Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #350: Fireside chat with HoF Coach Randy Huntington Part 1 | World Records, China & the Cost of the Craft

Transcript

#350: Fireside chat with HoF Coach Randy Huntington Part 1 | World Records, China & the Cost of the Craft · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey guys, real quick before we start today's episode, which is
• 0:03
  going to be a banger. You're going to love it.
• 0:05
  Thanks for being here. Wanted to make sure you were
• 0:07
  aware of this pull promo that we're doing.
• 0:09
  This is amazing. We never do this.
• 0:10
  The pacer pull promo January 1 through February 28 by three
• 0:15
  pacer vaulting poles get one free.
• 0:17
  Now of course there's a few stipulations there, so check out
• 0:20
  the website gillathletics.com, but call your preferred gill
• 0:24
  dealer right now and tell them you want to take advantage of
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  the buy 3 get one free. It's over into February, no
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  more. We're not doing it, but go get
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  it right now for your football coach out there who deserves it
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  right now. Let's get on with the show.
• 0:38
  You're listening to the Gil Athletics Connections podcast
• 0:41
  with host Mike Cunningham. Track and field world UNL tuned
• 0:48
  in to our humble servant Mike Cunningham for another
• 0:52
  extraordinary message for Guild Athletics connections.
• 0:56
  All right, welcome back here to the Girl Connections podcast.
• 0:58
  So humble. Be your host Mike Cunningham
• 1:00
  here. Hey, I want to hop right into
• 1:01
  it. First of all, we're celebrating
• 1:02
  our 350th episode. I could not imagined back on day
• 1:08
  one, episode one that we'd be celebrating 350 friggin
• 1:11
  episodes, man. So I'm so happy that you're here
• 1:13
  to hear this one. And I went out and I got I, I, I
• 1:15
  want to do something special for 3:50.
• 1:17
  So I wanted to get someone who's been in the game for a while, is
• 1:20
  a great storyteller, has been in a lot of stories and I think I
• 1:24
  found them. So we're going to get right into
• 1:25
  it. Help me welcome the legendary,
• 1:27
  the wise, the wonderful Mr. Randy Huntington.
• 1:29
  Randy, how are you my. Friend.
• 1:31
  Hi, Mike. Good to see you.
• 1:33
  Thank you. I didn't know I was.
• 1:35
  I didn't know I was going to be a Celebrity 350. 350 so I I've
• 1:39
  been practicing 349 times to hopefully get this one right.
• 1:44
  We'll see. That's great.
• 1:47
  That's great. Randy, how are you man?
• 1:48
  How's get us a little quick little catch up as we are here
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  in 2026, man. What's just where you at and
• 1:53
  what you doing right now? Well, it's, it's, it's good to
• 1:56
  be home. It's nice to speak English.
• 1:59
  I don't speak Chinese. It's actually nice to speak
• 2:01
  English to somebody who understands me and I don't have
• 2:04
  to turn and look at the person next to me and wait for them.
• 2:06
  So that's that's been the last 12 years of my life for those
• 2:12
  that kind of watched. But yeah, the last 12 years have
• 2:15
  been in China, changing Chinese track and field.
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  I mean, I've had a few people who have gone over and, and seen
• 2:26
  it just recently and go, dude, what they're doing now, when,
• 2:30
  when you got there, you changed it completely.
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  And, and now there's some other American coaches over there and
• 2:36
  they don't even realize how easy they have it.
• 2:38
  But this past year I've been bouncing back and forth between
• 2:42
  China and here 'cause I've been working with Christian McCaffrey
• 2:46
  and Bejon Robinson and Luke McCaffrey and the NFL.
• 2:50
  So it's been, it's been a lot of fun with, with Christian and
• 2:53
  Luke, 'cause I, I trained their dad, you know, I trained Ed
• 2:57
  years and years ago. So, and it was, it's, I'm
• 3:02
  training Lisa and Ed's little boy, you know, it's kind of the
• 3:05
  way it feels. It's it's really, he's having a
• 3:07
  great year. Are you, I know Brian Kula is is
• 3:10
  deep with Christian McCaffrey. Is Brian Kula still involved?
• 3:12
  You know Brian. No, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:14
  I, I, I, Brian, I don't know what's what's happened.
• 3:20
  I never really asked much. I don't think it was a negative.
