Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #324: Alan King – Umpqua Community College | From Montana to a New Gill Track Facility

Transcript

#324: Alan King – Umpqua Community College | From Montana to a New Gill Track Facility · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

• 0:02
  You're listening to the Gil Athletics Connections podcast
• 0:05
  with host Mike Cunningham. Track and field world UNL tuned
• 0:12
  in to our humble servant Mike Cunningham for another
• 0:16
  extraordinary message for Gil Athletics Connections.
• 0:21
  Here we go back on the Guild Athletics Connection podcast
• 0:23
  again, so humble that you would press play today.
• 0:26
  I think this makes 2 weeks in a row with my favorite.
• 0:30
  I'm I'm biased, I'm the host. I get to be biased with my
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  favorite stratum, if you will, of track and field.
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  And that's my JUCO, my Community College coaches.
• 0:38
  I'm pretty sure if I time this right that Miss Cleary, she was
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  last week over in Iowa Central and today I'm going to have a
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  fun one here. First of all, easy name to say
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  except for a school, but I think I've nailed that.
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  So let's get right into it. Help me welcome the head coach
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  of Umpqua. We're going to learn more about
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  that Community College in the great state of Oregon.
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  Help me welcome the wise, wonderful Mr. Alan King.
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  Alan, how are you, Sir? Doing well.
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  Thanks for having me here. I'm I'm excited.
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  Awesome. We we got to dive right in
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  Umpqua. I'm assuming that is like a
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  Native American name from out in the Oregon.
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  Is that correct? That is correct.
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  And beautiful campus setting, about 100 acres.
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  The Uncle N Umpqua River wraps around our campus and so you can
• 1:20
  find people fishing right after class and athletes that walk
• 1:23
  down the river when we're done with pole vault and go fishing
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  And yeah, go place. We got a fish, lot of here,
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  salmon run all sorts of fun stuff here.
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  So that makes sense because your mascot is the River Hawks.
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  That so that makes like all the sense in the world.
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  Then what? So give us a picture.
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  As you know, we kind of all of us can picture Orion.
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  You know, it's kind of this big rectangle, if you will.
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  And you know, if you're listening to this podcast, you
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  probably know where Eugene is. And if you know where Eugene is,
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  that means you probably know where Portland is.
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  And you know exactly what I mean when I say that.
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  Give us where is Uncua in relation?
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  We are one hour South of Eugene, so right on I-5.
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  Oh yeah. What's an easy trip?
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  Makes a coaching out here fun to go up and watch, like pretty
• 2:00
  classic every year now. Yeah, do all that fun stuff.
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  Did you go to pre this year? I did, yeah.
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  I missed it and Oh my gosh, it was it's it's always amazing.
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  First of all, it's it it literally is my favorite track
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  meet ever. You know, a three hour ish
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  window. The announcer does a great job
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  of telling you where to look. There's action going all the
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  time. It's that's a pretty cool meet.
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  So you you got to be there this year sold out.
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  What, by the way, that's amazing you.
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  Know, and like I said, I've been a couple years now, obviously
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  I've since I've moved out here. And then I, I had one trip there
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  before when I was coach up at Rocky Mountain College back in
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  the day. I took a bath that's out there,
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  slept in someone's backyard in a tent.
• 2:38
  Just go watch this thing. But yeah, so I remember you
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  talking on one of your podcasts about you seeing one world
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  record at one point. And I've been so blessed.
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  I think I've seen 5 or 6 world records just because I've come
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  here. You all saw the shot world
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  record, world record. I mean, we just saw a world, two
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  world records this last year free.
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  So it's just, it's just so we're just so blessed to be here.
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  Yeah, I, I was happy and, and it kind of made me start thinking
• 3:05
  about other things because about the sell out that that was a a
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  big, you know, and I was wondering because I actually had
• 3:11
  someone hit me up. I was like, hey, it's sold out.
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  Do you have any connections? And literally it was the day of
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  and I was like, you know, maybe, but not hours before the meat
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  starts, man, I'm sorry. I was like my, my network only
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  goes so far that they're already busy.
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  But but I love that it was sold out because, you know, and I
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  don't know that it's the new stadium versus the old stadium.
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  That's its own controversy. But you know, NCAA's in the old
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  stadium was, you know, I'll say close to sold out.
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  And maybe it's a bad memory, but I remember the the Friday,
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  Saturday component being slam packed and with the new stadium,
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  which is a we did the new stadium.
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  So I, you know, trust me, I'm a big fan of new Hayward, but it
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  just doesn't seem like the the local crowd has made it back
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  yet. And that kind of that kind of
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  bums me out. So I was happy about pre, Yeah.
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  That kind of bums me out too a little bit.
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  And I've noticed that too, because my first pre was in the
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  old stadium and you know, the biggest, the biggest memory I
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  have is when they run the 10K and every stomp on their feet up
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  and down the wood and Bleacher just following the, you know,
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  and just don't get that same enthusiasm.
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  But obviously you walk in that stadium, you're blown away.
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  It's like. It's an upgrade where?
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  Am I at? There's nowhere else in this in
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  this, I say this country, this world, you're going to get a
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  stadium like that. It is it is unbelievable.
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  And I'm I'm glad they did it. And I just wish, you know, I
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  know there's a lot of controversy more local than
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  anywhere else about new versus old Hayward.
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  And I just wish, you know, some more locals would, you know,
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  just buy in. I mean, it's still Hayward, it's
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  still Oregon. It's still the greatest track
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  meets and therefore the greatest track athletes in the world
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  there. And so I just wish there had
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  some more embracement because I love it.
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  It's an amazing city. OK, well, you know, Alan, I
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  didn't invite you on here to talk about Hayward.
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  So let's let's let's put that back to the side.
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  But you mentioned pre, and I do. It is like some of my favorite
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  of the whole world. We want to get to know you
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  better because there's a lot of exciting things going on and
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  that's we want to talk about that near the end when we get
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  there. So let's start building up that
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  journey. Alan, somewhere assuming you
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  were an athlete, you know, we've had plenty of coaches on here
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  who weren't athletes somewhere track and field started for you.
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  Where does that? Where does that start for Alan
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  King? Oh, being a a track athlete, I
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  actually get a mustache to honor the guy that got me into into
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  running so. Is that right?
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  Yeah, yeah. So my, my high school coach,
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  Burton Pierce at Westside, just phenomenal, got me wrapped into
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  it. And I don't know what he saw in
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  me to Get Me Out to run, but he saw something.
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  But, but we'll get to that a little bit before that.
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  I remember when I was a kid, I was never the fastest kid.
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  I never had the best endurance. What I'm going to do in the mile
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  PE test and doing pretty good at that. 2-3 in in PE and then I
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  think about middle school, we started riding bikes everywhere
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  and I think that's where my endurance came.
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  I mean, I had I, you know, middle school girlfriend type
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  situation. I couldn't find a girlfriend in
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  town and so I had to go to the next town over.
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  So I'd be biking like 30 miles one way to go hang out with this
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  girl for a couple hours and bike home.
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  So that's awesome. So that's kind of how my
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  endurance kind of built up. And then, then I got into high
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  school. We're still riding her bikes
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  around. Then I started racing my friends
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  on their bikes and so I, they would do a full lap around the
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  block and I'd go through the alley and we'd see who can get
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  back first. Unfortunately I never won, but I
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  tried my hardest. And where?
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  Where are we? Let's get a picture of.
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  So, yeah, I'm, I'm in Billings, Mt.
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  I was in Gillette, WY, but before I was a year old, I think
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  we moved to Billings. That's where my mom's from,
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  everything like that. So yeah, I grew up in Billings,
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  single parent income, single parent household, moved around a
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  lot when I was a kid. Be in, you know, an apartment
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  for a year, grandparents for a year, a house for a year,
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  grandparents. I think when I was between the
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  grades 1st through 6th or 7th, we're in seven different houses
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  in different locations. Wow, so.
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  How did so Very similar, by the way, from kindergarten through
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  9th grade. I think my wife and I, because
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  she couldn't believe it. We, we counted it up one time
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  and it was something like I think I got to around 20
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  schools. I was all, every year I moved a
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  school several years. There was 2 schools and there
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  was one or two years where there was 3 school.
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  So I was always you, you probably relate to this a little
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  bit. I was always the new guy, always
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  the new kid, right? And so you got to quickly find
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  who's your tribe? Who, who do I hang out with?
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  Who do I not hang out with? And, and I wasn't as extroverted
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  as I am today then. So it wasn't like I, you know,
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  now I'd show up at school, be like, hey, you know, back then I
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  was like, holy, you know, I was scared.
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  How did you handle always being that new kid?
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  Was that a struggle? Yeah, I would say it was a
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  struggle, you know, and being a being a lower income kid, you
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  know, growing the courts and stuff like that here and there.
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  And and, you know, I'm so grateful for my mom.
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  I mean, we were, we were little kids and she went back to high
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  school, you know, So where she's going, sorry.
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  Yeah, you're good. You're good.
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  Take your time. I.
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  Mean she she dropped on high school, got married, had us.
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  Wow, I did not expect this emotion.
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  So sorry about that. You're good, brother.
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  You're good. You're so.
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  Emotional guy. That's what's scaring me right
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  now. OK?
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  Drink of water, take a breath. Absolutely, take your time.
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  This, this is what we get into is that these are real people
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  behind the title coach and I know there's, you know, when he
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  started expressing his movement, a lot of movement, same here.
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  I know there's people listening right now.
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  Same. So this is this is there's a lot
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  of people that are supporting you that have gone through this,
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  these things as well. Alan Absolutely.
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  Yeah, yeah. So my mom went back to school,
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  got a high school diploma, got a.
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  Profit. Art and moved us up through the
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  neighborhoods basically so so she grew up on Title 9
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  assistance food stamps all that's tough yeah and then my
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  grandparents stepped in and bought a house in a fairly nice
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  neighborhood for us and run it to us for at cost so we could
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  actually afford to be able to do that and you know it took
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  everybody a while to get to those situations where we could
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  afford to kind of move the next neighborhoods and very
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  appreciated for my mom to do that yeah she.
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  Sounds like a fighter. She's a fighter, baby.
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  Yeah. And.
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  So, so we, so we got into a nice neighborhood, but I still found
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  the kids that weren't necessarily the nicest, you
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  know? OK.
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  And so we, we would run the hood, you know, my mom was
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  working a lot. We'd run the hood.
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  We'll stay out late at night, you know, sneak out at night
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  doing all that, all all the stuff.
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  And, and Billings was how about 80,000 people when I was a kid,
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  so we could still get in trouble.
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  And so we never got in serious trouble.
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  We, we had a lot of fun, I guess you could say.
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  And then by the time we had got, when I got into middle school is
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  when we had moved to that kind of nicer neighborhood.
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  And so then I need an identity. You know, I, I was kind of a
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  quiet kid, shy kid. I did not like to socialize.
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  And that's something I had to learn a lot, especially through
• 9:55
  college is where it really came into effect.
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  That's where I drew a lot. But yeah, so then I went, went
• 10:02
  out for wrestling and got my butt kicked.
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  So, but I, you know, and then then I went out for track my 7th
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  grade year and I was not the fastest.
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  My friend was the fastest on the team as a distance runner and
• 10:19
  his mom was my actual music teacher.
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  So I was taking music classes from her when I was in 4th
• 10:26
  grade. You know, I decided to pick up
• 10:28
  the cello, the bass, sorry, the bass and play bass.
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  And she's not going to like this.
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  But I never practiced. But but Mr. Jackman saw
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  something in me, you know, and you know, music is a, is a
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  different type of crowd than I was hanging out with.
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  And so it kind of got me seared a little bit away from the the
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  trouble, you know, kind of. And then like I said, I got into
• 10:51
  middle school, started smoking cigarettes a little bit middle
• 10:55
  school. Yeah.
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  So, so kind of going down the wrong path and then started
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  running, met pretty good friends with her, her son, and then 7th
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  grade track I, I finally broke 6 minutes to the very last meet.
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  So I was like, OK, I, I might be able to become a, you know, a
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  1600m mile runner. They had cross country I didn't
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  know existed. Never ran cross country in
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  middle school. Then the next year I tried to go
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  out for basketball, didn't make the basketball team in middle
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  school, 8th grade. And then so I started doing
• 11:31
  track workouts and I, I was pretty disciplined all up until
• 11:36
  the track season. And then I just told coach that
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  I'm not doing track. I just quit doing everything.
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  I was like, oh, OK, I I wanted my free time back and.
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  Kind of you did all the pre work, the thing that we, you
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  know, a lot of times as coaches, we have to beg and borrow and
• 11:52
  prod to get to do. You did that and then you're
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  like, you know, I don't want the payoff.
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  Yeah, yeah, I don't know what it was.
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  Yeah, I got up. I was doing 16 pull ups, you
• 12:00
  know, so that was the highest ever did for pull ups.
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  You know, I, I was working out and then I got tracks and I
• 12:05
  didn't even do it. And I was just like, I don't
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  know why or what came over me. So everyone over to my high
• 12:11
  school and then didn't do athletics.
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  I I had long, I was a skateboarder.
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  I had long hair doing doing the neighborhood skating skate
• 12:19
  parks. And we didn't have skate parks.
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  It would skate the parking garages and and stuff like that.
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  And then I got, I did track my freshman year and Burton Pierce,
• 12:32
  my mentor, the mustache, he saw something in me and he very, he
• 12:36
  encouraged me first year 1330 for 3200, girls were beating me
• 12:45
  and and I learned a lesson about the pity clap because I was the
• 12:50
  pity clap. So, and to this day, it's kind
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  of obviously there's certain, certain circumstances, but I
• 12:58
  don't pity clap to this day because I was so embarrassed to
• 13:01
  get the pity clap. And it's not.
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  And I think that obviously there's different circumstances
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  involved with that. But yeah, so I, I hated it.
• 13:13
  I was embarrassed. And, and coach, we had the last
• 13:17
  meet at the JD and he cancelled because of bad weather and he
• 13:20
  made us a deal. We'll get you a bar St. letter
• 13:21
  if you can run APR and a time trial with kids.
• 13:25
  I didn't do it. I didn't, I didn't varsity.
• 13:29
  And actually what I ended up getting from that last race was
• 13:33
  a stress fracture in my chin and I got done.
• 13:36
  I couldn't put weight on and you know, and it took a long time to
• 13:40
  diagnose. I had a stress fracture because
• 13:42
  it was a, they call it a pinhole stress fracture.
• 13:45
  So instead of going across the the bone this way, it went
• 13:48
  straight through the bone like a pinhole.
• 13:51
  And so, and I could walk for weeks and I was on crutches and
• 13:55
  yeah, that that was demoralizing for sure.
• 13:58
  And so I was done with athletics after that.
• 14:00
  So, yeah, OK, but we know that's not true because that's exactly
• 14:03
  where my question is going. You know, I, I know you know,
• 14:06
  12/13/14 year old kids one because I, I was that at one
• 14:08
  point and I now have a 14 year old son.
• 14:12
  So I know you know, the mindset and and what setbacks like the
• 14:17
  pity clap. Guess what?
• 14:18
  Yeah, same right here. But so I'm with you on that not
• 14:20
  and I'm not a fan of the pity clap either.
• 14:22
  Again, you're right with there's different circumstances.
• 14:23
  A kid falls, It's like, hey, you good job.
• 14:25
  But you know the guy who's just not very good again, this guy.
• 14:29
  What are we doing? Let's move on, you know, let's
• 14:30
  go. So I'm with you.
• 14:32
  You don't you had me on my own pins and needles.
• 14:35
  When you're like, if you run a PR at the last meet, you get
• 14:37
  varsity. I was like, oh, this is gonna be
• 14:38
  his like, oh, and this was my I PR like, no, I didn't make
• 14:42
  varsity. He's like, Oh my God.
• 14:43
  OK, that's. I feel like a roller coaster
• 14:45
  here. And then you get a stress
• 14:47
  fracture. Not only a stress fracture, a
• 14:48
  weird, a unique stress fracture you have right now at that that
• 14:53
  age, this is the end of the freshman year, right?
• 14:55
  I've been here and I've gone through all sorts.
• 14:57
  Of you have every excuse to be like, I'm going back to you know
• 15:01
  what I did? I didn't have that in
• 15:02
  skateboarding, guys. I didn't have that over here in
• 15:05
  Muse. What you have all the excuses in
• 15:06
  the world to walk away. What kept you going to it?
• 15:13
  Coach Pierce, so he was the guidance counselor at the school
• 15:18
  and he was obviously Privy to our phone numbers.
• 15:22
  We did have cell phones. Obviously this is early 90s.
• 15:25
  And so you would call me once a week during the summer.
• 15:29
  You know, Alan there, you know, this is, you know, this is Coach
• 15:31
  Pierce. You know, we watch out for cross
• 15:33
  country and you know, we run 3 miles and I'm like, no, not for
• 15:36
  me. I and I held off all summer
• 15:38
  long. I did my own thing.
• 15:39
  I was like, I'm not doing it. And then school starts going to
• 15:43
  my sophomore year. I'm going to get call slips
• 15:48
  every day to go see a guidance counselor.
• 15:51
  So I was getting pulled out of class once a day to go see my
• 15:54
  guidance counselor and he was heavy in recruiting.
• 15:57
  He would recruit the hallways, you know, I went to West High in
• 16:01
  Billings, you know, and it's it was, we had a lot of kids,
• 16:05
  graduated 550 in our graduate in class and we had 60 guys just on
• 16:10
  the cross country team. And his goal is always to hit
• 16:14
  100 athletes on the cross country team.
• 16:17
  We never got there. We were we were like upper 80s,
• 16:19
  low 90s every year. But we never got there between
• 16:21
  men and women combined. But yeah, so I finally broke
• 16:24
  down about a week into school and said, all right, I'll come
• 16:27
  up for cross country. Just quit.
• 16:28
  Quit calling me, pulling out any class and stuff like that.
• 16:31
  Do you think he was doing that with other kids?
• 16:33
  Like was he calling other kids in the summer?
• 16:36
  Not not the ones that he knew were on the team and was like,
• 16:37
  Hey, what was your mileage this week?
• 16:39
  But the kids who were like, man, I, I need, I need Tommy out
• 16:42
  there. I need Alan out there.
• 16:43
  Do you think he was calling? And then I love the the call
• 16:46
  slip everyday. But because do you think he was
• 16:48
  doing that with other kids? I don't know.
• 16:52
  I really don't know. I've never asked him about that.
• 16:55
  But I see, I think you would know though, right?
• 16:58
  Because I mean, we're talking about freshman, sophomore,
• 17:00
  junior, senior kids in high school, right?
• 17:02
  So you guys all talk. I was not social.
• 17:06
  Yeah. So I went to high school.
• 17:08
  Like I said, I grew up on the lower, lower side, actually the
• 17:10
  South side of Billings, on the other side of the tracks,
• 17:12
  literally. And so when we got over to, to
• 17:17
  West High, I mean, it's doctors, lawyers, kids, you know, kids,
• 17:19
  Dr. BMWs and to school and, you know, I, I work my tail off, you
• 17:25
  know, bought a $500 basically Ford Mustang, QA, Pinto,
• 17:29
  basically that's what I'm driving to school, you know, and
• 17:32
  they had to replace windshield, carpet and everything like that
• 17:35
  in order to drive the car. But, but yeah, so I'm, I'm not
• 17:39
  social at all with anybody really, except for a couple of
• 17:42
  kids in the art class. I was with a couple of kids that
• 17:45
  were, you know, skateboard friends, you know, a couple.
• 17:49
  Would you describe yourself as A and I'm not sure this is a
• 17:52
  necessarily a derogatory mark, but are you a loner at this
• 17:55
  time? Yeah, More at least loner
• 17:58
  leaning maybe. Yeah, more that way.
• 17:59
  I. Was really close with my my
• 18:02
  brother, he's a year, year younger than me.
• 18:05
  So we both kind of went through the same experiences.
• 18:07
  We had some pretty good friends in in middle school that so we
• 18:11
  would start from my house, we'd walk it was like a mile and a
• 18:14
  half mile to school. And so we'd walk from my house.
• 18:16
  We'd pick kids up along the way. So by the time we got to middle
• 18:18
  school, it's like 10 of us. It was pretty good with those
• 18:21
  friends, but a lot of those kids, we were right on that
• 18:24
  boundary line between like Senior High in West High.
• 18:28
  And so where my boundary was, I went to West High for high
• 18:30
  school and all my friends from that age for the most part went
• 18:33
  to the other high school. And so I didn't really carry a
• 18:36
  lot of friends over with me, you know, and you know, the one
• 18:40
  friend that I grew up with and hung out all the time, we took
• 18:43
  completely different paths. I mean, I went into athletics,
• 18:45
  he went into more of the vocational trades into the other
• 18:48
  kind of like alternate school, not just alternative, but it's
• 18:51
  more of like the hands on program.
• 18:54
  So he would, by the time we are going through for our freshman
• 18:56
  year, he was going to basically a completely different school as
• 18:58
  well. So, so basically me and my
• 19:00
  brother that were kind of the ones that hung out, you know, we
• 19:03
  see each other in the hallways and stuff like that, walk to and
• 19:05
  back from school and everything. And so I was always trying to
• 19:08
  find in an identity, didn't know what it would be, you know, and
• 19:12
  then cross country kind of gave me that identity.
• 19:14
  And I think that's important. It's, it's what we are in the
• 19:18
  muck of when we are 1617 years old.
• 19:20
  You, you nailed it. We are looking for an identity.
• 19:21
  That's why I always say when I moved, I was always like, all
• 19:23
  right, who's my tribe? Who, who, who can I trust, who I
• 19:25
  can't. You got to find that out real
• 19:26
  quick. That's what 16 year olds are
• 19:29
  doing. And I think it sounds like.
