon and the idea of running a marathon was to prepare for the Ironman triathlon. She will do an Ironman in the future and she will do very well. She wanted to get ready for the California International Marathon and we trained for that for three months. Sure enough, she ran a good time with that 2:31 and she said, ‘We’re not going to be doing any triathlons. We’re going to focus on the marathon. I’ve got the Olympic Trials qualifying time. Let’s focus on running my next marathon.’ We used Frank Shorter’s model. It was specifically his model focusing on quality, short races, and speed development in parallel with endurance running. We bumped her mileage up to seventy-five miles a week and she kept on doing her speedwork. She won the citizens race at Bolder Boulder which was a big deal for everybody because it was forty years, almost to the day, since I won the inaugural race. That was huge for her as a confidence builder. She went into Grandma’s Marathon well prepared with good speedwork under her belt and more endurance. She ran conservatively for the first half and got a feel for the field. What she sensed at that point was the other women were struggling. They were there more for a payday than a fast time and Nell was there to run a fast time. She ended up running 1:15 for the first half marathon and 1:13 for the second half. That was a huge negative split and the second half beat her previous best half marathon by a minute and forty-five seconds. That worked out well for her and she knew she could run faster. No matter what happens at the Olympic Trials – good, bad or indifferent – she will continue to run marathons and she will keep getting faster. Before she ran her first marathon, she ran a 1:16 half marathon at altitude and she ran less than double that at CIM. Then she ran a 1:14 at Pittsburgh last year and double that at Grandma’s. She just ran a 1:10:45 at the Houston and, if you round it off to 1:11 and double it, she could conceivably run under 2:25, all things being equal. We don’t know what the conditions will be like, but we feel like she is in 2:25 shape right now.
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That makes sense and, as you know, when someone negative splits in a race, they do this despite the facts that their lactate threshold and VO2 maximum have decreased, so most often something was left on the table.
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We do think that the momentum of a negative split can be on your side, so at the Trials if runners aren’t too aggressive it could pan out. I told her to just run her race and be smart about her running. She is very intuitive. We don’t talk about specific numbers and times. I just say to ‘run how you feel and use your intuition to run your best race on that day.’ Numbers are taken into consideration though as you go along.
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After this segue into discussing coaching, let’s look at some of your important races. One of the first big races you won was the 1975 San Francisco Bay-to-Breakers which is known for large crowds and crazy, zany costumes. What were highlights of that win?
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That was an interesting race where I had driven out from Los Alamos to Stanford where my brother was in school. I was staying with him. My brothers always supported my running when I showed up where they happened to be. I didn’t know much about the race except that Kenny Moore had won it multiple times in earlier years and I knew about the history of the course. It was one of the major road races at the time before road racing became as big as it is today. I went down to Eighth Street on the morning of the race and was warming up. We’re talking about tens of thousands of people out there. What I did not know was the protocol of the race start. That is, the best runners did not go to the starting line. They lined up on the street on the sides of the course two to three blocks up the street. I didn’t know that. So, when they shot the cannon, everybody was already running. People started running before the cannon went off. There wasn’t discipline and structure with the start. I started running and people from the sides were pouring in. I had to run in a zig zag to get around them. That’s what I did for the first mile of that race. I did not know that the top racers were on the side streets and they would blend in after the race had started. I was running as hard as I could as I tried to figure this out and process all this information. After about two miles I had a clear path in front of me and I could see the leaders about 200 meters in front. I saw Domingo Tibaduiza and top local guys who were in the field and thought, ‘okay, I can catch these guys.’ I did catch them at the bottom of the hill – I think it was Hayes Street Hill. By the time I got to the top I was leading along with two or three other runners including Domingo Tibaduiza. We raced down to the great highway for another couple miles. When Domingo and I got there, we were neck and neck and only had about 600 meters to the finish line. We started sprinting. We were going full out down the great highway as fast as we could go. It was nip and tuck. He would pull ahead and then I would pull ahead. When we came to the finish line, I won by a hundredth of a second. I’ve got a picture someplace and we were both hitting the finish line at the same time. It was essentially a photo finish. That was a crazy, crazy experience and, ironically, it was the only time I ran the Bay-to-Breakers.
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| GCR: |
You mentioned winning the inaugural Bolder-Boulder 10k in 1979. How was it being part of putting together the inaugural race in the midst of excitement about the event, having close to three thousand runners and mixing it up with Frank Shorter for the win? How special was it then and how special when you look back and then your daughter wins forty years later?
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Winning the Bolder Boulder is a life changer because you then have this credibility for the rest of your life. You are always in the newspaper, the literature and the results. There is always someone there interviewing you before the race. It perpetuates itself over time. In the Boulder community, winning the Bolder Boulder 10k is a bigger deal than making the Olympic team. Why? Because folks there see you from day to day and they know who you are. I became recognizable on the streets even more than Frank Shorter. Another reason why is that I am a lot more active in this community than others as a coach and promoter of events. It was a life changer and, for Nell, it’s the same thing. She is now recognized as one of the better runners in town. And with her marathoning, that completely changed her life. For both of us it produced a lot of positive energy and synergy in the running community and in our coaching business. She does a lot of podcasts where she gets coaching clients from all over the country. Going into this year, she was over her head with work. The hardest thing for her to do was to scale it back. We had to get her out of here and down to Arizona so she could get some sleep and get some rest and get some training in. She hasn’t been one hundred percent healthy and has had some infections over the last six months. She is healthy enough to be fine for the Trials.