• 3:24
  I just think that Christian was in LA, Brian was in Denver, now
• 3:28
  in Nashville, right? And obviously they work together
• 3:32
  a long time. But no, he hasn't been involved
• 3:36
  with him for over a year. Yeah, I, I know Brian more.
• 3:39
  I know Brian well and has been on the podcast as well and no
• 3:42
  deep ties. But I wondered if that, you
• 3:44
  know, now he's out in Nashville building that facility that I
• 3:46
  was like, ah, you know, it's still tough even for an NFL guy
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  to to make that consistency happen.
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  So that that's. Me, no, I mean Christian would
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  have had to move there, you know, I think.
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  And I, and with Olivia and everything, I mean, I'm sure
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  that, you know, their, their, their professional life outside
• 4:02
  of sport and that is, is really in, in LA or New York.
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  So, yeah. But just so anyways, and, and
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  you know, obviously Brian did a good job.
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  And for me it was, as I told Brian one time just not long
• 4:17
  ago, I said, look, we're standing on your shoulders.
• 4:20
  We know that you put a lot of work in with him.
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  You know, did I have to correct some things?
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  You always do. It's just the way it is.
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  I mean, it's a different, it's a slightly different level of
• 4:32
  expertise and that's not trying. To.
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  Applaud B. It's just, it just is, you know,
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  and, and it's been good Christians had a a damn good
• 4:43
  year considering everything he's gone through and nobody expected
• 4:46
  this year after last year. So it's been, it's been, it's
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  been great to see him succeed at the level he did, even though it
• 4:55
  could have been more. And we know that, but we did
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  what we could. And then this next year, we'll
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  try to do even better with him now that he's healthy.
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  Are you on sabbatical for China? Are you still?
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  I'm done. Yeah.
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  Is that right? I'm I'm done, except I'll go
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  over maybe twice a year for a couple weeks to do lectures, but
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  full time coaching after the national games.
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  I went, I, I helped Jiangsu province this year.
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  That's why I was going back and forth.
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  So not the national team. I just said I'm just going to go
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  help the province with their jumpers.
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  And they had their two female jumpers were gold medalists,
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  which first time that's happened in history.
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  Both came from the same province, 119 year old, one 2122
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  year old and they're they won the long jump and triple jump.
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  So and then the long jumper was bronze medalist in the World
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  Championships in Tokyo. She Hao, who I'd coached for
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  years and then let him go last year, then came back this year.
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  So it's it's been a good a little change, a little weird,
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  but it was fun to go back. I, I was working with another my
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  800m runner there, Wong Chen Yu, who just had some difficult
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  times and she's finally retired, so there's no reason for me to
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  be there for her. She was fifth in Tokyo, ran 157,
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  down from 2 O 1. And I mean, it was really
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  exceptional. Yeah.
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  You know, she's she was a heck of a talent.
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  Who ended up marrying the wrong guy, that's what.
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  Happened, you know, yeah, I look at my wife and say the same
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  thing. So I get it.
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  And I I that makes a lot of sense.
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  Hey. Look, I've never been married,
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  so obviously I you're. The wrong guy for everybody.
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  For everybody, yeah, there's just nobody that would want to
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  be with over here, you know, in this life.
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  But but that's also, you know, we, if we talk about it from a
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  coaching perspective, it's a tough life.
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  Yeah. And it's a special partner, male
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  or female, female, male, I don't care what your what your process
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  is, but it's not an easy life to choose.
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  And you know, I made a choice a while back that I was not going
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  to drag anybody through this. Is that right?
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  So this is a conscious choice. It's a conscious, it's been a
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  conscious choice for a number of years now.
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  It's just like, no, it has, it could be too much and then it's
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  and then it's pulling you away from both.
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  It's pulling you away from what the athletes need and it's
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  pulling you away from your family, your relationship.
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  Now when I talk to young guys, I say don't do what I did.
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  I mean, I will let you say don't do this to find find the balance
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  in a very unbalanced profession as as any artistic passionate
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  profession is, there's always been balance.
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  And so hold on, let's double click into that 'cause I have
• 7:51
  some feelings about that. I, I don't necessarily disagree.
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  First of all, 100% agree on man. If you are going to be a coach
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  and specifically we're talking track and field, but this
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  probably applies to any sport, you certainly have to have a
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  spouse that understands that this is not anywhere close to
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  the air quotes traditional 9 to 5 type of type of profession.