• 19:31
  What year did you graduate high school?
• 19:33
  I graduate 99. OK.
• 19:34
  As I say we sound very similar in age.
• 19:36
  I graduate 94 so we're we're the same age ish there.
• 19:39
  And so it's easy for us, as you know, 40 plus year old guys and
• 19:43
  everybody out there by the way, to forget that these these kids,
• 19:47
  even in through college, by the way, they're searching for an
• 19:50
  identity that that's I think you nailed that.
• 19:52
  I think that's that's very true. It's important for us to
• 19:53
  remember that sometimes when we're maybe judging sixteen 1718
• 19:57
  year old kids and decisions that they're making.
• 19:59
  So all right, so sophomore year coaches, I mean, you talk about
• 20:03
  a recruiter, this guy is not letting up.
• 20:06
  And finally, whether it breaks the wheel or whatever, you, you,
• 20:10
  you, you succumb. You come to the cross country
• 20:12
  team. Yeah, I, I, I succumb to it, do
• 20:15
  our first run and they're like, yeah, go out for we had this two
• 20:18
  mile, two to three mile lap kind of around the school and boom,
• 20:23
  gang Buster start out with the with the top guys and within 800
• 20:27
  meters on the last. Don't you tell me you just
• 20:30
  naturally I was like, you died, please.
• 20:31
  Tell me I died. I died hard and I didn't have
• 20:37
  running shoes, anything like that.
• 20:38
  And and so, yeah, I I died hard and up with you in the season.
• 20:42
  You know, Coach Pierce is like, you know, you need some running
• 20:45
  shoes if you're going to, you know, survive across the other
• 20:47
  season. Like you don't have money,
• 20:49
  right? So I bought my shoes.
• 20:54
  Wow, dude, Coach, he changed. My life, Really.
• 20:57
  Yeah, I haven't bought these things in years and you're
• 21:02
  bringing out memories that that's pressed, I guess.
• 21:04
  Yeah, Well, that's the that's the role, that's the, this is an
• 21:07
  honored seat I get into because we do get to some, I mean, you
• 21:10
  know, coaches, what you do today, Alan, is, is things to
• 21:14
  young people that that you're carrying on the legacy of coach
• 21:17
  and your mom by the way of giving value to others, caring
• 21:21
  for others. And that's what that's an
• 21:22
  important part of this podcast is people's stories so that you
• 21:25
  get that honor and that you get to honor those who have built
• 21:28
  who you are today. So I'd love this coach.
• 21:30
  Coach obviously is a huge influence.
• 21:33
  Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, it's not my
• 21:35
  trait trying to take very serious what I'm right now.
• 21:38
  Just the XS and OS like you talked about.
• 21:39
  Yep, absolutely. Yeah.
• 21:41
  So I bought my first pair of shoes, got me through the
• 21:43
  season. I was the last kid, almost every
• 21:47
  race. But what was cool about cross
• 21:49
  country is I could hide in the woods and people get to see
• 21:52
  flags, you know, so so I could go out there and do my own thing
• 21:57
  and have fun and not be seen the whole time like on the track.
• 22:00
  No, Alan, you would fry your athlete if they did that today
• 22:03
  and hear you doing this. I know, I know.
• 22:07
  So I could go out there. I could walk, you know, I could
• 22:10
  walk for a little bit, not get seen.
• 22:11
  But when I was in front of people, I sure was running, you
• 22:14
  know? So, yeah.
• 22:16
  So that was what was cool about cross country.
• 22:19
  So. Yeah.
• 22:21
  So, so that's how I kind of got into it.
• 22:23
  And so same thing, the JV meet, all the billing schools last of
• 22:27
  the year. He has our end of the kind of
• 22:31
  season wrap up with the JV kids. He he he did one-on-one meetings
• 22:34
  with all the kids. And I'm very bad about doing
• 22:36
  that to this day, but he was awesome about doing that.
• 22:40
  And so we would have a goal session before the last meet and
• 22:42
  he'd be like, all right, so what's your goal?
• 22:44
  I mean, what do you want to do? You want to run a certain time
• 22:46
  place? And I said, I don't want to get
• 22:49
  a ribbon, I want to medal. And, and, and I don't know if he
• 22:54
  did this on purpose, but he was definitely brutally honest
• 22:57
  person. He looked at me and said, you
• 23:00
  know, Alan, that's just not realistic.
• 23:01
  You need to shoot for something else.
• 23:03
  And I was like, you know what? I'm going to prove you wrong.
• 23:07
  So that was the first time, the whole year, I gave everything I
• 23:10
  could to that race. I dug her deeper than ever
• 23:13
  could. And I finished 7th in the JV
• 23:14
  race. No, I was like.
• 23:17
  Proved. You wrong.
• 23:18
  So so yeah. So I was like, I think he did
• 23:21
  that on purpose, honestly, because I think he, I think he
• 23:23
  probably knew what would fire me up.
• 23:25
  Yeah. And so, so yeah.
• 23:27
  So that's like, yeah, I got. So, so you went from walking in
• 23:31
  the woods, yes, probably being one of the last people on your
• 23:34
  team, last people in the race. And that last race you're like,
• 23:37
  you know what, I'm going to show him.
• 23:38
  And you got 7th, 7th. Of the JV meet, yeah, I got my
• 23:42
  ribbon. I still have that ribbon up in
• 23:43
  my house. Hell yeah.
• 23:45
  Nice. Love it, love it.
• 23:46
  So, so, yeah, so that was awesome.
• 23:48
  That was so much fun getting that, you know, and give me a
• 23:51
  little taste of something that was going to happen in the
• 23:53
  future but does. That fire you up for track
• 23:56
  season like are you actually like going to do track season
• 23:58
  this time so. You know, I was not varsity,
• 24:00
  never made varsity squad obviously that year and after
• 24:04
  the race, you know, we had a little meeting before our award
• 24:07
  ceremony, which I still do that. I love doing award ceremonies
• 24:11
  for my athletes, even at the college level, just because you
• 24:13
  got to honor those kids after putting all the hard work.
• 24:17
  And so he, he talked to me and he's like, hey, I want to make
• 24:19
  you a deal. I'm like, OK, what's this
• 24:21
  fantastic deal you want to give me if you agree?
• 24:25
  Because I told him I wasn't going to do track.
• 24:27
  I was like, I hate a track. I I don't like the laps.
• 24:30
  Nowhere to hide. I get it.
• 24:31
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he he made the deal that
• 24:35
  I will give you a varsity cross country letter get your big W
• 24:38
  you can go buy your letter jacket, whatever else.
• 24:40
  Get that pin if you show up to all the winter workouts and run
• 24:45
  the very first track, me, if you want to quit after that first
• 24:48
  track, we, we're good. You get your varsity letter,
• 24:51
  we're all set. Come on.
• 24:52
  All right, perfect. And so I breathe and we go up
• 24:56
  and he's given all the varsity letters, calls my name up and
• 24:59
  everybody's like clapping, kind of look around.
• 25:01
  I remember to look around like, why does he get a varsity
• 25:03
  letter, you know? But I, I was shooting my word.
• 25:07
  Like I said, just like in middle school, I, I was good at the
• 25:10
  preparing stuff, but I, I was kind of afraid to kind of
• 25:13
  showcase it. Maybe.
• 25:13
  I guess it's kind of like a secret in the back of my brain.
• 25:16
  Maybe. So I shut up every day.
• 25:19
  First time ever running on ice. First time ever running in snow.
• 25:22
  Oh yeah, we. Are in Montana.
• 25:23
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I remember running through
• 25:25
  the parking lot, it was like 1/2 mile from school, hit this black
• 25:27
  guys fall down, hit my knee, went back to school.
• 25:30
  I was like, coach, I can't do this.
• 25:32
  And he goes, you gave me your words, you gotta be back
• 25:33
  tomorrow. So I went back the next day.
• 25:36
  And, you know, I just ran through all all the winter.
• 25:39
  And he made this deal with a lot of kids.
• 25:40
  He wanted his kids come out. But I was the only kid that
• 25:42
  showed up Monday through Friday every day in the whole winter.
• 25:46
  And so, yeah, so we get up to the track seat and it's the
• 25:49
  first meet. It's up at Sky View High, which
• 25:51
  is up on this hilltop. It's always windy there, but,
• 25:54
  you know, beautiful school. And he signs me up for varsity
• 25:58
  for 3200. And I'm like, give me a panic
• 26:02
  attack, coach. And he's like, yeah, you told me
• 26:04
  you're going to give me one race.
• 26:05
  So I want you to run this varsity race.
• 26:07
  You didn't say what race I didn't get.
• 26:09
  That Yeah, yeah. So.
• 26:11
  So I was like, oh, my gosh, so scared, panicked, and.
• 26:14
  And I, I kind of have a little bit of stage fright, especially
• 26:17
  at that age. Yeah.
• 26:20
  And so I'm like, all right, I gave my word.
• 26:22
  So go out. Not sure what's going to happen.
• 26:25
  Finished second in the Marcy race.
• 26:27
  And I'm like, wow, this is cool. Immediately I get crossed that
• 26:31
  finish line. I run like 10 fortyish or
• 26:33
  something like that. So I'm from 1330 to 10:40
• 26:35
  between my freshman sophomore year, you know, first race man
• 26:38
  sophomore year and he comes up to you right after the race.
• 26:41
  He goes, so you want to quit? I'm like, Nope, I'm sold.
• 26:45
  So that's how I got I, I hadn't really, I've never really
• 26:47
  stopped, you know, a couple brief periods here and there,
• 26:49
  but I, I just can't give it up. You know, I I love this story
• 26:53
  about coach because, you know, we we almost called the the
• 26:56
  podcast, the Mythbusters podcast.
• 26:58
  I love the the to just bust the myths.
• 27:00
  And one of the myths out there that I'm really passionate about
• 27:03
  is to bust is that high school coaches can't coach college.
• 27:06
  And typically that's because, you know, oh, they can't
• 27:08
  recruit, they don't know how to coach, whatever, blah, blah,
• 27:11
  blah. This guy, he's a mastermind of
• 27:15
  the the, if you will, the psychology of coaching.
• 27:19
  Like he knew, you know, maybe for lack of a better term here,
• 27:23
  what buttons to push when and how to like even for him to ask
• 27:27
  that question. So you do you want to quit?
• 27:28
  Like he didn't, he didn't say so you're staying on right.
• 27:31
  Like he knew like he needed to ask you like so you want to
• 27:33
  quit. Like he he was giving you that
• 27:34
  almost like, see, I didn't really believe, you know, do you
• 27:37
  want to quit? Boy, this guy, this guy is kind
• 27:40
  of a the coaching Yoda, if you will.
• 27:45
  I mean, obviously I think very highly of them and you know, and
• 27:48
  not every coach is not everybody is going to have the same
• 27:50
  opinion of every coach, you know, and not every coach works
• 27:52
  here. But but man, he works for me and
• 27:54
  got me here. So and even to this day, it's
• 27:58
  hard for me to realize, but I'm not going to be the best coach
• 28:00
  everybody even today. That's right.
• 28:03
  And I might not work for people, but but he works for me.
• 28:06
  And yeah. And yeah, just got me.
• 28:10
  Going that's another really good thing for us as coaches to kind
• 28:14
  of to remember and also to take a step back when we're judging
• 28:18
  others. I'm a I'm a big anti judgement
• 28:20
  person. When we talk about transfers and
• 28:22
  transfer portals and things like that and we immediately want to
• 28:25
  say, oh, the kids, you know, a coach yelled at them one time
• 28:27
  and they transfer. It's like, you know what,
• 28:29
  everybody is not for everybody. You know, I love now again, I've
• 28:33
  used Mass Holloway as a lot of examples.
• 28:34
  I love him. He's a great friend, great
• 28:36
  leader. There are people that they
• 28:37
  thought because let's be real, in the recruiting process, the
• 28:40
  reality is not always in part of the recruiting process, that
• 28:44
  thought, you know, this is the greatest place in the world.
• 28:45
  They get there and like, oh, yeah, no, I don't like Mouse
• 28:47
  holds me accountable. Yeah, I'm not that.
• 28:49
  That's not me. I need to go somewhere else and
• 28:51
  maybe a little less accountability.
• 28:52
  So I think that's really important that, you know, coach
• 28:56
  was thank goodness Coach was great for you and your style.
• 29:00
  I'm sure there's maybe stories, you know, we have someone else
• 29:02
  from your your high school team in here going.
• 29:03
  Yeah. You know, I just did not get
• 29:04
  along with coach because of yada bada, you know, all these other
• 29:07
  things. And it's like, OK, someone else
• 29:08
  loved them. So that's good, you know.
• 29:10
  Yeah. OK, so finish out sophomore
• 29:13
  year, moves into junior year. How did did you?
• 29:14
  So you stayed on the team you kept.
• 29:16
  Your I stay on the team. So in Montana back then we had
• 29:20
  they only took 10 athletes to the state meet.
• 29:23
  And so they would take 5 from the E 5 from the West.
• 29:26
  And you know, I I ran at Bozeman month.
• 29:31
  You know which, Speaking of which, Lyle Wiese, I got a shout
• 29:33
  out to him. I saw you get podcast this.
• 29:35
  Game great dude love man to. Get together in high school,
• 29:37
  which is crazy to say that's. Cool.
• 29:40
  But yeah, so we go to Bozeman High, run the meet and I kick as
• 29:46
  hard as I could and I'm just going to state by one spot.
• 29:49
  So they did like an East West type of thing you're saying?
• 29:52
  So you picked 5 from each side. That's. 6.
• 29:55
  Well I got 6 I rent 1019 but as. But as a sophomore, who really.
• 30:00
  This is like your freshman year if you want.
• 30:02
  Yeah, exactly. Wow.
• 30:04
  Yeah, so you. Gotta feel like, like you gotta
• 30:06
  feel like, oh, I mean, are you, let me ask you this way, are you
• 30:09
  So I know you got 6 and you're bummed out, especially as a
• 30:12
  sophomore, and you probably aren't even supposed to be
• 30:14
  there, but you're still, you know, you're, you're, are you
• 30:17
  starting to feel as you kind of come off that sophomore year and
• 30:20
  you start staring junior year in the face?
• 30:22
  Are you starting to feel like you found your tribe a little
• 30:24
  bit at this point? Yeah, yeah.
• 30:26
  It it was kind of weird and I don't know if it's because I
• 30:29
  became an athlete or, or what happened, but I also started
• 30:33
  noticing that people were talking to me.
• 30:34
  I was hanging out with people, started kind of getting some
• 30:36
  friends, you know? So, so, yeah, so I was starting
• 30:39
  to get accepted. So yeah, I, I think the biggest
• 30:44
  social impact was going into my junior year, going into my cross
• 30:48
  country season. I went out and my goal was to be
• 30:53
  the top dog. You know, I wanted to be #1 I
• 30:55
  wanted to find that identity. I wanted to be, you know, the
• 30:58
  best that I could be. And so I, I ran all summer.
• 31:02
  Nobody else ran as much as me. I was sold.
• 31:05
  I, I wanted to have a good cross country season and so I wanted
• 31:09
  to be. So we had to be, I can't
• 31:11
  remember 16 or 18. I can't remember to be Allstate
• 31:14
  for crosscut. And so and bummer, I didn't make
• 31:20
  it that junior year either, but I did run at state.
• 31:23
  I was our top runner, but I just missed Allstate and there were
• 31:29
  some, there were some seniors and stuff on the team that year
• 31:33
  kind of kind of got mad at me basically you could say, because
• 31:36
  all of a sudden, you know, I was a nobody my sophomore year and
• 31:39
  then I was a top guy. I was running like actually I'd
• 31:42
  run like 2122 minutes, 3 miles my sophomore year.
• 31:45
  And by my junior year I'm running low sixteenths.
• 31:48
  So all of a sudden they're like, and, and to me, I was like, so,
• 31:53
  so I actually made a lot of friends with the younger
• 31:56
  sophomores and freshmen that year, not necessarily the
• 31:58
  juniors and seniors I was with. So yeah, so we had a pretty good
• 32:02
  season that year for cross country and then went on to
• 32:06
  track and I wanted to, you know, make state and I did everything
• 32:12
  I could all winter. Well, reverse.
• 32:15
  I did what I thought I could do, but I kind of let coach down
• 32:18
  that year and also just had to go back out to wrestling year.
• 32:21
  So I was doing wrestling and trying to run at the same time.
• 32:24
  Now I'm a big advocate of multi sport athletes.
• 32:28
  So on one hand I'm like yeah cool, do what you want.
• 32:30
  It's high school, you know it doesn't really matter, but you
• 32:33
  are just finding your trajectory as a runner and you decide.
• 32:37
  Let me go take the hard left over here.
• 32:39
  Go. There was a rationale behind
• 32:41
  that because our top runner, he was a wrestler, cross country,
• 32:46
  trap guy. But but you had wrestled a
• 32:48
  little bit too, and I. Wrestled.
• 32:49
  I wrestled a little bit. And I remember you saying I got
• 32:52
  my butt kicked. So you had the experience too?
• 32:55
  And I wrestled a little bit my freshman year.
• 32:56
  I did go off for wrestling my freshman year, got my butt
• 32:58
  kicked. But I was tiny.
• 33:00
  I mean, I was, I hadn't really drawn my freshman year.
• 33:02
  I was, I was wrestling under 100 lbs.
• 33:04
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So and so.
• 33:06
  And I got my, I just got thrown all over the place.
• 33:10
  But but one thing that I did learn from wrestling that year
• 33:14
  was not to be afraid of releasing some emotion while
• 33:20
  you're out there as an athlete, you know, because so I remember
• 33:25
  I started off JV just pounded and then it's going to the
• 33:31
  second match and he did some, I didn't know what it was, but I
• 33:34
  got mad, like physically mad on the mat and, and wrestling's a
• 33:37
  good spot to take that out sometimes.
• 33:39
  And so I, I just, I got mad. I pinned the kid and then I used
• 33:44
  that same aggression the whole year.
• 33:47
  And so I went undefeated the rest of the year and wrestling
• 33:51
  tell yeah, so I was like, OK, I got to tap in this anger for
• 33:54
  this wrestling thing. And so then we're going in and
• 33:58
  getting ready for state, and I got a fungal virus on my hand
• 34:02
  from wrestling some. People.
• 34:05
  And I was like, I'm out, yeah. So.
• 34:09
  So that was my last chance. And so, so, so I did disappoint
• 34:12
  Coach Pierce quite a bit with that because I would see he had
• 34:15
  big plans for me. And you know, I'm just missing
• 34:17
  state of the sophomore. I did run faster.
• 34:20
  I I ran ten O 6 that year in the 3200, but I missed state by two
• 34:23
  places that time. Everybody can't get better.
• 34:25
  Wow yeah. And so so yeah.
• 34:27
  So that was the heartbreak year right there that junior track
• 34:31
  season. And so then I.
• 34:33
  Any and and maybe this is kind of a A2 timeline question when
• 34:40
  you get 7th. So think about what you thought
• 34:42
  of as a junior when he got 7th and didn't make it.
• 34:46
  The the question is the same for both these timelines.
• 34:49
  Did you regret going to wrestling?
• 34:50
  So when you got 7th as a, you know, 16 year old junior, you're
• 34:56
  a 1617 year old kid. Did you have regrets?
• 34:58
  And now, because what we have now is we have perspective,
• 35:00
  right? We, we, we, we're 40 year old
• 35:02
  guys. We can look back.
• 35:03
  And now when you look back at it, do you have regrets?
• 35:06
  So you see, did you have regret then and do you have regret now?
• 35:10
  I would say yes today and back then because I think, I think I
• 35:15
  mean, yes, it it taught me how to use some aggression as an
• 35:18
  athlete. But like we talk about Coach
• 35:21
  Pierce, I think he was a master on he would have got that out of
• 35:23
  me no matter what. So I think if he would have had
• 35:27
  that extra winter training year with me actually fully body and
• 35:30
  he would have, he would have pulled even more out we'd.
• 35:32
  Have figured it out. Yeah, that makes sense because I
• 35:34
  was going to say, you know, you did learn something from it.
• 35:36
  So yeah, I could see as the, you know, the seventeenish year old
• 35:39
  kid, right, because we're young, we're emotional.
• 35:40
  We're, you know, gosh, I got 6 last year and now it's 7th.
• 35:43
  Am I getting worse? You know, you start putting all
• 35:45
  these things in your head. What I shouldn't have done
• 35:47
  wrestling. Now as a 40 year old you can
• 35:48
  look back like, well, you know, maybe who I am today so it's OK
• 35:50
  but yeah, I can see where the the draw of the coach to they're
• 35:53
  like, man, if I could have just stayed on the coach train, we
• 35:56
  might have been OK there. Yeah.
• 35:58
  Yeah, yeah. And like I said, I think, I
• 36:00
  think he would have. I think what I did my senior
• 36:03
  year would have happened my junior and then I could have
• 36:05
  gotten even faster as a As. A That's a great tease.
• 36:08
  So what happened senior year? So senior year end up breaking
• 36:14
  15 a couple times. So yeah.
• 36:17
  So that was that was fun. Obviously we're running on a
• 36:19
  home course. It's pancake flat and there's
• 36:21
  there's no, I mean the hill is like a 5 foot.
• 36:25
  He's in a bridge across a little stream.
• 36:27
  That's that's a so yeah, yeah. So then I was I was confident
• 36:32
  that year. I mean, I was.
• 36:33
  I won meets, you know, I'd never won a race until that year.
• 36:36
  You didn't go to wrestling senior year.
• 36:38
  No, no, no. So, so cross country was
• 36:41
  awesome. So going into my senior year, I
• 36:45
  was like, I'm I'm a big gold guy, high achieved, shoot for
• 36:50
  the stars. And then, you know, the same
• 36:52
  goes if you don't hit the stars, you're going to land on the
• 36:54
  moon, you're still going to be up there type thing.