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A couple other men I’ve interviewed who were very good road racers were Steve Spence and Jon Sinclair and it seemed like there was a certain time for both when everything was clicking in training and racing. When I look at your running history, 1978 and 1979 were your years as you won the 1979 Lilac Bloomsday Run, 1978 Utica Boilermaker, 1978 Tucson Sun Run, 1978 Garden of the Gods 10-Mile, the 1979 Springbank International Road Race, and the 1978 Schlitz Light National Championship. What were the reasons that you were mentally and physically at your peak so that when you raced you weren’t just competing, but winning?
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The thing that set me about from other guys who were just as good as I was from a physical point of view it that I didn’t get injured. I didn’t miss workouts and I was consistent. I was able to build on my success over the years I was competing rather than having gaps in my training or gaps in my competition. I never had either of those from after I graduated from college all the way to the time I retired. I was extremely consistent, and I didn’t get distracted. Often, people get distracted by relationships, work, an injury or some other issues that arises. My training was good, and I got to the point where I had refined my training and I knew exactly what to do to prepare for a race. One thing I did for myself and that I do now when I’m coaching is to have numbers to hit when I did a cut down workout from a mile down to 400 meters. I would have goal times and knew that, if I hit those times, I would be fit enough to run a good time. I did a lot of planning before I set that World Record in the 15k at Gasparilla. My workouts were mapped out. I had all the numbers and the miles for each week, the long runs, tempo runs and interval training. I was very precise about my training and it wasn’t slip shod. I had a winning formula and that is the same formula I apply with the runners I coach now, and it works. I’m not apt to change anything if it’s working. In a nutshell, consistency, specificity of training and planning are all vital.
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You didn’t qualify for the Olympics, but you did compete at two U.S. Olympic Trials. How exciting was it the first time at the 1976 Olympic Trials when you competed in the 5,000 meters, even though you didn’t advance from your qualifying heat?
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It was great because I was a late entry as they needed a few more runners to fill up the field. I didn’t have the official qualifying time, but they called me up to run. I said, ‘okay. I’ll come and run.’ I had run something like a 13:39 or 13:45 that year, so not super-fast, but it was a great experience to get to the Olympic Trials and at least be in the heats. There were some fast runners making the Olympic team. Guys like Duncan McDonald, Matt Centrowitz and others were much better at 5,000 meters than I was. It was a valuable experience.
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In 1980 it was bittersweet for all athletes since the U.S. didn’t go to the Olympics. You finished thirteenth in the 10,000-meter finals and the field was stellar with guys like Craig Virgin, Greg Fredericks, Alberto Salazar, Jeff Wells, Tom Wysocki, Tony Sandoval, Herb Lindsay, Mark Nenow, Stan Mavis and Gary Tuttle. That race was so loaded – how cool was it to be running with this great group of runners with whom you also competed in road races?
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I always thought that if I had clicked on that day that I could have made the team. Earlier in the year I was racing most of the same guys on the track and roads and was familiar with them. There was a running circuit and we got to know who was on the circuit and what they were capable of doing and how to beat them. The best way to beat people was to run smart. I say that because you should have a plan going into the race and have specific numbers to hit along the way. Whenever I did that and stuck to my guns, I was very successful. Unfortunately, around April before the Trials, I was running in a road race and got knocked down on my hip. That basically put me out for the rest of the year. I missed about two weeks of training. When I did get running again, I wasn’t at one hundred percent. So, I went into the Trials underprepared. I should have been in the top six at worst in that race if I was at my best. I don’t think I would have made the team, but at least I would have been more competitive.
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How advantageous was it for you to have detailed knowledge of most of your top competitors’ racing styles?
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I remember running at Falmouth the year I finished in third place and there was a guy in front of me that I thought was Greg Fredericks. It turned out to be Rod Dixon. I found out after the fact. That was one of the rare situations when I didn’t know all the top runners in the field. I didn’t know Rod Dixon was running that year as he was a late entry. But he came in and surprised everybody by winning. Herb Lindsay was second and I was third that year. It was another example of running against some of the best in the world. Ironically, my daughter ran at Falmouth last year and I was trying to find a place to stay there so we wouldn’t to drive in. I called one of my Facebook friends, Brian Baker and sad, ‘What’s the best way to get into town on race morning?’ He said, ‘Forget it – don’t even try! Come stay with me the night before.’ My son and his girlfriend were also coming for the race and he said for us all to come down. He said, ‘You can’t have the guest bedroom because Rod is in there.’ I knew he was talking about Rod Dixon as soon as he said that. Rod Dixon and I got to hang out for a couple days and my daughter had a chance to meet him. Afterwards, Nell said, ‘who was that guy?’ She didn’t even know who he was. She did say he was nice, though she didn’t know who he was. My son, who is a professor at NYU, has a photographic memory and remembers everything about everybody so he had a fun time talking with Rod. It was interesting to go back to Falmouth forty years later.