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  However, I I wonder how much of that where we you know, we'll
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  easily say a coach, a coach's life is 24/7 and and let's
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  specifically talk about college and and higher because you know,
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  our our high school coaches, God love them, our teachers first.
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  They should be teachers 1st and then that's his own profession,
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  by the way, and not not exactly a nine to five either, but with
• 8:35
  our college coaches with recruiting etcetera and our post
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  collegiate coaches with travel etcetera.
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  How much of from your experience is when we say coaching is 24/7,
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  how much of it is it our own doing where we don't create
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  barriers between our athletes and ourselves?
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  And how much of it is, you know what, if you are going to
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  actually do this, this is the job.
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  This it is a 24/7 mental state to do the job.
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  I've had this discussion with people who don't do this, and
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  I've had this discussion with people who do this.
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  And of course with actors, actresses, dancers, different
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  people in artistic professions that have a lot of negativity
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  because you get you get, you lose, you don't get picked and
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  yet still have this incredible passion to perform.
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  I think that it is the nature of the beast because there's so
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  much, so many times people have their relationships fail in this
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  arena. And yet at the same time, I
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  mean, if you're going to do this right, you are.
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  It is a mistress, you are married to it.
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  It takes that kind of effort. I, I would say, you know, I
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  probably should have been a priest, but that's kind of a bad
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  thing to be these days. You know, it's not a, not a
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  good, a good comparison, but you know, you, you, you have to find
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  people who truly understand what it is that you do.
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  And there's not a lot of those. I mean, seriously, not a lot.
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  Well, how much? And we're going to get into your
• 10:30
  actuals. You know what, we traditionally
• 10:32
  do our stuff here in a little bit, but you and you've been a
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  college coach for sure. We'll get into that a little bit
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  For the, yeah, for the last several decades, professional
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  coach, I would have thought, and this is me never having been in
• 10:46
  a professional coach and I was a fairly high level college coach,
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  but not in the professional side.
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  I would have thought, oh, once you get to that level,
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  especially after you're established and maybe have a
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  little bit, I'm going to say more of a choice factor in who
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  you're actually coaching, that it would be less because
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  they're, they're adults. So I don't have to worry about
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  them at 8:00 at night. We're in college, as you know.
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  You know, I got to worry about that 8:00.
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  I mean, I've had that phone call where the cops are calling me
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  because they have one of my athletes, you know, that kind of
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  stuff. I would have thought in the
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  professional world that had been easier to have that barrier.
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  You would you would hope that by that time you ferreted out those
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  that just don't have that kind of drive and that
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  professionalism not always true. It is I, I think back on, you
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  know, I've been sort of in the professional ranks since the
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  late 80s and with a, with a venture into collegiate for just
• 11:42
  a short time at Michigan State in 2006.
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  So that's the only time that I was able to actually garner a, a
• 11:49
  job. I, I and people got people kind
• 11:53
  of negatively talked about me talking about.
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  I'm like, look, you talk about it because it's real.
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  Not talking about to get sympathy.
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  It's just the reality of what it was in the 90s.
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  You know, I have well over 300 applications without an
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  interview and I was just the wrong guy, obviously.
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  But most of the time, as we all know now, there's already
• 12:18
  somebody in the wings that they want.
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  And a lot of people want to be comfortable with the person
• 12:23
  they're they're working with. And if they don't know you, you
• 12:28
  know, that's different. And I probably just wasn't good
• 12:31
  enough networking to take advantage of that.
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  So I'm, I'm sort of getting away from your question a little bit.
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  But yeah, I, I, I feel that your assumption is correct.
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  But the reality is not necessarily because it takes a
• 12:53
  while for people to move out of the cocoon of collegiate comfort
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  and protection to I got to do this on my own now, you know,
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  and there's not a lot of people that can do that, right.
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  And and This is why some people migrate to certain coaches who
• 13:10
  now become their new cocoon. And your relationship with them
• 13:14
  is very close. And your dad, your brother,
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  whatever you become. And that relationship is, is
• 13:22
  vital to their success. Men maybe not as much as women.
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  Hard to say this because it's individual, but yeah, you're
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  your assumption always is. Now in China it's similar in
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  this day and age. And you know, when I first got
• 13:43
  to China in 2013, China was growing so fast that their
• 13:51
  generational gaps was about four years, not 20 years.