• 36:56
  So I wanted to win state, you know, I wanted to, you know, run
• 36:59
  the fastest in school history. That's a pretty good big goal
• 37:01
  for a guy who's never made it to state.
• 37:02
  Yeah, That's that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 37:04
  Yeah. And so so we we get to the state
• 37:06
  meet and. Wait, so you qualified?
• 37:09
  Oh yeah. Don't skip over that you hadn't
• 37:10
  qualified yet. That's.
• 37:11
  Cool. So, so let's go ahead.
• 37:12
  So, so, so this is where some of the leadership as far as a a
• 37:15
  coach, I think started playing into my thing because we would,
• 37:20
  we'd have morning practice if you were going to be varsity,
• 37:22
  didn't matter if you're JV kid or not, you had to attend
• 37:24
  morning practices. Even if you're the number one
• 37:27
  guy, if you didn't show up to morning practice, you weren't
• 37:28
  going to run varsity that week. And so I was, I was doing that
• 37:32
  sophomore year, junior year and going to my senior year.
• 37:35
  I was like, guys, we got to take these morning practices
• 37:37
  seriously. And what I mean is we would go
• 37:41
  about 3 blocks away from the campus and there's this overhang
• 37:44
  on our church and we'd take a nap for about 1/2 hour.
• 37:46
  So we'd run back to the campus. And so, so going into my senior
• 37:51
  year, because like I said, I'd made friends with those juniors
• 37:54
  and you know, the, the younger kids and I, I was like, guys,
• 37:56
  we're not going to do that. We're, we're going to do what
• 37:58
  coach says. We're, we're going to put
• 37:59
  everything into this. And so my senior year, we're not
• 38:02
  taking naps for the morning runs.
• 38:03
  We're, we're taking the workouts.
• 38:05
  We're we're doing drop off runs out where that came into my
• 38:09
  effect. I remember, you know, my junior
• 38:12
  year in track, we we had run to a friends house, one of the
• 38:15
  teammates and we'd go hang out. And then to make us look like we
• 38:18
  were sweaty, we throw water in armpits and, you know, so yeah.
• 38:23
  Fully nobody, by the way. Yeah, as I'm saying fully nobody
• 38:26
  by the. Way, yeah, he knew because we're
• 38:28
  coming back. We're fine.
• 38:29
  We're not flush. We don't have red faces, but we
• 38:31
  got sweat stains, you know? So he knew.
• 38:35
  But yeah, so it's, I mean, we're 1415 year old kids, you know, we
• 38:39
  don't want to go out and run 8 miles, right?
• 38:43
  But I think I don't know what he saw me, but I think he knew I
• 38:46
  might be a leader someday. But yeah, so I made sure we did
• 38:49
  everything he asked you. So, so we had gone to state as a
• 38:53
  team, You know, junior year, I, I finished I think just outside
• 38:58
  of Allstate, I think at Allstate.
• 39:00
  And so my senior year we're like, we're, we're like, look
• 39:04
  around. We're like, we might be pretty
• 39:05
  good this year in cross country. And so, so we go to state me and
• 39:09
  we, you know, we run our tails off and we finished third in the
• 39:11
  state as a team. You know, we hadn't got them, we
• 39:14
  hadn't got a plaque in a long time.
• 39:15
  So that was pretty cool. And so then those same kids,
• 39:19
  they're all younger than me. Yeah.
• 39:22
  And we had one other guy that was my age and they're all
• 39:25
  sophomores and and juniors and and guys, you're showing up all
• 39:28
  winter with me. We're we're going to work.
• 39:29
  We're going to work. And it worked pretty good.
• 39:33
  I mean, I was, by the time I got to track, I was getting beat by
• 39:36
  my own teammates in some races. It's and, and so then, yeah.
• 39:41
  So by the time we finish that year, we had five guys, like 10
• 39:44
  and 3200. That was pretty cool.
• 39:46
  Wow. So, yeah, so I was pretty cool.
• 39:50
  But so, you know, I have a kid that had memory steak, meat and
• 39:53
  track and I got beat by one of my teammates at a meet midway
• 39:58
  through the season. I was pretty upset.
• 40:01
  And so that so I convinced all the freshmen around me because
• 40:04
  they kind of looked up to me, I think.
• 40:06
  And I said, hey, we're going to, we're going to do a 4x4, we're
• 40:08
  going to do the JV 4/4 by 4 for fun.
• 40:10
  I'm not a speed guy. I was a speed guy but I I use
• 40:13
  that address and I was pretty upset.
• 40:15
  I ran like a 52 split. I opened up and I handed off.
• 40:18
  We were first and I was like, wow, that was crazy.
• 40:20
  I was, you know, kind of fun to get the aggression out.
• 40:22
  And then they had track coaches like, hey, you just made 4 by
• 40:25
  14. So.
• 40:29
  Running, I was a mile or two mile and all of a sudden every
• 40:32
  meet after that after 3200, I was running a 4 by 4.
• 40:35
  So yeah. And then ended up making state
• 40:38
  and all three as well. So, so we go to state and the,
• 40:41
  and the mile, I remember the mile I was like, got dead last.
• 40:46
  You know, I got 10 kids. I got dead last.
• 40:48
  I still ran a 432 mile, you know, altitude in Montana.
• 40:52
  That's pretty good. And then, you know, state the
• 40:57
  3200 kind of traumatic story. And I love to share this with my
• 41:01
  kids because it's I try to tell them it's OK to be embarrassed
• 41:04
  sometimes. And when we all make mistakes, I
• 41:07
  get to the I get the start line. I don't have my running shorts
• 41:11
  on. I'm I'm starting to take my
• 41:14
  pants down and I just had my little briefs on.
• 41:16
  Shut. Up and I'm like, they're calling
• 41:19
  us a start so so one of my teammates's across he was an
• 41:21
  alternate and so he was all dressed up in his kit and I, we
• 41:26
  had a change right by start line and I put my shorts on and took
• 41:29
  off so yeah so. So yeah, so that you learn to
• 41:33
  get rid of modesty real quick like that.
• 41:37
  So yeah, so, so yeah. So I ended up finishing getting
• 41:40
  all state, you know, so I got all state for cross finished six
• 41:43
  and cross finished six at state and 3200.
• 41:45
  And so yeah. So someone for a kid that
• 41:48
  couldn't even run a mile to become an all state runner was
• 41:51
  pretty. Cool.
• 41:51
  Well, I love the story. You know, I love the from
• 41:54
  freshman year to sophomore year, the huge change.
• 41:57
  And it just made me think about like, wow, one year, like what?
• 42:02
  So many things can change in one year.
• 42:04
  Like literally one year from your freshman sophomore year was
• 42:06
  a huge leap. But then even, you know, from
• 42:09
  there to your senior year, again, just another huge leap.
• 42:12
  That's a short amount of time. I know it's our whole high
• 42:14
  school career, but it's a short amount of time in our lives.
• 42:17
  Just the, you know, you know, the kid who would, you know,
• 42:19
  loves cross. I won't say loves cross country
• 42:21
  lights cross country because he could go and hide in the woods
• 42:24
  to the guy who you know, as a senior and junior says, hey,
• 42:27
  boys and girls, all right, we're done with the sleeping on the
• 42:29
  runs. We're done with the splashing
• 42:31
  the pool while we're done. We are we're going to we're
• 42:33
  going to buy in like that's that, that gives like that.
• 42:37
  That should give coaches like so much hope that they got this,
• 42:40
  you know, this this squirrely kid who just you know, what do
• 42:43
  they say grab assing around, you know, and it's like, you know
• 42:45
  what, that kid could be your leader that in a very short
• 42:48
  amount of time, by the way, don't give up on them.
• 42:50
  Keep pressing into them. That's a great, great story.
• 42:53
  All right, Alan, it's senior year.
• 42:54
  So we're thinking about college and next year and maybe running.
• 42:58
  I don't hear necessarily, even though you have a great
• 43:01
  relationship with coach and you have come into your own as a
• 43:04
  leader for sure your senior year.
• 43:06
  I'm not necessarily hearing like I want to be a coach at this
• 43:09
  point because. Yeah, yeah.
• 43:11
  So talk to me about what were you thinking about for college
• 43:15
  and and whether running was going to take a part of that?
• 43:17
  And what were you thinking at this age this, you know, 18 year
• 43:21
  old high school senior of major in and become like, I want to
• 43:24
  become a astronaut, a businessman, whatever.
• 43:27
  What were you thinking at that point?
• 43:29
  I was not thinking college at all.
• 43:31
  We I'm the only one in my family to go to college.
• 43:35
  I have cousins that have gone on gone to college and got degrees
• 43:37
  now. But at the time, nobody in my
• 43:40
  family had even thought about college as an option.
• 43:43
  And so my coach is one kind of spearheaded that for me.
• 43:47
  So he actually took me to college, college tours in his
• 43:49
  car and stuff like that. So we about halfway through the
• 43:54
  year, cross country is done and I started getting some phone
• 43:58
  calls who from where? And so like, oh, OK.
• 44:02
  And so, so Coach Pierce, he, you know, he took me over to
• 44:06
  Montana, University of Montana to tour, Montana State to tour
• 44:10
  Gonzaga to tour. And they're offering me walk on
• 44:16
  spots, you know, $500 books. And I, you know, I have no money
• 44:19
  to do that. You know, so like this is not
• 44:22
  going to happen, Coach. I don't think it's, you know, in
• 44:24
  the cards for me. And so then he kind of expanding
• 44:27
  his search and I started getting calls from schools in North
• 44:31
  Dakota, South Dakota, you know, some surrounding states.
• 44:34
  I mean, obviously recruiting now is a lot different.
• 44:38
  You can find athletic.net is amazing.
• 44:41
  We didn't have that back then. And so basically it's, it's a
• 44:44
  lot of Labor back in my coach trying to send kids off and
• 44:47
  trying to find good options. And so we had a, we had AD 2 in
• 44:51
  town that was offering a really good package and I could live at
• 44:54
  home, but they only had cross country, you know, and, and I
• 44:57
  wanted the track element. And some of you know, that
• 45:00
  that's some of the coaches you've interviewed before kind
• 45:03
  of alluded to that. It's hard to have a successful
• 45:04
  program. And I was a prime candidate.
• 45:08
  I was not going to go someplace where I couldn't do sport year
• 45:10
  round. And so then I got a couple
• 45:14
  offers, good offers from Jamestown up in North Dakota,
• 45:18
  Dakota, Wesleyan, you know, Black Hills State, talk to me a
• 45:21
  little bit. I ended up I, this guy chased
• 45:25
  the money. Whoever gave me those money is
• 45:26
  worth going to go. It's all I had to do.
• 45:29
  No research really on the coaching, no research on the
• 45:32
  school. Yeah.
• 45:35
  I mean, basically it's it's kind of like the Jerry Maguire spot,
• 45:38
  you know, show me the money and that's where I'm going to go.
• 45:41
  And so that's what I did. I I chased the money.
• 45:43
  I went to school called Dakota Wesleyan out in the South Dakota
• 45:47
  World Famous Corn Palace. If anybody does not know what
• 45:49
  that is, you got to look up the the Corn Palace.
• 45:52
  But yeah, so I went out there, drove me and my, my high school
• 45:56
  buddy from the team, we, we went to the same school.
• 45:59
  He actually side with Jamestown. And then I chose Dakota Wesley
• 46:02
  and he decommitted from them, decided to come with me.
• 46:04
  So he, he got the two of us for the price of 1, I guess.
• 46:09
  But yeah, so we drive over to I, I never visited the school,
• 46:12
  didn't know anything about it. I didn't know anything about
• 46:15
  South Dakota. Never been out there.
• 46:17
  Get there and it's like, I would say it's probably 95°, about 85%
• 46:23
  humidity. And I'm like, what did I get
• 46:26
  myself into? And we're, we're living in a
• 46:30
  dorm. It's called Allen Hall, not
• 46:33
  spelled the same way, but it was probably built in probably the
• 46:36
  1970s. No EC, nothing like that.
• 46:38
  You know, 10 by 10, you know, the, the dormer probably the
• 46:42
  size of my office, you know, and we're just sweltering in there
• 46:47
  and then we go out to dinner. I think it was like Perkins like
• 46:49
  that. And it, it people had never been
• 46:52
  to the Midwest or the South. At night when the bugs come out
• 46:55
  around the lights, that was a new experience.
• 46:59
  I mean, I'm out there and it's just like a cloud of bugs
• 47:01
  hovering around every light in the entire town.
• 47:04
  And I was like, uh oh, I might be in trouble.
• 47:06
  Here. It freaked you out a little bit,
• 47:08
  yeah. It did.
• 47:08
  It did, but I had no idea what I want to do for a degree.
• 47:13
  My degree was running. I was just going to go there and
• 47:17
  run as long as I could and just have fun.
• 47:19
  And so no, like I want to be a teacher, I no nothing, no no
• 47:24
  direction as far as academics. And the only thing So what I put
• 47:29
  down on my on my major with biology.
• 47:33
  OK. Because growing up, I loved
• 47:36
  animals. I would go out and I'd catch
• 47:38
  snakes and lizards and turtles. I would make terrariums and it
• 47:42
  was all this fun stuff. Then also like I'm going to be a
• 47:44
  vet or zoologist, you know, that sound like that'd be fun.
• 47:46
  I'm going to hang out with animals all day.
• 47:49
  So you take classes for it and things change.
• 47:52
  But yeah, so. So yeah.
• 47:54
  So I was a biology major going to go become a zoologist or a
• 47:57
  vet or something like that. But really, I went to school to.
• 48:01
  That was plain and simple. So talk to us about college as a
• 48:05
  whole then as far as you know, give us a we, we don't need to
• 48:08
  go year by year necessarily on the on the athletics.
• 48:11
  But so talk to us about, you know, you had a great
• 48:13
  relationship with high school coach.
• 48:14
  Talk to us about your experience with the coach.
• 48:16
  Coaches in college and you had to get somewhere guided on your
• 48:20
  academics at some point. Yeah, so, so academically I
• 48:25
  didn't know what I wanted to do. Struggle a little bit.
• 48:28
  School wise, I was mid twos 2.2 GPA my freshman year.
• 48:34
  My coach was very nice man, but didn't never had the same
• 48:38
  relationship. Little bit of different training
• 48:41
  where training philosophy as well.
• 48:44
  I I feel like I spent more time injured than I was healthy in
• 48:47
  college. You know, I I was actually
• 48:50
  running less miles than I did in high school, but the intensity
• 48:53
  was a lot higher than I'd run and you know, and my body was
• 48:57
  just not suited for that. You know, I at least problems
• 49:00
  need problems. Something every year would would
• 49:02
  flare up. It still did all right.
• 49:06
  Never made my goal be an All American.
• 49:08
  I hit, you know, I qualified for Nashville 7 times but never got
• 49:11
  on that big podium thing. But yeah, so, so very up and
• 49:16
  down college career. Like I would just start getting
• 49:19
  there and then something come to derail and get hurt.
• 49:21
  Something like that. Freshman year I was, I was a
• 49:25
  straight Arrow tech guy coming out of high school.
• 49:28
  In middle school I was not, you know, I was drinking alcohol.
• 49:31
  So hoping cigarettes in middle school, high school never touch
• 49:34
  it. I was like I bought into coach's
• 49:36
  plan. Straight narrow with your cross
• 49:38
  country. Had a let down at conference,
• 49:42
  started getting into the party and socializing that type of
• 49:44
  stuff for a little bit. Freshman 15 came on pretty quick
• 49:49
  within about a month and a half, two months when I started doing
• 49:51
  that. And then pretty shortly I woke
• 49:55
  up 1 morning I tell my kids this, but I woke up 1 morning I
• 50:00
  was hungover on my dorm floor. I always ran, don't I never
• 50:05
  stopped running. And I remember on that run
• 50:07
  realizing like, I do not want to feel like this.
• 50:10
  I did not want to end up like this.
• 50:12
  There's lots of drinking in my family history.
• 50:14
  I don't want to become an alcoholic.
• 50:16
  And so I just from that day, I was like, boom, I'm done.
• 50:20
  So then I made I had no friends when I first got to college,
• 50:25
  started partying, had a ton of friends, and then no friends
• 50:28
  with all within that fresh menu. Yeah.
• 50:31
  You, you should be commended on getting to that realization
• 50:34
  early though. You know, I, I think a lot of us
• 50:36
  do come to that realization, but it's 234.
• 50:40
  Sometimes bad act, something happens, you know, a major thing
• 50:43
  happens. So to be able to come to that
• 50:46
  fairly early that that's a good thing.
• 50:48
  That's a good sign of maturity levels and things like that.
• 50:51
  So that's good. Yeah, yeah.
• 50:53
  So, so like I said, I, I think I try and guide my kids to not go
• 50:58
  that route, but it's, we're college athletes, we're college
• 51:03
  kids, It's happening. It, it's almost unavoidable.
• 51:07
  I try and treat my kids, tell them my experience and you know,
• 51:10
  you're going to gain some weight, you're going to slow
• 51:12
  down, you're not going to enjoy your athletic as much.
• 51:15
  Your school's going to suffer. You know, a lot of things suffer
• 51:18
  when you get involved in that. I try and be that that wise and
• 51:22
  old man now, but it doesn't always work.
• 51:24
  But hopefully eventually come around to me.
• 51:27
  Right. Yeah.
• 51:28
  So, so I did qualify for nationals after I stopped the
• 51:32
  drinking stuff. And at that time it was my
• 51:36
  sophomore year. So.
• 51:38
  So because I screwed up, I had to take some classes after my
• 51:42
  freshman year. So I stayed in town, took a
• 51:46
  couple classes start to get my grades back around.
• 51:49
  And that's where my wife comes in, you know, wow, you're
• 51:53
  bringing back memories that are crazy.
• 51:56
  So, so she's a local girl, local farm girl, you know, and she,
• 51:59
  she also grew up pretty, pretty poor income.
• 52:01
  So we connected, you know, and we just kind of hit it off right
• 52:04
  away. And she, she had a she had a
• 52:06
  boyfriend for about 5 years at the time.
• 52:08
  Wow. Yeah.
• 52:10
  So we just kind of hit it off. And, you know, she's very
• 52:12
  influential in what, you know, kind of help me keep me straight
• 52:14
  and narrow to you got to have some behind just support you and
• 52:17
  that's willing to be sacrifice a lot for a coach.
• 52:22
  Yeah, yeah. But I remember going into my
• 52:26
  soccer year, she like I'm an I'm a nerd at the time about
• 52:30
  running. And so I had to talk about
• 52:31
  running all time. And yeah, that's not just so you
• 52:34
  guys know out there that's not the way to pick up girls.
• 52:36
  That's. Going to say God bless her.
• 52:37
  That's the first thing I thought so.
• 52:39
  That's. Not the way to pick up girls,
• 52:41
  just so you know. But that's what I thought and
• 52:42
  talked about 24/7. But she put up with me and she
• 52:47
  actually was home for the summer and went to a different school
• 52:50
  over in Minnesota. And she was off at school and
• 52:53
  she came up to walk into North Dakota to come watch me run.
• 52:56
  And she tells me this afterwards, obviously.
• 52:59
  But she drove up by herself from her college and she is nervous
• 53:04
  because she's like, what if this kid who I've just met, we're
• 53:08
  kind of hitting it off, kind of become serious.
• 53:10
  What if you talk about running things out running that runs all
• 53:12
  the time and sucks. And so, so she was nervous.
• 53:19
  Luckily, I, I did, I was top ten.
• 53:21
  I did OK. And, and so, so, yeah, so, so
• 53:24
  she, yeah, so, so she's like, OK, at least she's packed about
• 53:28
  something. He's pretty good about, you
• 53:29
  know. Did she have any kind of track
• 53:31
  background? Did she run in high school or is
• 53:33
  it no she but she knew the sport at least like she knows.
• 53:35
  Any athletics? Nothing.
• 53:38
  Wow, OK, yeah, she just knows sucks and not sucks that's.
• 53:41
  Yep, Yep. That, that's kind of she's
• 53:44
  yelling and so, so, yeah, so. And obviously I was nervous to
• 53:47
  have her come watching for sure. Sure, sure.
• 53:49
  Yeah, I did. All right.
• 53:50
  Finished top ten and, you know, and I guess the stars went from
• 53:53
  there and we kind of parked together and moved in together
• 53:58
  and she went back home, I guess. And yeah, that's where we
• 54:02
  started dating and eventually led to over 20 years of marriage
• 54:06
  now. Wow.
• 54:07
  That's so cool. That's a great story.
• 54:08
  I love that. I love that.
• 54:10
  But but she was super supportive all the way through.
• 54:13
  There'd be mornings where you don't want to wake up and get
• 54:15
  those 13 miles and she'd kick it.
• 54:18
  And she, she actually became a bus driver for the team, a van
• 54:21
  driver. And so we, she would drive vans
• 54:24
  for us. Yeah, she was, she was awesome.
• 54:26
  She's still awesome. Obviously, yeah.
• 54:29
  Yeah, so great there. So she was supportive all the
• 54:31
  way back then and still today. I mean, she's.
• 54:34
  And at this point, I'm still not hearing anything that's like,
• 54:37
  oh, and you know what? When you said you, you were a
• 54:40
  nerd and running, I started thinking like, oh, is this where
• 54:42
  he's going to say like. So I started paying attention to
• 54:43
  work. I'm still not hearing coaching.
• 54:46
  Yeah. I did not get into coaching
• 54:50
  until I started coaching and I got into coaching by mistake.
• 54:53
  I I still believe it was a mistake I got with the coaching.
• 54:56
  So let's go there, but let's finish out college.