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You scored Silver Medals at the 1977 and 1979 US National Championships at 10,000 meters. What are some takeaways from those races as far as who you raced and had to beat and why you were successful?
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The first one in 1977 was against Frank Shorter. When I was at the top of my game, I could beat almost anyone in the world. I was beating Olympians and on a good day I could click. On that day, I didn’t really click, and Frank was able to pull away from me and win. It was great to have that experience racing with him and to know that I could race with him. Over the course of my career I met him many times. I probably beat him half the time and he beat me half the time. It was the nature of the beast. In 1979 I was more fit, but I didn’t know that Craig Virgin was going to go to try to set the American record, which he did. Craig just took off. I knew I didn’t need to go with him and couldn’t have gone with him because he ran 27:40. I ended up running 28:24 for second place. I was really racing Frank Shorter and the guys in the pack. I ran a smart race and was able to run a very strong last 400 meters and pull away from those guys. That was a fun experience to finish second and make another national team.
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You ran some marathons but didn’t seem to emphasize that distance. Results for you were four marathons in 2:24 – 2:26; one in 2:20; and you did win the 1979 San Antonio Marathon in 2:24. What were you learning from your training for the marathon distance and your marathon races that was different and, based on your performances, did you feel that perhaps it wasn’t your best racing distance?
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That is a good conclusion. There were so many guys running fast marathons at the time, and they made it look easy. The marathon didn’t come easy to me. I trained for it and wasn’t that great at it. The shorter races were relatively easy for me. My logic was to try the marathon to see how it goes but, if it was too hard, I would stick with the shorter races. And that’s what ended up happening. My marathons weren’t great. The 2:20 at san Diego wasn’t a bad race, but not great. My best marathon was the 1975 Pan Am Games Trials when I ran 2:25 at altitude. That was an incredible time because the winning time at the 1968 Olympic Trials there was only 2:31. I was a little off my timing. Frank Shorter had dropped out of the 1968 Olympic Trials and Kenny Moore won in 2:31 so, if I had run head to head against those guys, I would have won literally by a mile. I was a good altitude runner in the marathon, but it didn’t translate down to a sea level marathon. After I didn’t do great in the marathon, I stayed with the shorter races and it paid off.
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Let’s go back a bit to when you were a youth and started your high school running. Were you active in many sports and how did you get started as a teenager in the sport of distance running?
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I was lucky that my parents found Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1948 after moving all over the country with my dad's work. They got to Los Alamos right after the Manhattan Project closed. My dad was an iron worker and got a job with a subcontractor at the labs. Once they got to Los Alamos, they knew that’s where they were going to stay and that’s where they made their home. That is where the six of us grew up. One of the nice things is that it was a small town and had a YMCA with basketball. There was Little League baseball and the city had tennis lessons. We had school teams for track, basketball and football in junior high school. I played five sports – football, basketball, track, tennis and swimming. If I could get my hands on it, I would play it. They had a city track meet when I was in grade school and meets when I was in junior high. So, I had a chance to try everything. I even ice skated. I didn’t try out for the ice hockey team but skated because we had an outdoor rink in Los Alamos. The altitude was so high and there were these deep canyons where the sun didn’t shine, so they had a full-size ice-skating rink in one of the canyons and that’s where I learned to ice skate. All these sports were right at my fingertips and I could get to any of the venues in a few minutes. I was playing basketball and touch football in elementary school and then basketball and tackle football in junior high. I also played baseball, but I was running all the time. When I got to high school, I was tiny. I weighed about a hundred and five pounds. I couldn’t play football anymore. And in baseball the diamond got big when I moved up from Little League to Babe Ruth League. I was a pitcher and lost all my speed because it was too far from the mound to home plate. I did play football until I was a ninth grader and baseball until I was fifteen. I played basketball until I was a sophomore and I did make the sophomore team. I thought that I should try running. I went out for cross country my sophomore year and became the top runner on the team. But I didn’t qualify out of my District to go to the State meet.
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How did you build on that beginning in running to become one of the fastest milers in the country by your senior year?
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I stuck with it and gave everything I could my next couple years and ended up winning the State Cross-Country Championship my junior and senior years. I ran about 9:30 which was good at altitude back in the day. That’s when I started getting offers from some colleges. I’m thankful that my parents found Los Alamos and all us kids were able to participate in so many sports that were available. It wasn’t expensive to compete in sports and you didn’t have to travel. Nowadays, athletes must get on competitive travel teams and their parents must spend a lot of money. When it came to track, what I figured out early on my sophomore year is that there were national championships. At the time, the national Jaycees organization sponsored a national championship. You qualified in your state and then the Jaycees had to figure out how to get you to nationals. I went my first summer to Eugene, Oregon. That was in between my sophomore and junior years. I ran in the prelims of the 880 and the mile. I didn’t make the finals in either one, but I had the opportunity to run on that track at Hayward Field. At the time it was a crushed red brick track. In my sophomore year in track I had finished second in the mile and third in the 880 at State. I ran decent times at altitude running in the rain with three inches of water on the track. My junior year I won the State cross country race and then won the mile in track in 4:18 down in Hobbs, New Mexico. I could have run four or five seconds faster, but I was just trying to get through that race and win it. I was feeling good. That summer I went to Minneapolis and ran against Garry Bjorklund who won in about 4:08 or 4:06. I finished in 4:16 which was my best time as of then. That experience was great running at the University of Minnesota and being competitive. Later that same summer I ran in the Junior Olympics and ran 4:14. I had some pretty good marks early in my high school career. My senior year I won the indoor national championships in 4:11.6 in Houston.
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What were highlights of that race in terms of who you raced and how the race developed?
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There are some interesting stories about that race. When I worked for Nike years later, I interacted with all the top athletes and one time I was talking to Henry Marsh. He said, ‘I was in that race in Houston in 1970.’ I had no idea because this was years later when he was ranked number one in the world in the steeplechase. For that race, we had to run prelims in the afternoon. It was a Friday afternoon about three o’clock and I ran a 4:24 to qualify for the finals which were that night at seven o’clock. So, I ran 4:24 in the afternoon and came back to run 4:11 that night. For me, a 4:24 was easy, but 4:11 was hard. In the final I ran an even pace. I went out the first half in 2:05 and ran a 2:06 second half to win by five seconds. It was fun winning that national championship.
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You won State championships twice in cross country, twice in the mile and were a medalist twice at 880 yards. What do you recall of your first State championship in cross country and what stands out from the other championship races?
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Cross country was only a two-mile race at the time, which was a sprint. We were pretty much going as hard as we could from the beginning to the end and hanging on for dear life. The first year was very exciting. I ran against this kid from the largest high school, Steve Lynch, who was the favorite going into the race. Nobody really knew who I was. We duked it out the last 600 meters. We were side by side. He surged and I covered the surge. Then he would surge again. I think he surged three or four times over that last 600 or 800 meters and I covered every single one. On the very last one, he surged, I kept it up and out leaned him basically for the win. That wasn’t unexpected by me, but I was very happy to do that.
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How improbable was it that the Los Alamos track team finished third in the 1968 New Mexico State Track Championships your sophomore year with only five members as Jim Lamonica won the Pole Vault, Johnny Anderson, Leroy Pacheco, and Grant Godbolt all scored high in their events, and you finished third in the 880 yards and second in the mile?
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You did some good research as you had to dig to find that information. Yes, we had five guys – a hurdler, a sprinter, a pole vaulter, a two-miler, and me in the 880 and mile – and we all scored points. Pacheco won the hurdles, Lamonica won the pole vault, Anderson placed in the top three in the 100 yards and Godbolt was second in the two-mile. We scored a lot of points per person. Our average per person had to be eight points because we had a lot of first places. We racked up a lot of points. We were the smallest 5A school at the time by a factor of two. The big Albuquerque schools had over two thousand students and we were just over a thousand. We were very, very competitive for the size of our school and that was crazy all the points we scored with five guys. But it shows one thing – it doesn’t take a lot of athletes - it takes high quality athletes to be competitive.
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We mentioned that you won the individual State Cross-Country Championship twice, but your teams at Los Alamos finished 2nd in 1968 and 3rd in 1969 at the State Meet. How much good camaraderie was training and racing with your teammates and do you still get together for a reunion every now and then?
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We were all new to the sport. Burgeis was a tennis player. Eddie Sanchez was a left-handed State Champion golfer who happened to be a talented basketball player, runner, golfer – he could do anything. We lost Eddie one day on a long run in the mountains. He finally showed up after sun-down, completely exhausted, but otherwise in great shape. He did everything well and had a great sense of humor. A couple of the other guys, Kolter and Stovill, were pure runners. We had an exchange student, Habte Kidane, who was the first Ethiopian I had ever met, and he was a good runner. We trained hard. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we trained hard and we were competitive. On race day, we went out there and could race with the best teams in New Mexico. We would have won my junior year, but Kolter had a bad race. If he had had a decent or average race, we would have won the championship but, for whatever reason, he didn’t run that well. My senior year, Tony Sandoval was second or third behind me and he went on to win two State Championships after that. All the guys on the team my senior year were either my neighbors or lived down the street.
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Your best time in the mile was 4:11.6, but you raced quite a bit at altitude including a 4:12.6 State win at altitude of 5,000 feet in Albuquerque. How strong were you in that race and what do you think that compared to at sea level?
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The NCAA usually gives a five second adjustment for that 5,000 feet of altitude, but we would have to do some additional research. Five seconds faster is probably about right, so 4:07 at sea level. I set that State Class 5A record in 1970 and I still have the record fifty years later. Some good runners have gone after that record. When I reflect on having that record for fifty years, it’s crazy.