• 54:58
  So so you finish out what did, what did you end up getting a
• 55:00
  degree in? So so I was I had low 2 point O
• 55:05
  didn't know what to do went undecided.
• 55:08
  I took a class called animal development was failing it
• 55:11
  halfway through had to withdraw and then I took a history class.
• 55:18
  I hated history in high school, fell in love with my history
• 55:21
  professors, 2 great history professors.
• 55:23
  Dr. Flynn, he's wrote, he's written several books about
• 55:26
  South Dakota history, everything like that Doctor Mcclair, he, he
• 55:29
  was the, he passed away a few years ago.
• 55:32
  Both, you know, authors, you know, you know, I mean, this is
• 55:34
  a, a small school, like 800 kids and you got 2 history teachers
• 55:38
  that are known around the country on The History Channel
• 55:41
  talking at the little tiny college.
• 55:45
  And so, and obviously there I was packed about running there,
• 55:47
  packed about history and it was just kind of good mirror and I
• 55:50
  just picked up history and I was like, I'm going to do history.
• 55:53
  And and so about that same time, there's a little museum, Dakota
• 55:58
  Discover Museum across the campus.
• 56:01
  And for insurance purposes in the upstairs part of the part of
• 56:08
  the museum, they have an apartment set up so the, the
• 56:11
  building could be insured. They had to have a resident up
• 56:13
  there, and so I actually got to live in a museum upstairs part
• 56:17
  of the museum for a couple years in college, and I worked for the
• 56:20
  Dakota's Discovery Museum doing archives in the basement.
• 56:24
  So cool. That's cool.
• 56:27
  Yeah, so it's called the Beckwith house.
• 56:28
  So if anyone wants to look what the Beckwith House looks like,
• 56:30
  it's it. I lived in a mansion in college,
• 56:32
  but I would lived in the servants quarters.
• 56:34
  So we had we had our cloth foot bathtub, no shower, so we took
• 56:40
  baths every day. Yeah.
• 56:42
  So yeah, it was such parents so so me and my my girlfriend at
• 56:47
  the time lived in there. Cheap rent, 200 bucks a month.
• 56:51
  I could walk, you know, I didn't have a car.
• 56:53
  My car blew up my freshman year college and so I could walk back
• 56:57
  and forth to campus tipped anybody that's in college that
• 57:01
  doesn't know how to make it work, work for the cafeteria,
• 57:03
  free food every time you work. So I worked all three meals
• 57:05
  every day. Smart.
• 57:07
  So, yeah, so we just made it work, you know, and like I said,
• 57:12
  similar backgrounds, low income. So we're not we're we're not
• 57:15
  going to spend lots of money even to this day.
• 57:16
  We're pretty frugal about that, right?
• 57:18
  Which is probably why you can make coaching work and.
• 57:20
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the right profession.
• 57:24
  You know, and we, we think we live the high life just because
• 57:27
  of how we grew up, you know, right.
• 57:29
  So you can make it work as long as you don't buy the new cars.
• 57:31
  And stuff. That's right.
• 57:32
  Yeah. No joke about that.
• 57:34
  So. So you get up, get a history
• 57:35
  degree. Is that what?
• 57:36
  You got a history degree and the goal was to be a curator museum.
• 57:41
  Yeah. Well, yeah, you're living it.
• 57:42
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so so I went from a two
• 57:46
  point low 2 point to graduating College of the 3.6.
• 57:50
  Dude. Get out, there's a.
• 57:51
  Lot of work to get there. You talk about finding your
• 57:54
  path, man, it's, it's one thing, you know, I think our
• 57:58
  experiences create who we are today.
• 58:00
  So like in one hand, I want to say like, oh man, Alan, if you
• 58:03
  could have just found history in high school, even like, oh, you
• 58:05
  know what, what could have been or whatever, but I think you had
• 58:09
  to go through this journey to find it.
• 58:11
  That's so cool, man. That's what a what a turn around
• 58:14
  academically in in life monetary.
• 58:16
  Yeah, that's. Yeah, so so I love my classes.
• 58:20
  My doctor Flynn called me comeback kid in my historical
• 58:24
  research and writing class because my first product was not
• 58:27
  the greatest. And you know, because that whole
• 58:29
  class there's there's two assignments.
• 58:31
  It was you had to do get your idea and kind of do like that.
• 58:35
  And then the finished product was your assignment and it had
• 58:38
  to be cited. Sidable be able to publish in a,
• 58:41
  you know, in a, in a words. Did you keep in touch with coach
• 58:46
  from high school? Brunson, I think you said.
• 58:48
  Burton, Pierce. Burton Pierce, Coach Pierce, did
• 58:51
  you keep in touch with him? Oh, we keep in touch.
• 58:54
  So he. I'm sorry, stay in college when
• 58:56
  when you're going through, you're going through a lot in
• 58:58
  college. Were you in any kind of
• 59:00
  communication with him? Not a not a lot.
• 59:02
  No, I would like I only went back twice my whole I was in
• 59:06
  college for five years. I I did the five year plan.
• 59:08
  So I had to figure things out. But when I would go back, I
• 59:13
  would go run with the team. I'd go see him, but I mean,
• 59:16
  we're still in the age where there's no cell phone.
• 59:18
  Yeah, right. It's harder, yeah.
• 59:20
  Yeah, so so we're and there's not, you know, my emails came in
• 59:22
  existence, but I've not yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 59:25
  And so the the communication's not like, yeah.
• 59:27
  That's what it is today. So you get a history degree,
• 59:30
  you're thinking you're going to go become a museum creator.
• 59:32
  So what's the first step? Do you actually go to work for a
• 59:34
  museum to start or because coaching's coaching's not there
• 59:38
  at all? Yeah.
• 59:39
  Yeah, yeah, I was working in that museum and I was like, this
• 59:41
  is pretty cool. I could do this.
• 59:43
  But as the backup plan was what else do you do with history
• 59:47
  besides if you're not a curator, what you do?
• 59:49
  Well, you got to teach. And so I got secondary education
• 59:52
  as a minor. And so I was the backup plan.
• 59:56
  And one of the things that my wife Rebecca and I kind of hit
• 1:00:01
  it off was we both wanted to experience Alaska sometime in
• 1:00:04
  our life. And so we so I got my degree,
• 1:00:08
  she is an elementary teacher and like, well, let's go teach an
• 1:00:10
  Alaska after college. So so an O 4.
• 1:00:15
  Right before we graduate, we go over to Minneapolis, we do a
• 1:00:18
  Alaska job fair together and we get hired by school district up
• 1:00:22
  in Alaska will be a teacher. She was middle school, I was
• 1:00:24
  high school. So we we do that we graduate in
• 1:00:29
  May, get married in June and move to Alaska.
• 1:00:33
  And so we're, we're we're thrown in and kind of a common thread
• 1:00:39
  in my life is I'm OK doing adventure, sight and scene.
• 1:00:43
  So I went to college, sight and scene.
• 1:00:45
  We went up to Alaska. Sight and scene.
• 1:00:47
  I took a job on that. Now, sight and scene, you know,
• 1:00:49
  so, so, yeah, so. But yeah.
• 1:00:52
  So we were a Pulaski. I spent two years up there
• 1:00:54
  teaching. I was the high school.
• 1:00:58
  I taught four grade levels of math, four grade levels of
• 1:01:01
  writing. So it was, yeah.
• 1:01:03
  Small. Like super small.
• 1:01:06
  Yeah, this right. Here, Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:10
  That's my high school. That's the high school.
• 1:01:13
  Yeah. Holy.
• 1:01:15
  He just showed us. If you're listening to us on the
• 1:01:17
  audio, he just showed us a picture of I I don't think
• 1:01:20
  there's more than 8-9 people there.
• 1:01:21
  Holy. Correct.
• 1:01:22
  Yeah, there, there are 12 kids in the high school.
• 1:01:25
  Yeah, dude. So they're they're all I.
• 1:01:28
  Feel like you love that though. I don't know why.
• 1:01:31
  I just feel like that like kind of that hustle and bustle and
• 1:01:34
  you know, you got a lot of stuff going on.
• 1:01:35
  I feel like that was kind of your jam, your your groove.
• 1:01:38
  There and I'm pretty sure my wife, my wife found this out
• 1:01:41
  pretty early in our relationship.
• 1:01:42
  I'm pretty sure I have ADHD or some form of that because and I
• 1:01:46
  think running was always self medicating for me in in a way I
• 1:01:51
  guess you could say. Did did you keep running for not
• 1:01:55
  for like maybe, but not necessarily for competitive
• 1:01:58
  persons. But did you keep running Like
• 1:01:59
  did you keep like, you know the guy who would like wake up and
• 1:02:02
  go run 5 miles before work? So I I tried.
• 1:02:06
  So I by the time I done my college career, I had been hurt
• 1:02:09
  so much and so disillusioned with running.
• 1:02:11
  I was just like the the most fun for me at that age was I love to
• 1:02:19
  compete and try and win and be the best I could be and when I
• 1:02:24
  was hurt and I couldn't do that, I couldn't train.
• 1:02:27
  I never felt like I ever got everything I got on my selves
• 1:02:30
  and I was pretty. I was pretty much done with
• 1:02:32
  running after college, but I'm retired that.
• 1:02:34
  Makes sense? We got to Alaska, so we what was
• 1:02:39
  it? Just five planes and a boat to
• 1:02:41
  get to our village. Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  So it's a two mile boat ride from one side of the river to
• 1:02:49
  the other. And there's a there, they have a
• 1:02:52
  boardwalk. We lived in the tundra.
• 1:02:54
  And so I started running a little bit and I'd run back and
• 1:02:58
  forth, back and forth for 20-30 minutes, you know, on the
• 1:03:01
  boardwalk. And that that's hard to do.
• 1:03:06
  But the principal said, hey, you ran a college actually out there
• 1:03:12
  running. So you want to you want to start
• 1:03:14
  cross country. All right, OK, sure.
• 1:03:19
  And so, so my cross country practice is the kids would load
• 1:03:22
  up the boat and I taught I, I was in middle school and high
• 1:03:24
  school cross country. So I'd load the boat, drive the
• 1:03:26
  2 miles over to the other side, the sandbar sand pits, we'd run
• 1:03:30
  around there, drive the boat back-to-back.
• 1:03:32
  At the back of the boat. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:35
  So we had. So for our transportation, we
• 1:03:39
  had a school boat to get back and forth.
• 1:03:41
  To not a school bus, a school. Boat So we had a school boat and
• 1:03:45
  then and then we'd fly from there to the competitions and
• 1:03:48
  and what we'd do is we usually leave the day before we'd go to
• 1:03:52
  the school, we'd sleep in the gym floor, the clashing floor
• 1:03:55
  and sleeping bags compete and then fly back the next day.
• 1:03:59
  Think about that next time we want to complain about how hard
• 1:04:02
  it is to get to a track meet or something holy.
• 1:04:05
  So that's what we had during the during the warm weather.
• 1:04:07
  And then once the river froze over, we had well, it's a snow
• 1:04:11
  machine, but there's a snow go with a, with a sled that you'd
• 1:04:15
  put the kids on and you'd drive the snow go across the river.
• 1:04:17
  They'd be bumping down on the ice if it gets in there.
• 1:04:20
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:04:22
  That's crazy. So, yeah, it was a lot of fun.
• 1:04:25
  Yeah. So I coached cross country,
• 1:04:28
  started that out, coached Lego robotic league.
• 1:04:31
  When you're that's cool when you're coaching, you know, a lot
• 1:04:35
  of times, most of the time when we first start coaching, we
• 1:04:39
  coach how we were coached. That's all we know right until
• 1:04:41
  we start getting a coaching education and peer
• 1:04:44
  conversations, things like that. So usually my question is like,
• 1:04:47
  you know, so did you kind of fall back to either how coach
• 1:04:50
  Pierce or college? But you're in such a unique area
• 1:04:56
  like you almost, it feels like you would almost had to have
• 1:04:58
  created it out of thin air anyway.
• 1:05:00
  Like no matter what you did in high school or college, it
• 1:05:03
  doesn't feel like you can just automatically translate that to
• 1:05:06
  this situation. Yeah, no.
• 1:05:08
  So basically, I mean, we had some pretty athletic kids.
• 1:05:11
  I mean, because basketball's huge up in Alaska because it's
• 1:05:14
  an indoor sport and they're really good hoopers and they can
• 1:05:16
  shoot these and they can run back and forth.
• 1:05:19
  So I had some endurance, but we didn't do intervals.
• 1:05:23
  I'm not talking about the athleticism.
• 1:05:25
  We just went. And ran not about just where you
• 1:05:27
  could even practice and stuff. Yeah, there's no, there's no
• 1:05:30
  three mile loops for crown out because there's rivers and plane
• 1:05:32
  rides in between it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's all.
• 1:05:34
  Yeah. All right.
• 1:05:34
  So. Basically, I'm running with the
• 1:05:36
  kids, having fun. That's all I'm doing.
• 1:05:38
  So let's keep moving forward. So I think I heard you say you
• 1:05:40
  spent two years in Alaska. Two years in Alaska.
• 1:05:42
  Why leave and where to? So a couple things happened
• 1:05:48
  pretty big that second year, 2 guys that I ran against in
• 1:05:53
  college qualified for Olympic trials and I'm like, I beat
• 1:05:58
  those guys. I can't let them do that.
• 1:06:01
  So I started getting a little bit of fire in there after my
• 1:06:06
  first year. I was not a very pleasant person
• 1:06:10
  to be around because I quit running.
• 1:06:13
  My wife actually bought a treadmill for me and put it in
• 1:06:16
  the in the. House get.
• 1:06:17
  On there you got to run. So, so I, I was starting to
• 1:06:21
  lodge some miles on the treadmill so that that made my
• 1:06:25
  mood better, obviously. And then one of our Co workers,
• 1:06:29
  they were so, so everything's built up on stilts, kind of like
• 1:06:34
  you'd see on the coast down in Florida or something like that,
• 1:06:36
  But they're built in the tundra. They dig down, pile on so they
• 1:06:39
  can get solid, solid ground because everything shifts and
• 1:06:43
  sinks and tundra so much. And so the school's up on the
• 1:06:47
  silt. And when the snow in Alaska up
• 1:06:50
  there, it's basically in addition being in the middle of
• 1:06:54
  nowhere Kansas where it's super flat and then imagine flatter.
• 1:06:57
  So it is super flat. And so any amounts of snow piles
• 1:07:01
  up around all the buildings. And so basically giant mountains
• 1:07:04
  of snow would collect around the buildings.
• 1:07:07
  And so we would, I would go out and carve stairs in the snow and
• 1:07:12
  stuff like that so we can get to school.
• 1:07:14
  And we live in a, we lived in an apartment that had no running
• 1:07:16
  water, anything like that. So we, we did the real roughneck
• 1:07:19
  and stuff. And, and so, but the other
• 1:07:23
  teachers, they lived inside the complex that had running water,
• 1:07:26
  smaller apartments, but they had running water and we wanted a
• 1:07:28
  bigger place without running water.
• 1:07:30
  So we wanted to have kind of stretch our legs.
• 1:07:31
  I. Guess that's a tough choice,
• 1:07:33
  honestly. Yep.
• 1:07:35
  And so she was, she was walking to school.
• 1:07:39
  She was pregnant at the time and slipped and broke her leg in
• 1:07:42
  three spots. And she was stuck there for a
• 1:07:45
  week because the weather was so bad.
• 1:07:47
  And so we're like, Oh my gosh. And so, so they finally flew her
• 1:07:51
  out successful, you know, good. You know, she was gone for the
• 1:07:55
  rest of years like that. And we're at the point where
• 1:07:57
  like, we want to have children. We don't know if we want to do
• 1:08:00
  that just in case that was a hard decision, Todd.
• 1:08:02
  Love those kids man. Yeah.
• 1:08:04
  Flew down, we resigned and I still teach, keep touch with all
• 1:08:10
  those kids all the time. Oh, that's cool.
• 1:08:13
  So we fly down, quit our job. That was a hard one because I
• 1:08:16
  love those kids so much. Every one of those kids went on
• 1:08:20
  to get a degree of some sort. That's awesome.
• 1:08:24
  That's cool. So we we fly down, we moved in
• 1:08:27
  my brother's basement. He has he he he's renting the
• 1:08:31
  same house I grew up in as a child.
• 1:08:33
  OK, so we, we go, I go back basically into my childhood
• 1:08:36
  bedroom with my wife and, and basically I kissed my wife that
• 1:08:41
  I needed to run again and I want to try and go after going for
• 1:08:45
  trial. And so she agreed and we moved
• 1:08:49
  in my brother's basement back in Billing, Montana.
• 1:08:50
  Wow. He was going to be a full time
• 1:08:53
  runner and she was going to support me and she got to teach
• 1:08:56
  the young. And so I started just basically
• 1:08:59
  running and running by myself. So there's nobody there trained
• 1:09:04
  with kind of what gets me into coaching, honestly.
• 1:09:08
  And so so I have a breakout race.
• 1:09:11
  It took me a while, it took me a couple of years.
• 1:09:13
  I had a breakout race. I finished top ten at California
• 1:09:15
  International Marathon. So when you say she's supporting
• 1:09:18
  you being a runner, so are you literally during that time
• 1:09:20
  you're you're running, you're not working?
• 1:09:22
  Yeah. So so I'm I'm running I'm
• 1:09:24
  working odd jobs here. In the yeah, say my odd jobs,
• 1:09:26
  right. But you're not doing, you're not
• 1:09:27
  teaching. You're not, no.
• 1:09:29
  I'm not teaching. I'm Yeah, is is your.
• 1:09:32
  Is your wife a St. Yes.
• 1:09:34
  Holy, I mean I know so you know my wife.
• 1:09:38
  I love my wife. Very supportive If I told her,
• 1:09:41
  hey, we're I'm going to quit Gil and I want to become a
• 1:09:45
  professional podcaster and it it may take two or three years.
• 1:09:48
  I mean, I think she'd be like, I love you, I love you, but but
• 1:09:51
  no, like what do you like? What do you mean?
• 1:09:53
  You know, I mean, right, Right, dude?
• 1:09:55
  Yeah, yeah. So that's what I say.
• 1:09:57
  You can't do anything in this world without support.
• 1:09:59
  And to have that behind you. Wow.
• 1:10:02
  So, so she was teaching, she got a teaching job, which is really
• 1:10:05
  hard to do in that school district.
• 1:10:06
  So the fact that she got a job is amazing because everyone
• 1:10:09
  wants to go to Billings from all the small areas around, right?
• 1:10:12
  There's not much around it besides small towns.
• 1:10:16
  So I'm running and then my uncle has a long service business, so
• 1:10:19
  then I start working with him. And so basically I'm running
• 1:10:23
  anywhere from 80 to 120 miles a week are.
• 1:10:26
  You again, I know you have you know, you have some background
• 1:10:29
  with Coach Pierce, but that's, you know, that's mile and two
• 1:10:32
  mile stuff and cross country. You have some background from
• 1:10:35
  from being coached in college, but you're doing marathon
• 1:10:38
  training. That's a different are you
• 1:10:41
  reading? Are you, you know, at this time
• 1:10:43
  you can maybe find some things online.
• 1:10:46
  What, what are you like? You can't just be like every day
• 1:10:48
  I'm waking up and running 20 miles, right?
• 1:10:49
  Like you had to start some kind of program.
• 1:10:53
  Yeah, I'm reading. I I'm reading stuff.
• 1:10:56
  Runner's World. Yeah, Runner's World.
• 1:10:57
  Galloway. What?
• 1:10:58
  Yeah. Yeah, Galloway.
• 1:11:00
  When I was in college, I, I wrote a couple of my own
• 1:11:02
  programs based off of, off of some Galloway stuff back in the
• 1:11:06
  day because I felt like I, you know, I need that little extra
• 1:11:09
  which maybe would have caught, which probably helped me get
• 1:11:12
  injured a little bit in college. That's.
• 1:11:13
  Why? I'm glad you said that.
• 1:11:15
  OK, good, good. But but I think my college
• 1:11:17
  experience for me today academically was the best thing
• 1:11:22
  I could have ever done. Yeah, athletically, not so much.
• 1:11:27
  So I love that college to this day because I would have went to
• 1:11:30
  a big school. I guarantee I would have flunked
• 1:11:33
  out right. Right, right.
• 1:11:35
  Yeah, small college situation, something to to be said for.
• 1:11:38
  So after two years, you had a breakthrough.
• 1:11:39
  You said your top ten at the California.
• 1:11:41
  Yeah, I could just make that California National Marathon.
• 1:11:43
  What kind of time? Not very fast, 2/29.
• 1:11:48
  Yeah, OK, I, I, you're saying not very fast in the scope of
• 1:11:51
  like, you know, the world records 2 hours or whatever, but
• 1:11:54
  229 for a by the way, not in all.
• 1:11:56
  I mean, let's, let's be real here.
• 1:11:57
  There's plenty of kids who are all American in whatever
• 1:11:59
  division doesn't matter that can't run 229.
• 1:12:01
  So I mean, you're, you're a little overachieving at this
• 1:12:03
  point in, in relation to your background.
• 1:12:06
  So, so the background to that race is, oh, my goal is always
• 1:12:10
  break 2-3. That's all I cared about.
• 1:12:11
  I want to break 229 is my first marathon.
• 1:12:14
  I ran the marathon 1 twice in college as in the NAIA, we have
• 1:12:17
  that. And so I was like, I just want
• 1:12:20
  to break 2:30. We wake up that morning,
• 1:12:23
  terrible weather, wind, rain, everything like that.
• 1:12:28
  And I woke up that morning and the mindset was I don't care
• 1:12:31
  what the weather is, I'm still running 229.