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Did you have many collegiate choices and what are highlights of the process?
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What happened was that I got a lot of interest and narrowed it down to a few schools. I was sure that I wanted to go to Oregon. During my sophomore year I had established a relationship with Coach Bowerman. We weren’t friends as he was reserved in his interactions with some of us runners including me. I do have a stack of letters from him and Bill Dellinger. I also have a hand-written letter from Steve Prefontaine in my files. I was running well and improving and won the State Championship. When I went to the Golden West meet, which was the de facto National Championship at the time, I did not run well. Also, I had been accepted into two Ivy League colleges, Yale and Harvard. I wasn’t that interested in going there until I went to see Coach Bowerman. I did my official visit and the timing wasn’t good because it was the Sunday after the NCAA Championships where Steve Prefontaine had cut his toe. Pre had a deep gash in his foot, and they sewed it back together because it was a serious cut. After the race, even though he ended up winning, they had to drain the blood out of his shoe. I don’t recall if Oregon won that National Championship that was in Des Moines, Iowa. Anyway, the next day I had my recruiting meeting with Coach Bowerman on the University of Oregon campus in his office.
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That surely had to be an interesting meeting with Coach Bowerman. How did it go?
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I was waiting for him and then one of his assistants brought me into his office and sat me down. A couple minutes later, Coach Bowerman came in on schedule but, even though I was only a high school senior, I could tell he was exhausted. He had deep circles around his eyes. They were completely bloodshot. His face was wrinkled up. He was a walking train wreck. He was coherent enough to talk to me and he said, ‘Excuse me – who are you?’ And he knew darn well who I was. Then he asked me, ‘what schools have you visited?’ That kind of caught me off guard because that isn’t what I expected by any means. I told him I visited Yale and I visited Harvard and a couple other schools. The first thing he said was, ‘You should go to one of the Ivy League schools. Why? Because you’re going to get a better education there. The running is going to run its course anyway.’ I was sitting there and not really processing it because it was happening so fast and I was only seventeen or eighteen years old. I was naive and didn’t know what was going on. His assistant was present, and I think this was on purpose so he could document what happened in the meeting. It was documented elsewhere. I came out shaken and had to process this information and figure out what to do.
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How did you finally decide to go to Harvard?
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Later that summer, finally I figured everything out. I wasn’t running that well and thought that, if I went to a school on an NCAA scholarship, I would most likely lose it within a year because I wasn’t feeling that great about my running. So, I decided to go to Harvard. The reason was that I didn’t have to run to keep my scholarship. I went to Harvard and everything was covered except some books and transportation. At the time it cost on the order of twenty-five grand a year to go to school there. The other thing about the Ivy League is that we acted like an NCAA Division I school and an NCAA Division III school at the same time because there were no athletic scholarships. They could give us as much money as they wanted and extra money because we weren’t on athletic scholarships. My dad was an iron worker and, while growing up in our household, he was on strike quite a bit. They went on strike every couple of years for one thing or another. When he was on strike when I was in college, my dad couldn’t give me any money for incidental expenses. I was on my own. I wrote the administration at Harvard for some money and they sent me a check for a couple thousand dollars. They could do that. Their endowment was billions of dollars and they had money to burn. At the time, the economy was good, and they had nothing to lose by keeping me in the fold. They didn’t want to lose me to another school as a self-transfer, so I could write and ask them for money, and they would send me the money. It worked out and was a good decision. I was shaken at the time but, in retrospect, it was the best advice that Coach Bowerman could have given me. It was a good decision that we made jointly, without me even realizing it.
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| GCR: |
While at Harvard, you won Greater Boston Track and Cross-Country Championships, were ‘All-Ivy League’ in Track and Cross Country and set the school record for three miles with a time of 13:30 at the 1974 Penn Relays. What were some of the memorable races for you in college as you were now at a higher level of competition?
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That Penn Relays race was the highlight of my college career. I came in second place and broke the school record by almost forty seconds. I ran even pace – 4:30, 4:30 and 4:30. I almost won the race and should have won, but I was happy to run 13:30. I won a whole bunch of cross-country races. I was competitive in the IC4A with guys from Manhattan College, Tony Cologne, Mike Keogh and that bunch. I was not as competitive against the Penn guys. They were much better. They had Dennis Sykes and David Merrick and a whole phalanx of guys who were very strong. I felt like I was competitive against those guys even though I didn’t have a team to back me up. We were very, very thin and didn’t have much depth on our cross-country team. I would usually win by over a minute over my own next fastest teammate. And this was in five-mile races. I won one or two Ivy League Championships. In the IC4A, I think I was sixth one year against some very good runners. I had a couple good indoor races. I did win most races in the greater Boston area and then was competitive at Ivy Leagues and IC4As.
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Could you tell us about your college coach and what he did to give you new training techniques, changes in overall mileage and anything else after you were basically self-coached in high school?
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Bill McCurdy was the head coach at Harvard, and he was a national class half miler back around the 1940s. He was more traditional in his training. In cross country we would do five times a mile, which is a standard workout. One of the things he taught me was the jump mile or kick mile progression which I’ve used ever since then. We would run moderate pace, like a five-minute mile pace and then sprint a fifty-five second quarter mile in the middle of the mile. Or he might have us run the four laps of the mile in 75, 75, 75 and then kick in fifty-five. I learned accelerations from Bill and how to accelerate in a race. The work ethic was very tough, even though we were Ivy League. We would go to camp before cross-country season and, out of fifteen guys at camp, at the end only maybe two guys could run. It was that hard. Everybody else was either injured or exhausted. McCurdy gave us hard workouts and he was close to Coach Joe Vigil at Adams State in terms of his expectations. A lot of guys couldn’t cut it as it was impossible for many runners to stay with that type of program. I got stronger mostly because the workouts were so hard, and I tried to keep my mileage up as well. I did an extra run on the weekend and that helped me. I was probably averaging about seventy miles a week in college.
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What did you do different in your training in your post-collegiate career in terms of mileage, tempo running, hills and intervals as you stepped up to some longer racing distances?
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I did more miles and trained with Frank Shorter quite a bit. There was a core of guys who trained together a lot. There was Chuck Hattersley, Dennis Wilson, Kirk Pfeffer and others. We did long runs, if not every week, then every other week – twenty-milers at altitude which helped. The quality workouts were repeat 440s or miles. They were fast like four times a mile at altitude in 4:22 or 4:24 with a three-minute recovery. We did cut down workouts with a 4:15 mile, 3:06 for a three-quarter mile, a two flat half mile and 55 second quarter mile. A combination of high quality and endurance running made it happen. It was the Frank Shorter model. Not everyone was able to handle that type of workload. You had to plan it out and make sure there was enough recovery. Then we tapered for our big races. Whenever I was able to execute big mileage and high-quality sessions and taper just right, I would race well. It had to do with good planning and experience and knowing how much to taper.
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With your big focus at present on coaching and other responsibilities, do you still find time to stay fit with some running and other fitness activities? What is your current health and fitness regimen?
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I can’t run as much as I’d like to. Instead of going out for a six-mile run, what I’ll do is warm up a mile and do some stretching and strides and speedwork. A workout may be four times 300 meters progressively faster with one or two fast ones in there. Another workout might be six or eight times 150 meters where I start easy in 32 seconds and finish fast in 24 seconds. I also use progressions in my workouts even now. But most of my workouts are going to be more sprint oriented and less endurance oriented. It’s been a long time since I ran a 5k or a 10k. Last year I raced 800 meters and 400 meters – so short stuff. I also lift weights a couple times a week and ride the bike at least once a week. I’ll ride twice a week in the summertime and get on the spin bike. I do quite a bit of resistance work that is modeled after my daughter’s program. It’s all basic conditioning and fitness.
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What are your future goals that you wish to accomplish personally or as a coach over the next ten to fifteen years? Do you see yourself reducing the coaching and doing some things you haven’t had time for?
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| RR |
I like that approach. There are many transcripts I’ve written over the years and I’d like to put some kind of book together. It would be an e-book or something that is more flexible and dynamic than just writing a book and having it sit there because things change so fast. Writing is one of my interests that I do. I wrote an article for Jack Benjamin recently. I’m a big advocate of ‘less is better than more’ for kids. I believe that a lot of high school kids are not ready to take on much more than twenty miles per week in training. I tell the high school kids I coach that they will race much better in college than they ever did in high school. I let them know that I hope they will keep running after college and will run even better then in their post-collegiate career. In many cases that is true. There are runners I coached in high school who went on to become All-Americans in college and even better afterward. Writing that stuff down is what I’m interested in doing next.
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| GCR: |
I’m sure that you are asked to speak to running groups and to high school runners. When you are asked to sum up in a minute or two the major lessons you have learned during your life from the discipline of running, being a part of the running community, and helping and coaching others, what you would like to share with my readers that will help them on the pathway to reaching their potential athletically and as a person?
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| RR |
The key thing is keeping a long-term perspective. When I look at someone’s progression, many runners do their first marathon in their early twenties, which may be too soon. Keeping that long-term perspective, especially if you are a woman, is important because your running career can go into your forties. There are some very good over forty runners out there right now. The other important element is planning. Plan what races you will do, plan your workouts for them and don’t run ‘off the hip.’ Those are the two most important overall concepts. In races I believe in pacing. Runners should run smart races as opposed to going out as hard as you can and blowing up in the middle of the race. So, planning, long-term perspective, pacing and putting a lot of thought into your running instead of just going out and doing it.