• 1:12:33
  So I go out at 229 pace, canyons, Ethiopians, they do
• 1:12:37
  their thing, they take off. And I'm about 20 miles in.
• 1:12:40
  All of a sudden I see all these people walking along the road
• 1:12:43
  and it's, you know, some canyons, some of the top guys
• 1:12:46
  that took off way ahead of me. And so I finish, I class my cash
• 1:12:49
  cramp up and they pick me up and they take me into the elite
• 1:12:53
  runner suite and they start giving massages and breakfast
• 1:12:55
  and food. I'm like, you're like you.
• 1:12:57
  Got you. Got the wrong guy I think.
• 1:12:59
  I have big number like something like 7000 something, something
• 1:13:02
  something. I just signed up, but I finished
• 1:13:04
  top ten and I'm like, what's going on?
• 1:13:07
  So yeah, yeah, I just, I was one place away from winning prize
• 1:13:09
  money and I was just like. That kind of wet, that kind of
• 1:13:13
  wets that appetite a little bit and.
• 1:13:14
  So this is this is O 7 and so I hadn't really got into coaching
• 1:13:19
  yet or anything like that. So I had that breakout race and
• 1:13:24
  I got a call from from the College in town, you know, Rocky
• 1:13:27
  Mountain College and small, any high school.
• 1:13:30
  And they're it's actually oldest school in Montana, which is
• 1:13:33
  pretty cool to say. They said, hey, we got your name
• 1:13:38
  from Dave Kopic, who was the coach at MSU Billings, who was
• 1:13:41
  the other other College in town. And then Tony Banovich.
• 1:13:45
  She was a kind of like a local legend runner in town.
• 1:13:49
  He worked at the hospital. And he said, you know, they said
• 1:13:53
  you should be a good one to talk about maybe starting a cross
• 1:13:55
  country program here, like coach, I don't want to coach.
• 1:14:01
  And then I went out and run with those two guys and they're like,
• 1:14:04
  yeah, we really think you should do it.
• 1:14:05
  I think I think you could be a good coach.
• 1:14:08
  And I was like, OK, so I went and did my interview.
• 1:14:11
  Yeah. I said I'll take it and do it.
• 1:14:13
  And and you know, it was a little stipend, $6000 a year.
• 1:14:17
  But you were taking it as one of those, like, odd jobs, meaning
• 1:14:21
  you were still going to be running.
• 1:14:22
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:24
  I, I, I was going to be running. I was going to go to look for
• 1:14:26
  Trump. That was, that was.
• 1:14:27
  That's right. And so, so I took on that that
• 1:14:31
  task and my first year I put fires up around the campus.
• 1:14:36
  We're starting cross country. Come join us that spring.
• 1:14:40
  I think I got hired in April. By the end of April, we had
• 1:14:42
  before the kids went home for the summer, I had like 4 kids
• 1:14:45
  show up. They'll meet the coach type
• 1:14:47
  thing. And I'm like, damn, we're going
• 1:14:48
  to be we're going to be in trouble.
• 1:14:52
  Luckily I had a young lady show up.
• 1:14:54
  That becomes something pretty phenomenal.
• 1:14:57
  And she helped obviously recruiting process go go pretty
• 1:15:00
  well for me down the road, but it was a cross country only
• 1:15:02
  school and that's all they're going to do, you know, $6000 a
• 1:15:05
  year. So so I go through that first
• 1:15:09
  season and this girl Amber, she, she starts off 23 minutes for a
• 1:15:14
  5K, nothing special. She gets down and then she gets
• 1:15:20
  down to breaking 20 within a year.
• 1:15:23
  I go, you might have something. And so, so we talked and said,
• 1:15:27
  Hey, this is what I think you could do to to, you know, to get
• 1:15:29
  better. And she goes on to she wins
• 1:15:33
  conference by a minute run 1738 for a 5K.
• 1:15:36
  And I'm like, this is cool watching that happen.
• 1:15:41
  But, but basically my sole purpose of coaching that first
• 1:15:44
  couple years to to, to recruit people for me to train with, you
• 1:15:50
  know, I mean. You know it's going.
• 1:15:52
  To I'm a athlete. I was going to ask you and I, I
• 1:15:56
  kind of held back because I was like, no, I think that's a, a
• 1:15:59
  generalization. I was going to say, you know, my
• 1:16:00
  fear with marathoners who coach distances, they train them as
• 1:16:04
  marathoners when, you know, the, the longest event we have in
• 1:16:07
  track is a 10K and that is still 100 miles away from being a
• 1:16:10
  marathon. But so I was literally in my
• 1:16:12
  head, I was like, yeah, I shouldn't have.
• 1:16:13
  That's, that's a very distance, anti distance type of question.
• 1:16:17
  And then you go out and say, yeah, I was, I was trying to
• 1:16:19
  recruit training partner. Like I, I wasn't, I wasn't going
• 1:16:23
  to, I didn't have them run 20 miles with me and stuff like
• 1:16:25
  that. But, but I was out there doing
• 1:16:27
  the workouts with them. I mean, I was writing workouts
• 1:16:29
  for them specifically for five KS and stuff like that.
• 1:16:33
  But I was still wanting people to run with, you know, but I
• 1:16:38
  mean, it's a lonely life being a distance runner out there.
• 1:16:42
  And so that's what it was. And then so I think it was and
• 1:16:49
  then all of a sudden my wife's pregnant and I'm like odd job
• 1:16:54
  ain't going to cut anymore. So this number.
• 1:16:56
  Two number two, right? My first child.
• 1:17:00
  I thought, I thought you said in Alaska she was pregnant.
• 1:17:04
  She broke her leg. Oh.
• 1:17:05
  That that was a Co worker. Oh, I'm so sorry.
• 1:17:07
  OK, Yeah. That was a Co worker.
• 1:17:09
  We were deciding to have children, so we decided to move
• 1:17:11
  out. You did say when we were
• 1:17:12
  deciding to have child, I was like, she's already pregnant,
• 1:17:14
  Alan, y'all too late for that? OK, Now I'm with you.
• 1:17:15
  OK. OK.
• 1:17:16
  I'm sorry. Sorry.
• 1:17:17
  Yeah, so, so we moved out to Billings.
• 1:17:19
  And now she's pregnant. Things get real.
• 1:17:21
  Things get real. And so they're like, OK, now how
• 1:17:23
  am I going to make things meet, You know, 6000 long 6. 1000
• 1:17:27
  Don't buy diapers. 6000 ain't going to cut it anymore.
• 1:17:29
  So so I luckily there was a job opening admissions department,
• 1:17:34
  admissions counselor for the the PA program.
• 1:17:36
  So I took on that job. It was an interesting
• 1:17:42
  experience, suit and tie, basically job every day.
• 1:17:47
  Twenty 2627 years old interim people that are 34 years old
• 1:17:53
  made to come to PA and I'm their admissions counselor, you know,
• 1:17:56
  and, and I had to revamp the whole admissions process and it
• 1:17:59
  was a lot of work. But at that point I was like,
• 1:18:05
  OK, how do I get into coaching more and less of the guidance
• 1:18:09
  counselor because they were, they were helping me.
• 1:18:10
  And so I made this big proposal submitted, you know, I can get
• 1:18:14
  the, I thought I'd get 15 guys and I'd get 3030 athletes for
• 1:18:18
  cross country and distance track.
• 1:18:20
  As long as we can add track to the thing, I can attract those
• 1:18:23
  kids because I'm not going to attract the kids.
• 1:18:25
  And so I went with the vice president, made the proposal,
• 1:18:29
  athletic director showed I, I budget line everything like this
• 1:18:32
  is how we can do it. So we can make it because I
• 1:18:35
  mean, small liberal arts schools are very driven by how many, if
• 1:18:40
  you get it and nobody's getting basically full rides at those
• 1:18:44
  places. And, and so, so they agreed to
• 1:18:47
  it. And so then I was able to
• 1:18:49
  actually recruit some pretty good kids pretty quick.
• 1:18:51
  And so, so I, I brought 42 in that next year.
• 1:18:55
  I had 42 kids across country the next year.
• 1:18:59
  And then we started moving up the ranks in conference.
• 1:19:03
  And then by the time we were, by the time before I left, there we
• 1:19:06
  were. We were top 25 in both NAI for
• 1:19:08
  many women. Dude.
• 1:19:11
  Cool. So how many years there at Rocky
• 1:19:13
  Mountain? Oh, how many years would that
• 1:19:15
  be? I'd say 6-7 years.
• 1:19:22
  So pretty quick turn around, I mean, literally from, you know,
• 1:19:24
  I don't want to say nothing, that's something, but very, very
• 1:19:26
  small to a, you know, top 25. Any coaching education you're
• 1:19:31
  doing besides so to me, I, I take coaching education two
• 1:19:34
  ways. There's formal and informal.
• 1:19:35
  Formal is our US ATF level ones, USTF, CCA, Altus, things like
• 1:19:39
  that. Very important informal is I'm
• 1:19:42
  going to the library, reading a book, or I'm calling a peer.
• 1:19:44
  You don't even really have any peers necessarily.
• 1:19:48
  Like I can't see who you would call.
• 1:19:50
  Yeah, yeah. I really didn't have peers.
• 1:19:52
  I talked to Dave, the other coach in town a little bit about
• 1:19:55
  it. But but yeah, I see.
• 1:19:58
  I mean they were a cross country only team and then so.
• 1:20:02
  And you had a track, right? And I started having a tracking,
• 1:20:04
  we had no facilities. So don't get me wrong, we had no
• 1:20:06
  facilities, nothing there for it.
• 1:20:08
  But we started adding it. Yeah, I was reading a lot, so I
• 1:20:15
  I wasn't too involved into it. The The biggest book that I
• 1:20:19
  based my first couple years of training was Mark Wetmore's
• 1:20:24
  training running a couple of. Sure.
• 1:20:26
  Yeah, basically. What I did, I found that book.
• 1:20:28
  I wrote down their training program.
• 1:20:30
  I said this is what we're. Doing Yeah, I'm not a distance
• 1:20:32
  guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I read that
• 1:20:35
  book and it's fascinating. I can't Chris Lear is that the
• 1:20:38
  the author phenomenal, you know, just did a phenomenal job of
• 1:20:42
  telling a story. And then my first year coaching
• 1:20:45
  junior college, I go to our our summer meetings or whatever and
• 1:20:48
  I meet this guy named Jay Johnson from I think Pratt
• 1:20:51
  Community College. And I was like Jay Johnson and
• 1:20:54
  you know, we maybe had to introduce ourselves and he said
• 1:20:55
  he went to Colorado. Like, dude, were you in the
• 1:20:57
  book? I was like, Oh my God.
• 1:20:58
  Like I, I, I felt like I was meeting a rock star, but I was
• 1:21:01
  like, you were in the book and I was like, I'm not even a
• 1:21:03
  distance guy. And I was geeking out for Jay
• 1:21:05
  Johnson, who has gone on to become an amazing coach and
• 1:21:08
  advisor and mentor for coaches. So, so that book, I love that.
• 1:21:11
  I mean, that's a great book. I that that is a form of
• 1:21:14
  coaching education. So I love that.
• 1:21:16
  All right, so six to seven years.
• 1:21:20
  So, but again, I keep I keep kind of bringing this to your
• 1:21:24
  story here, Alan. I'm not I know you're coaching
• 1:21:26
  and you're doing a phenomenal job and and you're doing very
• 1:21:29
  I'm a coach as a career type, things like adding track and
• 1:21:32
  stuff like that, but I'm not hearing.
• 1:21:35
  That's not yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm not hearing that
• 1:21:37
  guy. I am a track coach at this
• 1:21:38
  point. There's still a lot of things
• 1:21:39
  you could have gone on and done and I wouldn't have been
• 1:21:41
  surprised at this point. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:21:43
  So, So what was it year? I don't know.
• 1:21:48
  So. So I was still training, trying
• 1:21:49
  to become a marathoner, trying to try to make that big.
• 1:21:51
  Breakout. That's right.
• 1:21:52
  That's. Right.
• 1:21:53
  And, and so I'm still training running marathons.
• 1:21:56
  You know, I run Chicago a couple times in there.
• 1:21:59
  I ran, I ran the Miami, you know, as an elite runner.
• 1:22:02
  That was pretty cool. Did you experience that?
• 1:22:05
  But I, I was never putting together a really quality
• 1:22:07
  marathon time. And then I got into Boston and
• 1:22:15
  that was pretty cool. Yeah, hit us 100th overall and a
• 1:22:18
  stress fracture in my foot. So, so it kind of break out but
• 1:22:24
  but we experienced the Boston Bones.
• 1:22:26
  You were there. Oh, so, so I finished.
• 1:22:30
  I mean I was done. I ran 2 hours and 29 or two
• 1:22:32
  hours 30 something. Like that?
• 1:22:33
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I ran all the time, I can't
• 1:22:35
  even break past that. So we were done in plenty of
• 1:22:38
  time. And so my son's born at this
• 1:22:40
  time and we're in The Cheesecake Factory eating lunch and
• 1:22:44
  everything like that. We had we had been done and also
• 1:22:47
  we're we're checking out and they're closing.
• 1:22:49
  Were they there wife and yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:51
  Yeah, yeah, we're going to make a foam family trip out of it,
• 1:22:54
  but we actually reserved the whole week to be there.
• 1:22:58
  And so we were leaving The Cheesecake Factory, and then
• 1:23:02
  they're blocking. We're going to walk over to
• 1:23:04
  Barnes and Noble and they're locking it.
• 1:23:05
  You got a gag because there's been bombs.
• 1:23:06
  And we're like, what bombs? Mean.
• 1:23:08
  Yeah, So they push us out and we park.
• 1:23:10
  There's a parking garage underneath the complex there and
• 1:23:13
  we get pushed out the streets and then there's ambulances
• 1:23:16
  lined up, people crying. It was crazy.
• 1:23:20
  And we can't get our car, no public transportation, nothing.
• 1:23:24
  And so we're we're just huddled up.
• 1:23:26
  I got my son holding my arm. He's he's a little tight.
• 1:23:30
  And so he's sitting in my arms. He's passed out sleeping and
• 1:23:33
  we're just kind of sitting, I'm standing by this garbage can.
• 1:23:36
  And then the police comes like you got to wait for garbage
• 1:23:38
  hands and bombs in part and garbage hands.
• 1:23:42
  So we're like, holy crap. And so we're we get up and we
• 1:23:44
  just start walking. We're like, we got to get away
• 1:23:46
  from this. We can experience this.
• 1:23:49
  And so if you actually, it's kind of crazy, if you go watch
• 1:23:52
  the Boston filming on Netflix, you can see me running.
• 1:23:56
  I'm in a light green shirt and then down the home.
• 1:23:59
  No way I was going to ask you if you saw it and and even if you
• 1:24:02
  could because you experienced it, so you know all rights to
• 1:24:05
  you can't relive it. But that was I tell people that
• 1:24:08
  was an amazingly in my opinion. I love documentaries, an
• 1:24:11
  amazingly well done documentary. Like I felt, I felt like, yeah,
• 1:24:16
  I won't go to the point of saying I felt like I was there,
• 1:24:18
  but boy, I felt like I understood everything that was
• 1:24:21
  going on leading up to during. I mean, it just they did a
• 1:24:23
  phenomenal job. Yeah.
• 1:24:25
  So you're in that. You're the lime green shirt.
• 1:24:27
  Lime green shirt, it's like 6781012, something like that.
• 1:24:31
  And for part of the movie you see a little lime green come in
• 1:24:33
  here. I'll kind of hobble in because
• 1:24:35
  my foot hurts so bad, but you'll see a lime green shirt go by if
• 1:24:39
  you if you know what I am, what I look.
• 1:24:42
  Like. But yeah, so we're just walking
• 1:24:45
  for miles and miles, miles. And our rental car is locked up.
• 1:24:48
  And so we actually just finally walked for it's like 2 hours.
• 1:24:52
  We just kept walking, trying to get away.
• 1:24:55
  And we finally run into, I mean, because we couldn't, the grid's
• 1:24:59
  block down, we couldn't make cell phone calls, nothing.
• 1:25:03
  And you know, we're trying to call our family saying we're OK,
• 1:25:05
  we can't get out. And strangely enough, the
• 1:25:09
  newspaper town for the news crew from Billings that know who I am
• 1:25:14
  and follow our cross country program, they were able to get
• 1:25:16
  through on my cell phone. And so I was my only contact
• 1:25:20
  with the outside world. So I, it's like, yeah, I just
• 1:25:23
  tell my family we're fine. Tell my wife's family we're
• 1:25:25
  fine. Just let them know.
• 1:25:26
  And so, you know, they were able to put a blast up on the TV and
• 1:25:29
  stuff like that, let them know we were safe.
• 1:25:30
  So. That's crazy because no one can
• 1:25:32
  make calls. No, so so we get a rental car
• 1:25:36
  and we started by the start. We made our hotel by the start
• 1:25:39
  line, so we don't want to have to make the big trip in the
• 1:25:41
  morning. So we drove to our hotel and
• 1:25:43
  we're sitting like, what do we do?
• 1:25:45
  I mean, we're supposed to go do the Boston museums.
• 1:25:48
  We're supposed to do a little duck Rock, You know, the all,
• 1:25:52
  all the marine stuff. And like, what do we do?
• 1:25:54
  We're like, yeah, so, so like, well, we'll just go to Rhode
• 1:25:56
  Island. We'll we'll get away.
• 1:25:58
  We'll just have a little fun, you know, because my son, I
• 1:26:01
  don't know how old he is at this time, 456 maybe.
• 1:26:04
  And so. So all right, we'll go down
• 1:26:06
  there. So we spend a couple days down
• 1:26:07
  there, do a little whale watching tour and we're driving
• 1:26:10
  back and we're supposed to take the exit to get to our hotel
• 1:26:14
  back in Boston because things kind of quieted.
• 1:26:16
  Been a couple days. Things are quieted down and it's
• 1:26:21
  closed off and they're like, you can't go this way.
• 1:26:23
  You can't go to find out. That's where the manhunt
• 1:26:26
  happened, where they're shooting the boat.
• 1:26:27
  We're supposed to stay in basically that same
• 1:26:29
  neighborhood. So.
• 1:26:30
  So then we just kept going and just walked into the hotel and
• 1:26:34
  got a hotel. And so yeah, it was crazy
• 1:26:36
  experience to. Be part of That's crazy.
• 1:26:39
  Dude, just to think that we're part of history, like that's.
• 1:26:42
  Yeah, sadly that's a sad part of history to be involved in.
• 1:26:46
  To this day my wife can't like she's never watched a
• 1:26:48
  documentary. She.
• 1:26:50
  Yeah, that's was saying it was going to ask and I was like, and
• 1:26:51
  I completely understand if you can't watch it for crying, well.
• 1:26:54
  She can't watch it but. I get it.
• 1:26:57
  I get it. Especially with the kid there.
• 1:26:59
  I mean, you just, you know, and you know, you're a father and
• 1:27:03
  you love your child. In my experience, I got two
• 1:27:06
  kids. No one loves their children more
• 1:27:07
  than moms. Even the the greatest loving
• 1:27:10
  dad, they're still mom. So for her, you know, she
• 1:27:14
  starts, you know, she's got her baby boy there and it's just
• 1:27:16
  like all the things that could have gone wrong.
• 1:27:18
  We could have been here, we could have been there.
• 1:27:20
  So I, I, I get it from her perspective.
• 1:27:23
  All right, let's forsake of time.
• 1:27:24
  Let's move forward just a little bit here.
• 1:27:26
  Let's keep moving forward. So 6-7 years at Rocky Mountain,
• 1:27:30
  qualify for Boston and you know the worst year to qualify.
• 1:27:34
  How do we move on? Why do we move on?
• 1:27:37
  Yeah. So, so that was that was an eye
• 1:27:40
  opener for me. It was like we life to be really
• 1:27:42
  short, you know? Yeah.
• 1:27:43
  Yeah, yeah. I was like.
• 1:27:45
  I'm I, I, I told my wife said we're we're going to do I'm
• 1:27:48
  going to do one more training cycle.
• 1:27:50
  I'm going to buy in fully to it. I'm still coaching at a time,
• 1:27:55
  but I actually hired a coach. Alan Culpepper was my coach,
• 1:27:58
  Which? I know.
• 1:28:01
  Yeah, and it's kind of weird that summer we have so-called
• 1:28:05
  Big Sky State Games in Montana. It's kind of like a mini
• 1:28:07
  Olympics for Montana athletes. And the guest speaker that year
• 1:28:11
  was Med Koflesky. And so I was a local runner, so
• 1:28:15
  I got to go run with him for a few times.
• 1:28:17
  And you know, you know, they were they were friends.
• 1:28:19
  So it was pretty cool. That's cool.
• 1:28:21
  But I was doing, I was bought in for training.
• 1:28:24
  Well, I actually ran. I was running the best I'd ever
• 1:28:26
  run. And then I'm going to go back to
• 1:28:28
  CIN, get my revenge. My goal is to qualify for
• 1:28:30
  Olympic trials. Ended up getting bronchitis the
• 1:28:33
  week of and did not go well. And so, and I told my wife, I
• 1:28:37
  said I was 32 years old at this time.
• 1:28:39
  And I'm like, and I'm like, this is this is going to be it.
• 1:28:41
  OK. And then we're going to figure
• 1:28:43
  out what we're going to do. And so, so it didn't go well.
• 1:28:47
  And and I was like, I I've got to, I've got to pick something.
• 1:28:52
  And I think I'm meant to coach. So, so where now?
• 1:28:56
  This is the first time I'm hearing this and I'm feeling
• 1:28:59
  this. What was the?
• 1:29:01
  Why the switch here? Why the like OK, this is it.
• 1:29:04
  This is where This is why I'm here.