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Inside Stuff |
| Nicknames |
My name before I became an adult was 'Ricky.' When I got to high school, I didn’t want to be called that anymore and I became 'Rick.' When I got to college, since my given name is 'Ricardo,' I became 'Ric,' spelled 'R-I-C.' I’ve spelled my name like that ever since college. I shortened 'Ricardo' to 'Ric.' There was no reason to have a 'k' on there
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| Favorite movies |
I like action movies like the Jason Bourne series. My two favorite movies of all time are 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Little Big Man' from back in the 1970s. I also like the 'spaghetti westerns,' particularly 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly'
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| Favorite TV shows |
My dad liked to watch TV and he was interested in 'Star Trek,' which was my number one show. We watched 'Gilligan's Island' and 'The Beverly Hillbillies.' Those shows were fascinating to me. Those shows were funny and, of course, we liked Ellie May
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| Favorite music |
John Coltrane is my favorite artist of all time. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are my favorite classic rock guys. I liked a lot of the 1960s music. Linda Ronstadt is by far my favorite female artist
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| Favorite books |
I read quite a bit of non-fiction. I also like Dan Brown’s books, like ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ because they are quick reads. They are page turners and I get through his books in a couple days because I read them so fast. I tried to muddle my way through ‘War and Peace’ and getting used to the diction and the language is tough in those types of books. I must stick with it and grind my way through them. I’ll pick up a classic book occasionally, and try to get through it
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| First car |
My dad was kind of a wheeler-dealer when I was growing up in high school. He bought a Plymouth Valiant from his boss for five hundred or seven hundred dollars. It had an aluminum block V6 engine and it had a lot of pep. It didn’t have bucket seats – it had a bench seat going across. That was my first car and it was a great little car. I drove that car back and forth for track meets between Los Alamos and Albuquerque
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| Current car |
I drive a utilitarian vehicle. It’s a Volkswagen Eurovan. It’s a great vehicle because you can drive it, you can camp in it or you can use it to move cargo. It’s geeky, but it is a great car
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| First Job |
My dad was a bit of an entrepreneur and he was a mover. What he would have us do is to help him move furniture. If he was moving furniture across town for somebody, he might get a hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the early 1960s. A hundred bucks was enough to buy groceries for a week or two. The other thing he did was move sheds because in Los Alamos none of the houses had any storage space and everybody had a shed. So, when people moved from once house to another, they would take their shed with them. The sheds were usually eight feet by eight feet or ten feet by ten feet or something like that. We had to access the shed, move the shed onto a flatbed truck, move it across town and unload it on the other side of town. For that he would get a hundred bucks. Almost every weekend he was moving things around town and he would get us to help him move. That was my first job
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| Parents |
My dad was probably the smartest uneducated person I ever met. He was smart and he was street smart more than anything. He grew up on the streets in Beaumont, Texas. He was from a large family, but basically was making a living on his own on the streets when he was twelve years old. He figured out ways to make money. I learned a lot about working part-time from him. I learned that, no matter what I was doing, I could always make some more part-time. When I came back to Boulder, Colorado in the 1990s, I started coaching on the side and could make almost as much money coaching as from my full-time job. That helped us to do many things as a family and to finance many projects that we normally wouldn’t be able to do. So, I’ve always been a believer in part-time work if you enjoy doing it. Coaching was one of those things I did, and it worked out well. My dad taught me to do that and he was also a tough guy. People didn’t want to mess with him. My mom came from a very humble background, a very poor background in Texas. She met my dad, who was an ironworker, and they travelled around the U.S. to various jobs until they finally settled down in Los Alamos. My mom was there with my dad through thick and thin, trying to pay the bills. My dad climbed up high as a rigger on tall buildings. He was one of those guys you see in film clips up on the skyscrapers hammering rivets into the iron. That’s what he did for a living in his twenties. Then he became a rigger for the Zaya Company in Los Alamos. My mom was a great cook and a great mom. She drove us to all our sports games in Los Alamos. But the thing I remember most is her great cooking. She could make any Mexican food or covered dishes and make them taste good. She was a great mom
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| Siblings and children |
I have five brothers and sisters who all live in New Mexico and are doing various jobs. One brother took over my dad's moving business and has run that for many years. The rest are doing what they do professionally and living a nice life in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have two boys. Enrico Robert is Dr. Rojas and is a professor at NYU. He went to school at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated magna cum laude in Physics. He got his PhD at Harvard in Biophysics and did post-doctoral studies at Stanford before he went to NYU. He’s got his own lab at the NYU Biology department. He is a runner and is training for a 10k that’s coming up soon. My second son, Jeff, is a Science Director at an American school in El Salvador and has been doing that for a few years. He is a Career International teacher. I coach him over the internet, and he has done well in running. And we have talked about Nell
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| Pets |
We had been talking about getting a puppy and Nell went down to the local Humane Society in November. She finally picked out a dog, a nice little puppy. We’ve been sharing responsibilities. When Nell is travelling, I take care of the dog or her mom does. Her mom and I are divorced but get along and take care of the dog. It is sort of our grandchild – this little puppy. She is a good one and is a lot of fun
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| Favorite breakfast |