• 1:29:06
  Yeah, it it became even though I was still trying to become an
• 1:29:10
  athlete, it was becoming more and more fun to see my athletes
• 1:29:15
  get better than me, to get better.
• 1:29:19
  I was getting more. It was I'd get more joy in
• 1:29:22
  having them and watching them win races than me win a race.
• 1:29:26
  That was so cool to be a part of it.
• 1:29:28
  And and and some of these like, like my girls cross country
• 1:29:31
  team, one year we had 10 girls under 19 and none of those girls
• 1:29:37
  were under 20 in high school. And it was just like, this is so
• 1:29:40
  cool. You know, it, it was just a lot
• 1:29:43
  of fun. You know, I had a kid, you know,
• 1:29:45
  he was a he was a 429 mile in high school and four O 6 indoor
• 1:29:49
  mile. I'm like, it was cool.
• 1:29:52
  You know, it became more and more fun to put my energy into
• 1:29:54
  them than in the ME and it I became less and less selfish, I
• 1:29:58
  guess. You can say, hey, and that's
• 1:30:00
  exactly right. I was actually going to wait
• 1:30:01
  till the very end to bring that up.
• 1:30:03
  We brought this topic up several times in the podcast where when
• 1:30:07
  you're an athlete, it's a very selfish pursuit and that's not a
• 1:30:10
  bad thing. You're trying to take everything
• 1:30:12
  coach comes says to you, everything you do, eating,
• 1:30:16
  nutrition, things like that. It's all about how can I make
• 1:30:17
  myself a better marathoner in this, when you become a coach,
• 1:30:21
  everything that you're learning and things like that, it's
• 1:30:23
  you're digesting and how do I push out to my athletes?
• 1:30:26
  And so it's a it's AI have no judgement towards athletes who
• 1:30:29
  are selfish because you have to be, especially as you continue
• 1:30:33
  to climb up and become more and more elite, Olympic level,
• 1:30:35
  professional level, etcetera. And for coaches, it's like, Oh,
• 1:30:38
  you know, you're always trying to learn to how do I now talk to
• 1:30:41
  my kids better and make them better?
• 1:30:42
  So you're, you've nailed it. You were able to have that
• 1:30:45
  awareness around that. That's right.
• 1:30:47
  And so around that time, once I realized that is going to be a
• 1:30:51
  coach, that's where the education comes in.
• 1:30:54
  USA level 1, USA level 2 started to get into coaches
• 1:31:00
  certifications. You know, I was starting to go
• 1:31:02
  to coaching clinics and camps and, and doing all that and, and
• 1:31:07
  it's all endurance distance based.
• 1:31:10
  You know, I'm not coaching anything else, which at that
• 1:31:14
  same time, we we need a new athletic director on our campus
• 1:31:19
  in the same moment. And so we're bringing athletic
• 1:31:23
  directors from across the country in to interview for the
• 1:31:24
  job. And I was in charge of taking
• 1:31:28
  him out to dinner, you know, and having, you know, kind of
• 1:31:30
  welcomed me in and discussions. And, you know, I met a couple of
• 1:31:32
  them and one of the guys was from a school called Culver
• 1:31:37
  Stockton College. He ended up not getting the job
• 1:31:40
  there and then his cross country coach quit And this one, I
• 1:31:46
  guess, but O 7, I think no, I started in O seven.
• 1:31:50
  I was in O20141314. He he called me up out of the
• 1:31:57
  blue and said, hey, this is you know, from her and you know, but
• 1:32:01
  I really enjoyed you. I know I didn't get the job, but
• 1:32:04
  my coach just quit. Would you be willing to move out
• 1:32:06
  here? Wow.
• 1:32:09
  Isn't that interesting? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:32:13
  You just never know who you're going to meet and connect.
• 1:32:14
  You're going to. So so he calls me up and I'm
• 1:32:18
  like, I don't know, my whole family's in Billings.
• 1:32:21
  We need a life. You know, I've got a good thing
• 1:32:23
  going. I mean, we're we're top 25 in
• 1:32:25
  the country, all Americans, you know, 4 by eights killing it.
• 1:32:30
  You know, I've got I've got these studs that they're
• 1:32:32
  freshman soccer. They're all running 155 or
• 1:32:34
  fashion 800. And I'm like, I'm like, man, I
• 1:32:37
  don't know if I can get that up. So I said, let me think about it
• 1:32:41
  for a couple days. And so then I go to my kind of
• 1:32:48
  the new athletic career that we hired.
• 1:32:50
  That was not because this guy didn't get the job.
• 1:32:53
  And I said, hey, you know, I've, I've been offered an opportunity
• 1:32:58
  and was wondering, you know, if you guys be able to step up the
• 1:33:00
  plate and actually make it so I can stay because financially you
• 1:33:03
  need to support family. Absolutely.
• 1:33:06
  So, so, yeah, so, so they said they, they said they couldn't do
• 1:33:10
  anything and they, they said they just weren't in place.
• 1:33:12
  And I said, well, what if we add full track and field?
• 1:33:14
  You know, I get, I came up with the whole budget and said, hey,
• 1:33:17
  I can bring this many kids in, we can do this.
• 1:33:20
  And like we're, we're just not. And basically what he said to me
• 1:33:23
  is I'll never be, he said. We're never going to add track
• 1:33:25
  and field here like the full-fledged track and.
• 1:33:28
  Field right? Wow.
• 1:33:29
  And I was like. Well, that's good to know.
• 1:33:31
  That's good to know. It's better than the alternative
• 1:33:33
  saying, yeah, we might do this, Alan, stay.
• 1:33:34
  And it never happens, you know? Yeah, and I mean, he was honest,
• 1:33:38
  you know, and I said OK. And so then I called back to FLX
• 1:33:44
  director and and I said, you know, I'll apply.
• 1:33:47
  I'll be interested. I want to see it, you know, I
• 1:33:49
  want to see when I get myself into you because, you know, I I
• 1:33:52
  love Bill and Fontana. I still do.
• 1:33:53
  My whole family's still there. And so they find me out.
• 1:33:57
  I do a thing. They have a track facility, but
• 1:33:59
  you know, they, they have some things going for him.
• 1:34:02
  Not much for athletes that it was a, it was a track and field
• 1:34:07
  team, men and women combined of like 18.
• 1:34:10
  And so it wasn't much, but he knew I I could recruit if I knew
• 1:34:13
  recruit 40 something for cross country.
• 1:34:15
  That yeah, right. I.
• 1:34:16
  Still do something track and so so I said OK and then he
• 1:34:22
  actually so I get to the point interview and by the time I get
• 1:34:26
  home he's no longer the athletic director there and I start
• 1:34:29
  getting phone calls from the president of the college instead
• 1:34:31
  of him because he's no longer there and I'm like this is kind
• 1:34:36
  of scary you. Know.
• 1:34:38
  This, this is kind of scary. And so, so I put like, well,
• 1:34:42
  what would it take for you to be our coach here?
• 1:34:43
  And I'm dealing with the president now.
• 1:34:45
  And so I'm like, I put out a number I thought was really
• 1:34:47
  high. Well, today I realized it wasn't
• 1:34:49
  really high, but from the other side, it was really high.
• 1:34:51
  And so I put out a number for there and she goes a little bit
• 1:34:54
  more if you wanted to offer. I'm like, OK, I understand.
• 1:34:57
  And she calls me back two hours later and says, we'll pay you
• 1:35:00
  that. Wow.
• 1:35:02
  So I go to my wife and I'm like, they're actually going to pay me
• 1:35:06
  this much to go coach. And and so.
• 1:35:09
  So yeah. And it was a tough time because
• 1:35:11
  at that time I was the middle of cross country season.
• 1:35:14
  And so so I said, I'm not going to leave these kids, at least in
• 1:35:17
  cross country. I'll come out, you know, in
• 1:35:19
  December. So, so I had to tell my kids
• 1:35:22
  that I had to leave, leave that behind.
• 1:35:24
  And then I go over to culvert and the, the, the deal I made
• 1:35:30
  with the athletic director, which obviously didn't get
• 1:35:32
  conveyed up the chain with the, with the new athletic director
• 1:35:35
  was once I get the 50 athletes, you need to help me, you know,
• 1:35:40
  get some full time assistant coaches.
• 1:35:42
  Absolutely. You can't.
• 1:35:44
  And that was a deal I made. It wasn't written down.
• 1:35:46
  It was just kind of a verbal agreement.
• 1:35:47
  Yeah, Yeah, we're, we're going to do that for you.
• 1:35:49
  And also. All right, cool.
• 1:35:51
  And so the new athletic director did not have that same vision.
• 1:35:55
  And so I was there for four years.
• 1:35:59
  We had we had an athlete go to national every year.
• 1:36:01
  I was there in track and field which and they they had one
• 1:36:05
  athlete before that ever go to national.
• 1:36:06
  Wow. We had the 1st all American
• 1:36:09
  female sprinter so I'm coaching sprints it now too.
• 1:36:12
  I'm. Coaching.
• 1:36:13
  I'm coaching. Vault.
• 1:36:14
  I'm coaching all these other things.
• 1:36:16
  I had a national qualifier, pole vaulter, 2 high jumpers.
• 1:36:20
  You know, I had an all American high jumper and it was just
• 1:36:22
  crazy. And I'm like, I really don't
• 1:36:24
  know what I'm doing. Yeah.
• 1:36:27
  But. I.
• 1:36:29
  Much effort into these kids as I can and learning as much as I
• 1:36:32
  can. So this is where a lot of the
• 1:36:33
  education talk earlier. So this is where I go.
• 1:36:35
  USATFCCCAI started getting strength and strength and
• 1:36:40
  concert strength and conditioning certified.
• 1:36:43
  You know, doing all these other certifications, meeting coaches,
• 1:36:46
  talking to coaches, and then the, one of the events that I've
• 1:36:51
  become pretty passionate about when I was there was pole Bolt
• 1:36:53
  because I had some pretty good pole bolters and I didn't know
• 1:36:57
  what I was doing to pole Bolt. And so I, I start making trips
• 1:37:01
  down to St. Louis, MO to the pole bolt club,
• 1:37:04
  taking my wife, my son, my athletes were going to pole bolt
• 1:37:07
  a couple times. You know, every couple weeks
• 1:37:08
  pole Bolt and I kind of get wrapped up to the pole bolt.
• 1:37:11
  I had a kid, you know, he went from a nine foot pole vaulter to
• 1:37:15
  a 16 foot pole bolter in a year. Wow.
• 1:37:18
  Cool and, you know, and. That's crazy.
• 1:37:20
  Yeah, He's not a super pole, Walter.
• 1:37:22
  He was 5, three, you know, you know, you think, you know, if
• 1:37:26
  you're going to be a big pole, Walter, you got to be a big kid.
• 1:37:28
  Yeah, but he was quick. Wow.
• 1:37:31
  He he had a problem where he would get injured pretty easy.
• 1:37:36
  Yeah. And oddly enough, Pole he didn't
• 1:37:38
  get injured because there's only 30 meters.
• 1:37:41
  So it's yeah, that's good point. Let's double click into that
• 1:37:46
  because because this is where you meet a mutual friend of
• 1:37:49
  ours, Chris Zeller of PV Saint Louis.
• 1:37:52
  And it's interesting, you know, during our pre pre recording
• 1:37:57
  session, you know, we talked about and I think curiosity is a
• 1:37:59
  superpower and you had the curiosity of you.
• 1:38:01
  You could have easily and no one would have said anything against
• 1:38:05
  you if you just said, you know, we're not doing pole vault
• 1:38:06
  because I don't know pole vaulting guys, I barely know
• 1:38:08
  high jumping. I'm hanging on over there guys,
• 1:38:10
  what in the world am I going to do with pole vaulting?
• 1:38:12
  But you took it upon yourself like, OK, I need to find I got
• 1:38:15
  to learn more. I got to learn more.
• 1:38:16
  And you mentioned where you were.
• 1:38:17
  You're like, you don't find pole vault coaches just hanging off
• 1:38:19
  trees. I wasn't going to be able to
• 1:38:21
  hire a pole vault coach. And so you started looking
• 1:38:24
  around and you find Chris down at pole vault Saint Louis.
• 1:38:26
  And I think this is a real interesting factoid or not
• 1:38:32
  statistic, but something about our sport about like the the
• 1:38:34
  importance of these pole vault clubs that have sprung up around
• 1:38:36
  the country. You, you get in contact with
• 1:38:39
  Chris and Chris, you know, pole vault guys in general, but Chris
• 1:38:41
  as well, very much our giver. You know, they're like, you want
• 1:38:44
  to learn about pole vault. Well, I love to teach people
• 1:38:46
  pole vault. Come on down.
• 1:38:47
  And so you guys strike up a relationship.
• 1:38:49
  And this is where you learn to vault.
• 1:38:50
  You personally learned about you get through some some sessions
• 1:38:53
  that kind of create that sensation and learn how to coach
• 1:38:55
  it. Yeah, yeah, so, so and I, I
• 1:38:57
  still pole today, which is kind of funny.
• 1:39:00
  So, so I, I, I broke a 12 foot barrier in my life, which is
• 1:39:04
  kind of cool to say. I'm actually nursing a hamstring
• 1:39:08
  injury from pole vaulting now. Now you're 45 thanks to some
• 1:39:10
  pole long. That sounds like a pole vaulter
• 1:39:13
  right there, buddy. Oh my gosh, if you start
• 1:39:15
  complaining about your back yet, that's the other great pole.
• 1:39:17
  Vaulter, I actually do have permanent back issues, but
• 1:39:20
  that's a separate issue from a torn quad.
• 1:39:23
  So we'll just yeah, that that's all happened as you get past 40
• 1:39:28
  things, that's true. That's true.
• 1:39:31
  Yeah, so Chris is awesome. Obviously some skinny distance
• 1:39:36
  runner trying to learn PO Bolt. I I'm sure he thought it was
• 1:39:41
  kind of a joke. Obviously.
• 1:39:44
  But yeah, I, I did, I, I, I will dive all the way into something
• 1:39:48
  when I get curious about something.
• 1:39:51
  And it's, it's all the events and, and all the athletes too.
• 1:39:54
  So, but when I was down there, my first practice start at 6:00
• 1:39:58
  AM and, and I didn't have one. I try not to have one big team
• 1:40:02
  practice and just kids sit, send kids out to themselves.
• 1:40:06
  During the track season I would do that a little bit more, but
• 1:40:08
  in the fall and the winter and the conditioning, all that
• 1:40:10
  stuff, I wanted to really work with the kids.
• 1:40:12
  And so I, I set myself up with two hour blocks all day long.
• 1:40:16
  So I'd start at six and I'd finish my last session about
• 1:40:18
  9/30, 10:00 at night. So I was doing all the event
• 1:40:22
  groups, the pros and the jumps and the javelin.
• 1:40:26
  You know, I had a kid that was there, helped him break the
• 1:40:28
  school record my first year. He was a he had a little Oscar,
• 1:40:31
  he's a nursing student. And so when I first moved out to
• 1:40:35
  Missouri, that first four or five months I was there for the
• 1:40:38
  track season, no family. They stayed in Billings.
• 1:40:41
  My son was in school at the time.
• 1:40:42
  I want to make sure he didn't pull them out because I didn't.
• 1:40:44
  I hate pulling people out midway through years, obviously.
• 1:40:48
  And so it was kind of a blessing for me in disguise that I could
• 1:40:52
  put almost 20 hour days, it felt like just into learning
• 1:40:57
  everything because I had no clue about anything but distance
• 1:40:59
  running, right. And so I am, I'm learning how to
• 1:41:03
  do blocks for the first time. I'm.
• 1:41:04
  Yeah, I didn't know what how to even use a set of blocks, you
• 1:41:07
  know, learning hurdles, learning, you know, povo
• 1:41:12
  learning wait through learning javelin.
• 1:41:14
  So, yeah, so I was. And so Eric would come in and my
• 1:41:18
  javelin kid, and he would get down to his nursing school about
• 1:41:20
  six, 7:00 at night, and he would come in and see me because my
• 1:41:24
  temporary office was actually in the lower part of the dorm.
• 1:41:27
  And so when he'd come in, he'd see the lights still on and he'd
• 1:41:29
  come in and we'd hang out and look at Java videos together and
• 1:41:32
  all sorts. So.
• 1:41:34
  Yeah, so. Yeah, so.
• 1:41:36
  Well, yeah, I love the, you know, you brought up something I
• 1:41:41
  didn't even think about when you're talking about, you know,
• 1:41:44
  the skinny distance runner walks into, you know, PV Saint Louis.
• 1:41:46
  And it's like, yeah, I could just see Chris like, you know, I
• 1:41:49
  know his enthusiasm for pole vaulting and teaching people
• 1:41:51
  pole vaulting, but then seeing like you coming in and going,
• 1:41:55
  all right, maybe this, maybe not this one.
• 1:41:57
  Like, what is he doing? Go, you're a marathoner.
• 1:41:59
  Get out of here. You know, I can see Chris, you
• 1:42:01
  know, taking on that challenge. And obviously it worked out
• 1:42:04
  really well. So shout out to Chris, PV Saint
• 1:42:06
  Louis, shout out to a lot of our track or our pro ball clubs,
• 1:42:09
  specifically around the country. It's it's quite amazing.
• 1:42:11
  It's a it's it's one of the few events in track and field that
• 1:42:14
  we very easily call a sport. We say the sport pole vaulting
• 1:42:18
  and it's very interesting. We don't I don't know that we
• 1:42:20
  I've heard that language around like, you know, the sport of
• 1:42:22
  shot putting or the sport of 5K and you know, it's, but we call
• 1:42:26
  pole vaulting a sport and I I think that's pretty, pretty
• 1:42:29
  special and guys like Chris are helping that positive culture
• 1:42:32
  there. All right, so Culver stock
• 1:42:34
  thinks we're getting closer on our time here.
• 1:42:36
  No, no, no, no, no, this is no apology.
• 1:42:39
  This has been a fascinating. This is great.
• 1:42:41
  You're you're getting close to being able to have someone write
• 1:42:45
  a book or a short story at this point of the most interesting
• 1:42:48
  man in track and field. I mean, you're Alaska for crying
• 1:42:50
  out loud. I don't want, you know, I don't
• 1:42:53
  want to, I don't want to say a failed distance runner in
• 1:42:57
  college, but not a overly successful distance runner
• 1:43:01
  because you may it's national. So I mean, so again, I mean,
• 1:43:03
  let's be real here. Those are that's hard as it is.
• 1:43:07
  But it wasn't like you were like a 5K all American who ends up
• 1:43:09
  becoming a marathoner. And that's just that's amazing
• 1:43:11
  to me. It's all all over Boston.
• 1:43:13
  And of course, the, you know, the, the specific Boston this
• 1:43:16
  is, it's really interesting how many years at Culver.
• 1:43:19
  Four years. You build an actual part.
• 1:43:22
  Did they ever get you assistant coaches?
• 1:43:24
  No, and that's one of the that's one of the reasons I left
• 1:43:27
  because my last year I had 85 athletes and no help.
• 1:43:32
  Dude, that's yeah, that that is I think it's this on a other
• 1:43:37
  podcast here recently and I, you know, I just got back from
• 1:43:41
  convention of just athletic college athletic directors.
• 1:43:43
  And so really got to, you know, deep dive.
• 1:43:45
  There's presenters and I went to a lot of presentations and kind
• 1:43:47
  of learned an athletic directors more about an athletic
• 1:43:50
  director's role. And it's unbelievable.
• 1:43:51
  This, this one guy, Mike Herman from University of Illinois
• 1:43:55
  Springfield, actually athletic director there, amazing guy.
• 1:43:58
  I love him. He did a presentation on
• 1:43:59
  community involvement, community engagement with his coaches and,
• 1:44:03
  and administration and, and just, I mean, just talks about
• 1:44:05
  all the things, but I mean, there's a million things.
• 1:44:07
  And I realize, oh gosh, he just described this much of the
• 1:44:11
  entire job. Like he, I mean, what he just
• 1:44:13
  described was a full time job. Oh, and he's also got to worry
• 1:44:16
  about retention of coaches and fundraising and, you know,
• 1:44:19
  schedulings and all these other kind of things.
• 1:44:22
  And so I got some more empathy towards our, our, our athletic
• 1:44:25
  directors in our administration. However, I think it is, you
• 1:44:30
  know, criminals as a strong word, but I'm going to use that
• 1:44:33
  in this area here when our schools or institutions bring on
• 1:44:38
  track or have track and then don't support it.
• 1:44:41
  And it's and it's one thing if you know, I like the
• 1:44:44
  transparency and upfront. It's one thing if Culver
• 1:44:45
  Stockton comes to you and says, Hey, Alan, love for you to be
• 1:44:48
  the head. You're not even the head coach,
• 1:44:50
  You're just the coach to be the track coach there.
• 1:44:53
  We're not going to you're going to be on your own.
• 1:44:56
  We're not going to have any paid assistance part time or anything
• 1:44:58
  like that. And since because of that, our
• 1:45:01
  expectations are and you are going to be very low.
• 1:45:03
  We don't want you to have 85 guys.
• 1:45:05
  We don't want you to have Povo. You're a distance guy.
• 1:45:07
  You know what, go build a great distance program that you can
• 1:45:10
  handle and you have it. I would be OK with that.
• 1:45:12
  But when it's, and I don't know this, this is the situation at
• 1:45:17
  Culver because you have a lot of self drive as well.
• 1:45:19
  So there's a little bit of like, I don't care if they do that.
• 1:45:21
  I was going to have good athletes and all these other,
• 1:45:23
  but I could see that too. But there's a lot of
• 1:45:24
  institutions that say, hey, Alan, in this example, you're
• 1:45:28
  going to be the only coach. We're not going to give you
• 1:45:30
  assistance, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and we require you to have
• 1:45:32
  808590 kit. That to me is criminal.