For breakfast, I love bacon and eggs and make that a couple days each week. I have cereal some days. I also make huevos rancheros where I make my own beans and eggs and salsa. I like hot food like hot chili
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| Favorite meal |
I eat standard food like steak and potatoes. Occasionally, I’ll have enchiladas or tacos – some type of Mexican food. I do all my own cooking, which is fun and, that way, I can control exactly what I’m going to eat
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| Favorite beverages |
For drinking and hydration, mainly water. I try to avoid pop. As far as beer, I like Beck’s beer. For some reason, it tastes good to me. I’ll also have some local IPA beers. I have my own expresso machine that I got a few years ago, so I make my own expresso. I pick up a pound of coffee from specialty shops when I go places and I’ve got a good collection. I make coffee for myself every morning
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| First running memory |
Los Alamos was organized and every year there was a field day where they brought all the elementary schools together and we competed in track events. There was a 100-yard race, a relay, long jump, high jump, a 200-yard race and other events. I remember running in the events and finishing first in the 100 yards one year. Another year in grade school I won the long jump. I remember my competitors – my high jump competitor was Dan McMillan and my 100-yard dash competitor was Kenny Rutherford. All of us guys ended up going to Junior High School and High School together and it was a lot of fun. I am very appreciative of the opportunities we had as kids to compete in these track meets and how organized they were. I cannot believe they could pull them off. At the time in Los Alamos there were fifteen grade schools and each one had at least five hundred kids. So, we’re talking about thousands of kids competing in these meets. They did a great job
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| Running heroes |
Kenny Moore would be number one. He’s a guy I met, and he was a substitute teacher at Los Alamos when he was training there. We became friends and have remained friends ever since. His writing was great. He was already writing at the time. And his running was amazing. I saw him train and race in Los Alamos. His style was amazing. He was very dramatic, especially with the big kicks he would do. When you watched him kick, your jaw would just drop. Of course, Frank Shorter with his persistence and ability to stick to it over the years and to be as consistent as he was for ten years or more. It was amazing and he is up there as well. Also, Pre. Everybody is inspired by Pre. Those were my top three guys. Billy Mills, even though he was in the background, became more prominent for me over the years because I’ve got to know him and have met him several times
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| Greatest running moments |
Number one is setting that World Record at the Gasparilla 15k because it was against top competition and I was well-prepared. Everything came together and I ran well. So that is my number one memory. Behind that was winning the National Cross-Country Championship. The track experiences of finishing second at Nationals behind Frank Shorter and Craig Virgin and making National teams and winning the 1975 Pan American Games Trials marathon are up there. The fact that I have this high school record in the mile that has been around for fifty years makes that race a big deal as was winning the National Championship mile in Houston. It was a fun time and a good career, even though we always think we could have run better
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| Greatest coaching moments |
Number one would be my daughter, Nell, as I’ve worked with her for such a long time. Having her be a late bloomer as she knew she wanted to keep doing the endurance training and racing, though we didn’t know exactly what we were going to do. That is by far number one and her success has been extremely gratifying for our family – her brothers and her mom. She is a very humble and gracious person about her success. She wants to do better but has never been the type of person to brag about herself. The other one is Dr. Tony Sandoval back in high school when he won the National Championship in the three-mile. He beat Craig Virgin that year, which I think was in 1972. I’ve coached him throughout his career into college before he made the Olympic team. I worked with him and would like to think I had some influence on his success over the course of the years
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| Most disappointing running moment |
The most disappointing was my high school race at the Golden West mile in 1970 where I was hoping to run 4:06 and I had a bad race and ended up running 4:24. That was the number one most disappointing race. Number two was the Olympic Trials in 1980, after I fell earlier in the year and cracked my hip hard. That was a race where I was eliminated from being a serious competitor due to that injury
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| Childhood dreams |
I always wanted to be in sports and be competitive. When I finally figured out that running was my thing, number one, I wanted to get a scholarship to college and, number two, I wanted to make an Olympic team. Those were the dreams and they were real. I got a lot offers and got the college scholarship and I was close to making an Olympic team. For me, that second dream of making an Olympic team was close to a reality. I made some National teams and, to a large extent, running as well as I did was meeting my dreams
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| Funny memory |
We had a lot of fun times with my running buddies over the years. We tried to stay out of trouble and somehow survived all those experiences. There were interesting things that went on in racing. I remember a funny story with Gary Fanelli at the start of the Virginia Ten-Miler. We were ready for the gun to go off when, suddenly, we hear yelling coming from somewhere. It turns out that Gary Fanelli got stuck in a portable toilet and couldn’t get out. He was yelling at the top of his lungs and, finally, they stopped the start of the race. No one knew who was in there, but they got him out and it was Gary Fanelli. That was probably the funniest thing that happened over the years in a race, even as nervous as we were at the start
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| Favorite places to travel |
I have always loved San Diego - the community, the climate and all the things to do. Recently, I bought some retirement property near Tucson, in Green Valley, where Coach Vigil lives. I like that because the climate is very nice in the wintertime. There is also plenty to do. It’s close to Mexico, close to the University of Arizona, and a beautiful running area with lots of recreational activities. Internationally, number one, I like Spain. I’ve been there a few times and like the culture, the language and the people
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