• 1:45:35
  It's like you're not. So you would never say, hey,
• 1:45:38
  we're going to start a football team.
• 1:45:39
  We're only going to hire 2 coaches.
• 1:45:40
  One's going to be the offensive. That's all you need the offense
• 1:45:41
  coach and defensive coach, right?
• 1:45:43
  That's all you need. We would never do that, but we
• 1:45:45
  do that all the time. I shouldn't say that all the
• 1:45:48
  time. We do that in a, in a, in a good
• 1:45:51
  too many situations. We do that in track and field.
• 1:45:53
  We are underfunded, not equipment budget.
• 1:45:57
  I'd love for you to have more of that, but not on time of
• 1:45:59
  equipment, on time of travel. I'm talking about just our
• 1:46:01
  personnel, the people that are actually taking care, overseeing
• 1:46:04
  these young people. We are under staffed, under
• 1:46:07
  budgeted in a lot of places and I do.
• 1:46:09
  I do think that's because you're dealing with the kids, you're
• 1:46:11
  dealing with their safety, their student athlete experience,
• 1:46:13
  etcetera. You don't have an English
• 1:46:15
  department and have one English teacher.
• 1:46:16
  It's just ridiculous. I just can't stand that.
• 1:46:19
  So again, not necessarily your situation there, but I, I just,
• 1:46:22
  it's scary to me when I hear 85 kids and one coach and I and you
• 1:46:25
  could be the greatest coach in the world, Alan, maybe you are,
• 1:46:28
  but it's still almost impossible to be the pole vault coach, the
• 1:46:30
  high jump coach. Oh, and by the way, a husband, a
• 1:46:33
  father, someone who has I'm certain who has some kind of
• 1:46:36
  regular life. Maybe you go to church, a
• 1:46:37
  passion, a charity, things like that.
• 1:46:39
  It's, that's just, that's crazy to me.
• 1:46:41
  That's crazy. Yeah, it was tough.
• 1:46:43
  I had a couple of guys coming in and out kind of like volunteer
• 1:46:46
  assisted for a season and but it's there's no funding for it,
• 1:46:50
  you know, it was definitely a challenge for.
• 1:46:52
  Sure. Consistency is king and that's
• 1:46:54
  not consistency brother, absolutely.
• 1:46:56
  So I get it that that's maybe did you start looking or was the
• 1:47:01
  next situation opportunity looking for you?
• 1:47:05
  So, so I was, I was looking, I was, I was actively looking,
• 1:47:10
  applying for lots of jobs. I went on three or four
• 1:47:13
  interviews, nothing clicked, nothing.
• 1:47:18
  I was, I was asking too much for some places for, for a salary
• 1:47:24
  and I wasn't experienced enough for the place that we're going
• 1:47:26
  to be able to afford the salary. Basically, you know, track and
• 1:47:30
  field, you have to have some pretty experience to get, you
• 1:47:32
  know, a little bit better paying jobs.
• 1:47:36
  And so I just got my last, I remember it was a, it was a
• 1:47:40
  Monday. I got a rejection from the
• 1:47:42
  school I applied for saying, no, we're not.
• 1:47:44
  It was AD 2. And they're like, yeah, we
• 1:47:45
  don't, you're not the right person for us.
• 1:47:48
  And but Howard, they tried to politely say that.
• 1:47:51
  Oh. And so I was pretty bummed.
• 1:47:53
  So I actually took a lunch break that day.
• 1:47:55
  I went home and I kind of thought about it.
• 1:47:58
  It's like, man, maybe I'm just going to have to be here or quit
• 1:48:01
  coaching. You know, I'm kind of at my end,
• 1:48:03
  end of it all because I was, I was burnt out.
• 1:48:05
  I mean, sure, yeah. And so I get back to my office
• 1:48:10
  and I have a missed phone call and a message from Craig Jackson
• 1:48:14
  from Umpqua Community College. Never heard of it.
• 1:48:18
  You're just like, what are you talking about?
• 1:48:19
  Yeah. So I'm like could do a search
• 1:48:21
  and it's like in Oregon, Oregon's cool.
• 1:48:25
  Yeah, keep going. Yeah.
• 1:48:28
  But then then I had that thought like, but a Community College.
• 1:48:32
  Sure. Yeah, I was going to ask that.
• 1:48:34
  Yep. It's such a terrible, not that
• 1:48:36
  I've been in it for so long, it's such a terrible stigma.
• 1:48:39
  Yeah. Did you have any experience with
• 1:48:41
  junior college besides knowing maybe they were there but like
• 1:48:44
  did you recruit you just. I tried Community College kids
• 1:48:48
  but I never get them because we didn't have the budget to get
• 1:48:50
  the good ones. Sure.
• 1:48:51
  Like what was your attitude towards junior college?
• 1:48:53
  Was it like, oh, that's where where the the non qualifiers go
• 1:48:56
  and who who coaches there? I I had no idea what a Community
• 1:48:59
  College was. We had zero community colleges
• 1:49:01
  in Montana. OK, so.
• 1:49:03
  I. Didn't know what it was.
• 1:49:06
  I was not contacted by any community colleges when I was
• 1:49:08
  coming out of high school. You know where I coached in
• 1:49:11
  Montana? We didn't run against any
• 1:49:13
  community colleges except for Gillette.
• 1:49:14
  Yeah. So you really had no idea?
• 1:49:17
  No idea what a Community College really was, I thought it was
• 1:49:20
  just a place for vocational studies kids.
• 1:49:22
  OK, that's fair. Yeah, you know.
• 1:49:24
  That's what I thought. I thought they were going to be
• 1:49:26
  the truck drivers. They're going to be welders,
• 1:49:28
  electricity. So you.
• 1:49:29
  Know because we had we had a a Community College where I went
• 1:49:32
  to school, Mitchell Tech and that's what.
• 1:49:35
  They were, Yep, very common. That's that's fair.
• 1:49:38
  There nothing and so a Community College.
• 1:49:41
  So I was like, I don't know. But I was like, you know, I
• 1:49:43
  better, you know, I'll be decent.
• 1:49:45
  Call the guy back and got off the phone with him and I found
• 1:49:49
  out that he ran track in high school, He ran track in college,
• 1:49:54
  was a decathlete and I'm like OK.
• 1:49:57
  And so I was like OK, so he's going to be into it a little
• 1:50:00
  bit. And then one of the things when
• 1:50:04
  I was leaving colder and made-up on my leaving colder, I was
• 1:50:09
  like, no football. I can't be a place of football
• 1:50:11
  because at the small schools, what I found.
• 1:50:14
  So I got two small schools, huge resource drainer, I guess for
• 1:50:20
  lack of. And I love football.
• 1:50:22
  I love to watch football. I mean, what we do for
• 1:50:26
  fundraising here is we go work to Oregon football games as a
• 1:50:28
  track team. I love I love football.
• 1:50:31
  But small schools, there's such a drain on on budgets and.
• 1:50:36
  And to me, it felt like tracks. Yeah.
• 1:50:39
  Maybe large schools too, by the way.
• 1:50:40
  But yeah, keep going. Keep.
• 1:50:41
  Going but but yeah, I mean, I mean these kids are going in
• 1:50:46
  Missouri. I mean we travel probably far
• 1:50:48
  than two hours away, but they're going the night before, get
• 1:50:52
  their own beds. They stay in in a two hour 3
• 1:50:55
  hour game. It's not a, I'm starting to kind
• 1:50:57
  of come around to a different terminology.
• 1:50:59
  I used to say kind of what you're saying there, but like
• 1:51:00
  it's a resource suck. You know, it takes a lot of
• 1:51:02
  resources. It doesn't take a lot of
• 1:51:04
  resources. It takes resources, but so does
• 1:51:07
  track and tennis and golf etcetera.
• 1:51:09
  It is a I'm starting to kind of come around to a language of
• 1:51:11
  like it's a priority suck because I don't believe Culver
• 1:51:13
  Stockton did not have the money to pay you a fair wage.
• 1:51:17
  Or if and, or assistant coaches, they decided to put those
• 1:51:20
  resources in other places. Whether that's is that another
• 1:51:24
  night that they didn't need to stay because it was 2 hours,
• 1:51:26
  because they expect those track guys to go 12 hours and
• 1:51:28
  immediately compete. By the way, we don't get to stay
• 1:51:30
  overnight and things like that. So to me, it's more I'm starting
• 1:51:33
  to like, change my language of like this is a priority issue,
• 1:51:38
  not a resource issue. Yeah, that makes a.
• 1:51:42
  Lot of sense so. You keep.
• 1:51:43
  So you keep searching, researching about Umpqua, Yeah.
• 1:51:46
  And so there's no football. There's no football in any
• 1:51:48
  community colleges out in Oregon or Washington.
• 1:51:50
  So like. Is that right?
• 1:51:51
  Oh, I didn't know. That.
• 1:51:52
  Yeah, yeah. And so and then and then the
• 1:51:56
  kind of the the kicker was I looked up the weather forecast.
• 1:52:00
  No snow. Oh.
• 1:52:02
  I'm like, OK, so there's no snow, there's no football.
• 1:52:07
  Track and field is going to be the biggest sport on campus most
• 1:52:11
  likely. In an AD who likes track, you
• 1:52:13
  know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:52:13
  Who? Likes track and field and so I
• 1:52:15
  didn't hear a lot of positive. There's a lot of checks and then
• 1:52:19
  they told me the salary and I was like okay.
• 1:52:24
  Like hold. On speaks this much mate.
• 1:52:26
  What's going on here? Why are universities not doing
• 1:52:29
  this? Again, a priority, not a not a
• 1:52:33
  resources. Yes, love it.
• 1:52:35
  I love. It so then I was like, OK,
• 1:52:36
  there's a lot of things. And so I did the interview
• 1:52:39
  process. I accepted the job and I said
• 1:52:41
  we're moving. My wife is on board.
• 1:52:44
  So I was at when I was at colder.
• 1:52:47
  I was there for four years. It felt like 10, you know what I
• 1:52:51
  mean? You, you just get in a
• 1:52:52
  situation. Yeah, I've been here going on 8.
• 1:52:56
  It feels like I've been here for two years.
• 1:52:57
  Wow. You know, so it's, it's a
• 1:52:59
  completely different type of environment experience.
• 1:53:03
  So yeah, so, so we're training and so we're able to train year
• 1:53:05
  round out here. So it's cool.
• 1:53:06
  So, so I came out here, you know, for somehow we got 19 kids
• 1:53:11
  my first year for track, even even though I was kind of
• 1:53:15
  coaching out there and recruiting out here kind of
• 1:53:17
  doing that same thing. I'm not to say we were going to
• 1:53:20
  be the most talented and, and score a ton of points, but we
• 1:53:23
  had kids go to conference and do things and a lot of learning and
• 1:53:27
  still still kind of grasping things.
• 1:53:31
  Luckily I've Roseburg is a is a retirement community.
• 1:53:37
  And so the assistants I do have for a lot of time are, are
• 1:53:40
  retired people. But you want to talk about
• 1:53:44
  knowledge retirement people in the community that I get.
• 1:53:47
  Yeah, yeah. Our our Javin coach, Jim Feeney,
• 1:53:50
  and I don't know if you've heard of him, Javin.
• 1:53:52
  Name sounds familiar? Yeah.
• 1:53:55
  I mean, we own the junior college school national record
• 1:53:57
  in Javin dude, we have 80. We have a kid.
• 1:54:00
  He he was he was a local kid through 197 in high school and
• 1:54:04
  and finished 9th at Olympic trials three years later. 80.6
• 1:54:09
  meters. Wow.
• 1:54:11
  You know, like what is going on? So so I want us to have him, you
• 1:54:15
  know, we have 60 meter Jablin throwers every single year.
• 1:54:18
  Wow. You know, so so.
• 1:54:20
  You started with 19. How many do you have now?
• 1:54:22
  Because I feel like you're, you're a.
• 1:54:23
  Recruiter right now, as of right now, before any more melt might
• 1:54:27
  happen because it happened a lot.
• 1:54:28
  We're at 62 for this next year. Wow yeah holy.
• 1:54:32
  So my, my favorite question to ask is for some of their first
• 1:54:36
  time junior college coaching and same thing.
• 1:54:39
  I, I did 2 years of high school, three years, a four year and
• 1:54:42
  then a year of junior college. You know, when, when you're a
• 1:54:46
  high school coach, besides the coaching and things you're
• 1:54:49
  always doing, you're always trying to get your kids
• 1:54:50
  recruited to us, you know, to go to college, which athletically
• 1:54:53
  or academically, right? It's, and that's hard getting
• 1:54:55
  your kids to find the right schools and things like that.
• 1:54:58
  That's a, that's a, that's hard. That's hard.
• 1:55:00
  When you're at a four year school.
• 1:55:01
  Besides the coaching and things like that, you're always trying
• 1:55:03
  to recruit kids to your school. That's hard.
• 1:55:06
  There's a lot of competition, trying to separate yourself.
• 1:55:09
  You have budgets and scholarships, all that kind of
• 1:55:10
  thing. That's extremely hard.
• 1:55:12
  Junior college coaches are doing both at the same time all the
• 1:55:16
  time. You are always trying to get
• 1:55:17
  kids into your program and you're always trying to get them
• 1:55:19
  out and recruited. How have you adjusted to that?
• 1:55:22
  Because you've been used to just say just the only the one side
• 1:55:27
  of like, hey, come, come to me. You're also like, wait a minute.
• 1:55:29
  I would also like to help you move on to a four year.
• 1:55:32
  Yeah, in my first couple years, it was really hard trying to get
• 1:55:37
  people to take our kids because they're like, what is a school,
• 1:55:40
  their numbers and and we didn't have the most talent at a time,
• 1:55:44
  but there were some awesome kids, you know, and but we did
• 1:55:46
  get some kids moved on. And if I'm going to move a kid
• 1:55:50
  on, I'm going to, I have maybe a little different standard as far
• 1:55:55
  as my athletes are concerned. Yes, we're going to make
• 1:55:58
  mistakes. We're going to do things, but I
• 1:55:59
  want to make sure. So I don't have a ton of team
• 1:56:02
  rules. I have one rule.
• 1:56:03
  It's just it's a stupid rule. So don't do anything your
• 1:56:07
  parent, coaches, teammates would consider it stupid.
• 1:56:10
  It's a. Pretty good rule though.
• 1:56:13
  I mean, I I stole it from somebody else years ago.
• 1:56:15
  That's a pretty good rule. Well, yeah, I mean just.
• 1:56:17
  Encompasses a lot of things. Yeah, just don't be stupid.
• 1:56:21
  Yeah. So.
• 1:56:21
  Yeah, So. So, yeah.
• 1:56:22
  So that takes care of the alcohol, the partying, you know
• 1:56:26
  not. Studying the.
• 1:56:27
  Class, yeah, hanging around right.
• 1:56:29
  Take care of all of that. I'm also not a hard nosed coach.
• 1:56:33
  I don't yell at my kids. I don't.
• 1:56:35
  I don't say you have to be in practice or else or else.
• 1:56:38
  I'm like, if you're going to be a practice, I'm going to pour my
• 1:56:41
  whole heart and soul into you and the athletes that buy into
• 1:56:45
  that because I'm not going to be able to monitor. 60.
• 1:56:47
  Transcripts, I'm not going to be able to monitor grades for all
• 1:56:49
  those kids. And so I just try and build
• 1:56:52
  relationships like that to try and get them to buy into what
• 1:56:54
  I'm trying to do. And, and they understand that
• 1:56:58
  we, well, we don't have the resources as far as a facility
• 1:57:02
  we had, we had no facility. It's it's actually breaking
• 1:57:04
  ground on doing 1 now. Don't.
• 1:57:06
  Don't spoil it. Yeah, we're going to sell in a
• 1:57:07
  minute. We're getting.
• 1:57:08
  Close, but but for Zach, when he was thrown 80 meters in Jalen,
• 1:57:12
  we threw a horse stall mats out and he was practicing a horse
• 1:57:15
  stall mats. Wow, yeah, dude.
• 1:57:18
  So, yeah, so it's not like we, it's just.
• 1:57:22
  And that just goes to show you don't have to have the resources
• 1:57:24
  to make life a little easier, I hope.
• 1:57:26
  That's right. I think that's the right way,
• 1:57:28
  yeah. But yeah, so yeah, I have some
• 1:57:31
  good things, some conference chants, Most valuable athlete in
• 1:57:34
  the conference. What are you guys aren't NJCAA?
• 1:57:38
  Correct. We're part of the INWAC.
• 1:57:40
  Yeah, that's the Northwest. Athletic The.
• 1:57:43
  Washington and Oregons, is that right?
• 1:57:44
  Yeah, yeah. So do you have your own like
• 1:57:48
  national championship or how does that work?
• 1:57:50
  Yeah, you can call it nationally.
• 1:57:51
  It's a call for championship. It's like nationals.
• 1:57:54
  That's your big meet at the year.
• 1:57:56
  Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:57:58
  And and so we do compete in that.
• 1:58:00
  We've been fortunate to to be top three a couple times since
• 1:58:03
  I've been here, which is pretty cool to consider.
• 1:58:04
  We have, we had no facility and it's been all over the country.
• 1:58:09
  And you know, I think one of the best thing for, for my
• 1:58:13
  recruiting since I've been here in a, in a weird way is COVID
• 1:58:18
  because you couldn't bring people on campus anymore.
• 1:58:22
  You couldn't bring installs. Like I'm going to recruit
• 1:58:24
  everybody I can across the country.
• 1:58:26
  And they changed the rules before you could only you could
• 1:58:28
  only recruit kids from the states around Oregon at the
• 1:58:31
  time. Oh yeah.
• 1:58:33
  Then they change it where you can recruit international, you
• 1:58:35
  can recruit nationwide. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:58:38
  And so I started hitting Instagram.
• 1:58:41
  I, I, I didn't know what that was till I started until 2020.
• 1:58:46
  So talking on Instagram. Yeah, good for you.
• 1:58:48
  Yeah. I I probably do 80 to 100 video
• 1:58:52
  tours a year walking around campus with my phone showing
• 1:58:56
  them buildings because dude, I can't fly kids from or from
• 1:58:59
  Florida. I can't fly kids in from
• 1:59:02
  Jamaica. I can't fly kids in Great
• 1:59:03
  Britain. I just walking around campus
• 1:59:05
  talking to them or doing this but over.
• 1:59:07
  Instagram, you know, so I'm a huge social media advocate,
• 1:59:12
  specifically on Twitter, but you know, Instagram, my Facebook
• 1:59:15
  doesn't matter to me. I think of podcasting actually
• 1:59:17
  as a social media channel. So, you know, and you always
• 1:59:20
  hear about, you know, people railing about how bad social
• 1:59:23
  media is. And I and I tend to, you know,
• 1:59:25
  like you forgot that when TV came out, by the way, that was
• 1:59:27
  the devil that was going to ruin us.
• 1:59:28
  When the telephone came out, when radio came out, all these
• 1:59:32
  things, these are all things that were going to destroy us
• 1:59:34
  and they were terrible. And all these bad things happen
• 1:59:35
  and bad things do happen on TV, telephones, etcetera.
• 1:59:39
  And bad things do happen on on social media, yes, but we forget
• 1:59:43
  about the good of social media. What a great example of how to
• 1:59:46
  leverage some technology for your situation to be successful,
• 1:59:50
  not only for you to be successful.
• 1:59:51
  That's one thing for sure. That's you know, that's your job
• 1:59:53
  is to be successful as the the track coach there.
• 1:59:56
  But you've changed people's lives by getting them to your
• 1:59:58
  you. You have kids that are on your
• 2:00:00
  program, have been through your program that didn't have an
• 2:00:02
  opportunity to not have a chance to go somewhere and because you
• 2:00:05
  had a cell phone and Instagram baby.
• 2:00:08
  You, you do. I mean, that's like to me,
• 2:00:09
  that's that. That's why when I say I'm an
• 2:00:11
  advocate of social media, that is the positive of social media.
• 2:00:14
  I love that. That's, that's, that's
• 2:00:15
  fantastic, man. I love hearing that.
• 2:00:17
  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's been helped.
• 2:00:19
  It's been helpful for me to move kids on to play.
• 2:00:21
  So cool, yeah. People are seeing our programs,
• 2:00:24
  other. Right, all of us.
• 2:00:25
  It's. Really cool.
• 2:00:27
  I mean, as far as you're talking about moving kids on, I mean,
• 2:00:31
  I've got to meet coaches from all levels.
• 2:00:33
  I never thought I'd be in touch with.
• 2:00:35
  You know, we have a kid that, you know, you mentioned Florida,
• 2:00:38
  He just finished second form in javelin.
• 2:00:42
  He's at, he's at UCC river hockey.
• 2:00:43
  You know he finished second NCAA's.
• 2:00:45
  No way. Oh, that's awesome.
• 2:00:48
  Yeah, so we've been able to push kids on.
• 2:00:50
  We had another kid just missed nationals for Cal Poly, you
• 2:00:53
  know, and it's just like and I'm not for my history and where I'm
• 2:00:58
  front. I'm not AD one proponent as far
• 2:01:01
  as like it's not D1 or most. I've been asked if I want to
• 2:01:04
  coach D1 and I'm afraid to coach D1 because I don't think I'd
• 2:01:07
  have the same joy as I would and work with the kids like I do
• 2:01:10
  here. Maybe if I was an assistant
• 2:01:12
  coach at AD one somewhere and things like that.
• 2:01:15
  But I don't know, I hear, I talked to so many coaches and
• 2:01:19
  and what they do as far as the administration stuff and I kind
• 2:01:23
  of do some of that, but not the level they're doing.
• 2:01:25
  Right, right. I loved your self-awareness
• 2:01:27
  there. You know, we, I can't remember
• 2:01:29
  if we talked about this before or after we hit record, but you
• 2:01:31
  know, there's the D1 Buster mentality and we'd love to to
• 2:01:34
  rail at 18 year olds about that. And I tell you what, you know, I
• 2:01:37
  sit in a pretty special chair as a track and field coach
• 2:01:39
  advocate. You know, I pay attention to
• 2:01:40
  what coaches are saying in high school, college level and I see
• 2:01:45
  I don't know if I want to say just as much, but I see too much
• 2:01:48
  of the same D1 or bust mentality.
• 2:01:50
  Someone saying, Oh, I want to coach D1.
• 2:01:52
  I had to coach D1. If I'm going to be anything of a
• 2:01:54
  coach, I need to coach D1. Well, that's not true.
• 2:01:56
  It's not true at all. I I the other day I was
• 2:01:59
  listening to a podcast of a high school coach.
• 2:02:02
  Great podcast. I won't because of the story.
• 2:02:04
  I won't name the normally I would shout out the podcast,
• 2:02:06
  tell you go listen, but because the story is not that great.
• 2:02:09
  They said, oh, we're going to have to, you know, re visit this
• 2:02:13
  this podcast in a year or two because, you know, there'll
• 2:02:15
  probably be another state championship or conference
• 2:02:17
  championship or or D1 athlete to to celebrate.
• 2:02:20
  And I was like that that's contributing to the problem.
• 2:02:23
  He said D1 athlete, not another kid goes to college for track.
• 2:02:28
  He said specifically said D1. I was like, that is D1 or bust,
• 2:02:31
  buddy. That's that's the definition as
• 2:02:33
  well. So I love you have some
• 2:02:35
  self-awareness of like, you know, OK, it's the highest
• 2:02:36
  level, right? As far as you know, it's, it's
• 2:02:40
  the number, you know, we count opposite D3D2D1.
• 2:02:43
  So it's the highest level and all that kind of stuff.
• 2:02:44
  And, and there are schools in that level that have the most
• 2:02:47
  resources, but that's, that's a fact.
• 2:02:49
  So maybe it's, it's OK to, to ascertain to get to that level.
• 2:02:53
  And maybe that's the right, maybe that is the right level
• 2:02:54
  for you, Alan, We could revisit this in 10 years.
• 2:02:56
  And you may be, we may be talking as the next head coach
• 2:02:58
  of University of Oregon. We don't know.
• 2:03:00
  But that doesn't change who you are.
• 2:03:02
  That doesn't make you better than someone else because you
• 2:03:05
  have D1 across your chest and versus Community College, it's
• 2:03:10
  who you are, the positive impact you're making on young people
• 2:03:12
  and that's what you're doing right there in Roseburg OR baby,
• 2:03:15
  it's amazing. And I think one of the benefits
• 2:03:17
  to our sport, unlike other sports, is you don't have to go
• 2:03:21
  to D1 to compete against D. One, it's a great point.
• 2:03:24
  I mean, we're, we were having to meet this year at, at Hayward
• 2:03:27
  Field. It's Texas A&M, Wichita State,
• 2:03:31
  you know Oregon, OSD and it's uncle community colleges there.
• 2:03:36
  That's a great point. If we're talking about a
• 2:03:39
  basketball player or a football player who wants to GoPro, which
• 2:03:41
  again, I know the ability to do that is none.
• 2:03:44
  No one goes to the NBA. That's very few people, right,
• 2:03:46
  Things like that. But I'm willing to bet because
• 2:03:50
  of culture and prejudices and maybe because of facilities and
• 2:03:57
  monies and budgets and things like that, you're going to have
• 2:03:59
  a better chance to GoPro if you go to University of Texas versus
• 2:04:02
  I'll throw my alma mater under the bus here, Troy University,
• 2:04:05
  small D1. I'm willing to bet you got a
• 2:04:07
  better opportunity. You still got to be great
• 2:04:08
  athlete and all that kind of things.
• 2:04:09
  But I'm willing to bet. Same with football.
• 2:04:11
  I'm willing to bet you just have a it might not, may not even be
• 2:04:14
  that small, actually, maybe a little bit bigger.
• 2:04:16
  But in track, that 100 meters in Umpqua, it's the same 100 meters
• 2:04:20
  at at the LA 28 Olympics, it'll be the same.
• 2:04:23
  Same distance brother if you run a 9 if you run a 970.
• 2:04:26
  There, oh, black and. White 970 there.
• 2:04:28
  I love it. Yeah, it's so black and white.
• 2:04:30
  Well, normally, Alan, one of my favorite, my most common
• 2:04:34
  questions to wrap up a podcast episode is to ask you, you know,
• 2:04:38
  so as you stare into the future and you get to define the future
• 2:04:41
  next year, five years, 10 years down the road, what's got you
• 2:04:44
  excited about the future at your school there at Umpqua Community
• 2:04:48
  College? But we know we're here to
• 2:04:51
  celebrate, baby. Tell us some good news that's
• 2:04:53
  going on at Umpqua, literally out your window right now.
• 2:04:56
  Yeah, out of my window. I don't know if you hear
• 2:04:57
  construction or not in the background or not, but yeah,
• 2:05:00
  they we are building a brand new state of art facility.
• 2:05:04
  We're so excited here being blessed obviously.
• 2:05:07
  And like I alluded to earlier out here, I mean the support for
• 2:05:11
  track and field is real. You you got that same track AD
• 2:05:15
  guy still there? Yeah.
• 2:05:16
  Would you say you've been here the whole time?
• 2:05:17
  You say Mark or David? Greg.
• 2:05:19
  Greg. Craig, sorry.
• 2:05:23
  Thank you, Craig. First of all, shout out to you,
• 2:05:24
  Craig, because you're a track guy.
• 2:05:25
  You know, we all love you for that, but what great support
• 2:05:28
  you're showing track coaches and your student athletes there.
• 2:05:30
  So just grateful for that. So yeah, we're building a
• 2:05:33
  facility, baby. Yeah, and it's obviously not
• 2:05:35
  him. It's it's the foundation,
• 2:05:36
  obviously here. I mean, great things there.
• 2:05:39
  I mean, college presidents behind us.
• 2:05:41
  You know, what was it when the Olympic trials were here a
• 2:05:43
  couple years ago, she took a track team and sat with us in
• 2:05:46
  the stands and watched Olympic trials with us.
• 2:05:48
  What college president is doing that with their trap?
• 2:05:51
  Teams zero, yeah. So, so yeah, so so race was
• 2:05:55
  awesome. I mean, it's just, it's so fun
• 2:05:57
  to be supportive here, have that support and and you know, you
• 2:06:00
  know, as we're growing, you know, they've actually starting
• 2:06:03
  to increase my stipend for assistant coaches.
• 2:06:05
  So I'm actually starting to, I got an interview this week for
• 2:06:09
  hopefully a new sprints coach. So starting to be able to track
• 2:06:13
  some quality people. You don't have to do it all by
• 2:06:16
  yourself. Yeah.
• 2:06:17
  And I haven't been, you know, I've I've had a great.
• 2:06:19
  I'm talking about enjoy your, your career.
• 2:06:20
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, all these other
• 2:06:23
  people. I mean, we, we, we have 5 or
• 2:06:26
  people on staff every year, but you know, it's, you know, it's
• 2:06:29
  exciting to have that support. And they recently moved me from
• 2:06:34
  teaching longer to be teaching anymore.
• 2:06:36
  I'm going to go work to an admin side because now I'm going to
• 2:06:38
  start to schedule track meets and get events going.
• 2:06:40
  So, so my job is that's. A big change.
• 2:06:43
  Yeah. So there's a big growth here.
• 2:06:45
  But yeah, recruiting is is always challenge and fun and
• 2:06:49
  it's probably we've had some success recruiting, but it's
• 2:06:53
  also things I probably hate the most about coaching.
• 2:06:55
  But you've got to do it if you want to be successful.
• 2:06:58
  And I'm getting better every year.
• 2:06:59
  I mean, I've been going 20 years of coaching now.
• 2:07:02
  Right. That's crazy.
• 2:07:03
  Yeah. But yeah, I'm getting better.
• 2:07:06
  I think for females are hard to find all those girls.
• 2:07:11
  Yeah, I think that's the junior college issue, just to be frank
• 2:07:14
  with the. Yeah.
• 2:07:15
  It's across the board and you know, and so and ENWAC is
• 2:07:19
  awesome. I mean, we have some studs in
• 2:07:21
  here. And the.
• 2:07:23
  Coaching, I mean Dan WI think last year, the year before I I
• 2:07:27
  came across that of the podcast like and and he was the guy
• 2:07:30
  who's like, man, I don't know if football Turkey really catch up
• 2:07:33
  to him. No, but luckily we we took him
• 2:07:37
  out last not this past year before and I'm like, oh, we got
• 2:07:40
  one from himself. So yeah, so it's always fun to
• 2:07:43
  have that and he's awesome. You know, high energy, love his
• 2:07:46
  love, his passion for. It I mean.
• 2:07:49
  Yeah. So I mean it, it's just a great
• 2:07:51
  place. And that's so.
• 2:07:52
  Exciting man. Basically Tracktown USA is right
• 2:07:55
  here in Oregon, so. You know, this comes all the way
• 2:07:58
  from the very top our CEO who was AI can't remember it's four
• 2:08:01
  or five time. I've said it so many times I've
• 2:08:03
  now forgotten the number. I'll give the benefit of the
• 2:08:05
  doubt. Five time all American at Baylor
• 2:08:08
  for for pole vaulting. So pole vaulting, Yeah, pole
• 2:08:10
  vaulting is pretty. Big pretty.
• 2:08:12
  Important event, sport for us here.
• 2:08:15
  But, you know, he taught me something very early in my
• 2:08:18
  career here, been, you know, almost 19 years.
• 2:08:21
  Very, very. Actually, by the time you guys
• 2:08:22
  are listening to this, it'll have been officially 19 years
• 2:08:25
  here at Gill. And he taught me very early.
• 2:08:28
  Healthy things grow. And the first time he said it, I
• 2:08:30
  thought it was a cute, catchy phrase.
• 2:08:32
  You know, it's like a healthy thing to grow.
• 2:08:33
  Yeah. But then I started thinking
• 2:08:34
  about gardens like, oh, yeah, you know, only healthy gardens
• 2:08:37
  grow. You know, you pull out weeds and
• 2:08:38
  you give it nutrition and water and things like that.
• 2:08:41
  Humans, healthy humans grow. Yeah.
• 2:08:43
  We've seen the unfortunate side effects of unhealthy humans.
• 2:08:46
  They, they don't grow and you know, bad things happen.
• 2:08:48
  And it started to make me think, you know, really hard, like, oh,
• 2:08:50
  wait a minute, that's right, healthy things grow.
• 2:08:53
  So businesses, people, etcetera. And so programs.
• 2:08:56
  So when I start, when I hear about programs that are
• 2:08:59
  investing more into, you know, more salary, so for, so we can
• 2:09:03
  hire more coaches or pay our current coaches more.
• 2:09:05
  When I hear about building new facilities, of course, when I
• 2:09:07
  hear about supporting the coach doesn't have to teach anymore,
• 2:09:11
  you know, you can focus on that's healthy, that's growth
• 2:09:14
  and that's really good for our sport.
• 2:09:16
  And that is something I think we should all celebrate.
• 2:09:19
  We'd love to be moaned when we hear of a track program being
• 2:09:21
  cut. And we and we should.
• 2:09:23
  It's a terrible thing. I hate when programs are are are
• 2:09:25
  cut, but that same energy we put into that negative side of
• 2:09:29
  things. I want to be helped be the
• 2:09:30
  leader of the the same energy going into the positive.
• 2:09:33
  And that's why we wanted to have you on here, Alan, because you
• 2:09:35
  guys are growing, man. It's great for a sport.
• 2:09:38
  Uncle is going to be better to support more athletes that need
• 2:09:41
  to go to Community College for many, many reasons and go on to
• 2:09:44
  do other things. And when I say other things, I
• 2:09:45
  don't mean go to the Olympics and stuff.
• 2:09:47
  Certainly there's no reason I think there wouldn't be a kid
• 2:09:50
  I'm talking about. They're going to go and become
• 2:09:51
  teachers, coaches, neighbors. It's just going to be amazing
• 2:09:56
  the continued growth there in Aqua.
• 2:09:58
  No, we're, we're very excited. Obviously.
• 2:10:00
  I mean, we're always going to have to fundraise more and more.
• 2:10:03
  But I mean, what, what the school has done for us getting a
• 2:10:05
  facility, I mean, we're not going to have seating for for a
• 2:10:08
  year or two as you continue to fundraise for bleachers and
• 2:10:10
  stuff like that, keep adding on. But yeah, I mean, they they've,
• 2:10:16
  they buckled down and said we're going to support track and
• 2:10:18
  field. And so, yeah, so, you know,
• 2:10:20
  hopefully I can bless them with some good things to happen in
• 2:10:22
  the future. We started this podcast by
• 2:10:24
  talking about new Hayward Field, and that was, you know,
• 2:10:26
  something like a $270 million project and everything, but we
• 2:10:29
  forget, you know, Hayward Field was open in 1919.
• 2:10:32
  The reason I can remember that is Gil started 1918 and I'm
• 2:10:34
  always like, or one year older than Hayward, baby.
• 2:10:37
  It had to be had. You had to have Gil before you
• 2:10:39
  had Hayward, right? But when Hayward Field was open
• 2:10:42
  in 1919, it did not look anything like today.
• 2:10:46
  It grew, right? It grew to the great classic
• 2:10:49
  Hayward that we had. And now it's going to the news.
• 2:10:52
  So I'm not saying you're necessarily going to because
• 2:10:54
  who, you know, I I hope there's a billion Haywards, you know,
• 2:10:57
  that come around in the next 20-30 forty years.
• 2:10:59
  But what you're saying you're there, you know, you're building
• 2:11:02
  the track now you didn't have a track.
• 2:11:03
  Now you're building a track, then you'll build seating and
• 2:11:05
  maybe lighting and then build, you know, other infrastructure.
• 2:11:07
  And it's just going to as long as we keep going forward, we're
• 2:11:10
  healthy, we're going to continue to grow, man.
• 2:11:12
  We're just so, so excited for you guys, man.
• 2:11:15
  That's like I said, we we love the sport growing and that's
• 2:11:17
  what's happening right there on your campus.
• 2:11:21
  Yeah. And and you know, it's, it's, I
• 2:11:23
  don't know, I just wish more people take up track and field
• 2:11:25
  and get them to do it in college because it's there's so many
• 2:11:27
  kids that do in high school and never get the chance.
• 2:11:29
  And I know even if they're not very good in high school, you
• 2:11:31
  just don't know. Like I had that girl that was a
• 2:11:33
  23 minute walk on girl running seven in five days.
• 2:11:36
  And so that's a that's a great point.
• 2:11:38
  It's the number one sport participation rate in high
• 2:11:40
  school and college. And yet it's something like 7-8,
• 2:11:42
  nine percent actually go on to college.
• 2:11:44
  And it's like, Oh my God, that means what could the numbers
• 2:11:47
  look like in college? You're you're exactly right.
• 2:11:49
  I love that that's. Yeah, and and you know,
• 2:11:51
  Community College, I mean, talking about budget, I mean,
• 2:11:53
  yeah, we're doing a lot big, but it's affordable.
• 2:11:57
  I mean, people can, you know, if a kid gets a the Max Pell Grant
• 2:12:01
  here, they go to school for free.
• 2:12:02
  Wow. So it's just like, why couldn't,
• 2:12:05
  why not do that even if you want to have those dreams of going
• 2:12:08
  D1D2? I'm talking about all junior
• 2:12:10
  colleges, wherever you're. At that's.
• 2:12:11
  Right, That's right. I totally wish I would have went
• 2:12:13
  that route. I would have.
• 2:12:14
  I would have I paid off my student loans before I was 43.
• 2:12:21
  Trust me, I talked to my two kids early about we have a great
• 2:12:23
  Community College, Parkland Community College here that we
• 2:12:27
  talked early because we also have University of Illinois
• 2:12:29
  where my wife went. So it's like, yeah, I hope you
• 2:12:31
  do go to University of Illinois. That's awesome.
• 2:12:33
  You know, Parkland half the price.
• 2:12:36
  They have a program that works directly with U of I, so it's
• 2:12:38
  guaranteed the transfer. I'm like pretty smart guy
• 2:12:41
  because, you know, you're only getting so much from dad here,
• 2:12:43
  so you better figure it out. Alan, my man, one of the most
• 2:12:46
  important, most valuable, most expensive things you can give me
• 2:12:49
  is your time brother, you know, and I know you've got something
• 2:12:52
  big coming up here in about 13 minutes.
• 2:12:53
  So we're going to wrap up here, but I just want to say thank
• 2:12:56
  you, man. I'm just so really blown away.
• 2:12:59
  You know, it's really interesting again, in the seat
• 2:13:02
  that I sit here. This is, I don't know what
• 2:13:04
  episode this is going to be 300 and close to 330.
• 2:13:07
  So I've done, you know, over 300 interviews and way many more
• 2:13:10
  because there's other bonus episodes and stuff.
• 2:13:13
  And you would think I would start and year 6 I would start
• 2:13:17
  to find like, you know, lanes like, oh, this coach is going to
• 2:13:20
  be this time. This is how he got into
• 2:13:22
  coaching. And this is the, you know, lane
• 2:13:23
  2. Is this how they come into
• 2:13:24
  coaching? And Alan, you just threw me for
• 2:13:26
  a loop, brother. I've had no one like I've had no
• 2:13:29
  one like this. No one has been like this.
• 2:13:31
  And that I love that. I just love that that diversity
• 2:13:34
  that we have in ways to become track coaches that there is no
• 2:13:37
  one. I love that there's no one path.
• 2:13:38
  I love that there's many distinct paths because that
• 2:13:42
  background, the things that you've learned, the things that
• 2:13:44
  you've been through, those help enrich your current student
• 2:13:47
  athletes today. That that they make up who you
• 2:13:49
  are and that's how you're able to part to them.
• 2:13:51
  And I just think that's so cool. And I'm just so blessed that you
• 2:13:54
  would sit down with us and share your journey with us today and
• 2:13:56
  our listeners. I'm just blessed to get to hang
• 2:13:59
  out with 1819 year old kids that keep me young.
• 2:14:01
  You know, it's hard to age when you're hanging out with kids
• 2:14:05
  that are has time and a lot. Of in the opposite.
• 2:14:08
  They can age you real fast as well my friend.
• 2:14:11
  Yeah, I've done some of that too.
• 2:14:12
  Alan, thank you again so much. Really just grateful you would
• 2:14:16
  sit down with us here today. Please give our love to your
• 2:14:18
  wife. You know, there's I love her
• 2:14:21
  kind of, you know, she's on the side of the story because we're
• 2:14:23
  talking to you. But man, what a blessing.
• 2:14:26
  She. Is for you and your family, and
• 2:14:28
  then for your athlete. There's, you know, I love that
• 2:14:31
  she was driving vain. I mean, come on, man, I have
• 2:14:33
  such a heart for our spouses of track coaches.
• 2:14:36
  So please give her our love as well and tell her that we said
• 2:14:39
  thank you as well because she doesn't do what she does.
• 2:14:41
  You don't get to do what you do. And if you don't get to do what
• 2:14:43
  you do, I don't get to do what I do.
• 2:14:44
  So it's a it's a change. She's affected people in a
• 2:14:47
  positive way that she doesn't even know.
• 2:14:48
  So please give her our love there as well, OK?
• 2:14:51
  Will. Do thank you awesome guys.
• 2:14:52
  Thank you so much for being here again this week.
• 2:14:55
  I know this was 2 junior colleges in a row who knows I
• 2:14:57
  don't know what I don't know in my head yet schedule wise what's
• 2:15:00
  next? Maybe it's another Community
• 2:15:01
  College because you know, I just have such love.
• 2:15:02
  We could have spent hours just on Community College because I
• 2:15:05
  just think that level, there's so many positive.
• 2:15:07
  We started touching just briefly there about the cost and
• 2:15:09
  locations and the opportunities and things like that.
• 2:15:12
  And it's just it's it's a big part of my heart is our junior
• 2:15:15
  college, community colleges out there.
• 2:15:16
  So I'm just so grateful that you were here to join us today.
• 2:15:19
  Join us next week. We'll do it all over again.
• 2:15:21
  Thanks guys if it goes to appreciate the coach the ones
• 2:15:27
  that pour people most every season needs a voice of reason
• 2:15:30
  speaking the growth you got to prep before you carry the load
• 2:15:33
  ice coffee to the soul for those of us who stay on the go proper
• 2:15:37
  handoff to stay in the zone which you packing for the road.
• 2:15:39
  There's more than one way to go taking those SP and you told it
• 2:15:43
  ain't practice if your purpose ain't clear, it can't happen
• 2:15:46
  until you listen with both is you can't mentor without a
• 2:15:49
  mentor of experience. You can reinvent those years
• 2:15:52
  every plan's got to stand and deliver to and the price
• 2:15:55
  sacrifice can you give up you. It's a choice and a fight, not a
• 2:15:58
  win or lose. It's not a ploy boy device.
• 2:16:01
  Y'all can make more moves. It's not about how to it's all
• 2:16:04
  about why you don't know till you know who you are inside
• 2:16:07
  6,000,000 waste of time choose none.
• 2:16:09
  So y'all cross the finish line. The work ain't done, so we learn
• 2:16:12
  from the experts, but y'all got to put in the leg work.
• 2:16:15
  Your athletics network. It's all about connections put
• 2:16:18
  together for the profession to where every track coach could be
• 2:16:21
  blessed.