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  So every four years it was a different society.
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  So like we have Gen. X and all that.
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's were 4-5 years.
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  So an 18 year old, so different than a 30 year old.
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  I mean, I mean, like completely different today.
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  An 18 year old, 22 year old, you wouldn't be able to tell the
• 14:14
  difference between them and an American.
• 14:16
  You just do the same pretty much.
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  But their values and everything were, were, were, were, were
• 14:23
  very different then. Now that's moved out a little
• 14:26
  bit. And the other thing there is
• 14:29
  that they are in their cocoon the entire time.
• 14:32
  They don't come out of that cocoon, cocoon, if you wish to
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  use that word from the provincials level their entire
• 14:40
  career. So they go, they're part of a
• 14:44
  province and they're with that province their whole career,
• 14:47
  just like they'd be at a university for 15 years or 20
• 14:50
  years because they start at 12 or 14 and they're with them
• 14:55
  until they retire now. It used to be they would retire
• 14:58
  like 2425, but since I I've been there, we pushed that age out to
• 15:03
  323334. You know, with Sue being 32 and
• 15:08
  Wayne Lee being 32 or 33 this year, that's old for a Chinese
• 15:14
  athlete. In the past, they never really
• 15:16
  went that long. I mean, I had a couple athletes
• 15:19
  that were exceptional, like should have been Olympic
• 15:23
  medalist that left the sport because time to get married and
• 15:29
  have children. That was the culture, Yeah.
• 15:30
  Yeah. Yeah, and that was the culture,
• 15:31
  right? Yeah.
• 15:33
  You know something? You said there about with your
• 15:35
  comparison to actors and actresses, that doesn't make
• 15:38
  some sense to me because it's like you don't turn off being an
• 15:40
  actor. It's 24/7 because I like, you
• 15:43
  know, I think of the profession of coaching and you know, I've
• 15:47
  become, I've worked hard to become this advocate of track
• 15:51
  coaches on all, all levels. And you know, and so I, you
• 15:55
  know, I've had people call me the biggest track hype man,
• 15:59
  track coach, hype man in the world, all those kind of stuff,
• 16:01
  right? And I adore that because I do
• 16:02
  love our track and field coaches.
• 16:04
  But even I think, you know, I think about titles, right?
• 16:06
  When you think about son or dad or spouse, etcetera, like those
• 16:10
  titles are way more important than coach.
• 16:13
  But sometimes we put coach as the number one title and, and
• 16:17
  I'll say like, a lot of times I'll say something like, I can
• 16:19
  only think of three professions where your, your job, your job
• 16:25
  title travels with you 24/7 Doctor, right?
• 16:28
  If you have a neighbor who's a doctor, you probably call him
• 16:30
  Doctor Bob or something, right? I used to say 2 and then someone
• 16:34
  reminded me of like pastors actually, you know, you may call
• 16:37
  your, your neighbor if they're the clergy of Reverend or
• 16:39
  something like that. And then coach you, you if I bet
• 16:42
  your neighbors call you, coach that.
• 16:43
  That's a pretty common thing that people, if they're coached,
• 16:46
  that's your title 24/7. If they knew who I was, they
• 16:50
  would never met me. Right, right, right.
• 16:53
  No one, you know, my, my neighbor is an, is a, is an
• 16:55
  editor actually for Human Kinetics, which is here in town,
• 16:58
  which I let me wait when I moved here.
• 17:00
  But she's an editor there, you know, I call her Laura.
• 17:02
  I don't call her editor, editor Laura.
• 17:04
  Like no one I don't call my accountant, Accountant Joe.
• 17:08
  He, he's Joe. And it's one of those titles
• 17:10
  that follows you and it kind of made it a little bit more sense
• 17:12
  in regards to athletes because an athlete, because there is no
• 17:15
  clocking in at 8, clocking out at noon for lunch, clocking back
• 17:19
  in at 1, clocking out at 5:00, that that that's not an
• 17:21
  athlete's life. It's a little bit more fluid.
• 17:23
  But it's also, it can happen anytime.
• 17:25
  I could go work out at 7:00 PM if I wanted and still become the
• 17:29
  athlete that I want to become. 7:00 AM, noon, 2 times a day,
• 17:33
  zero times a day, etcetera. So it is is a little bit more
• 17:36
  fluid that that makes a little bit more sense in that regard.
• 17:38
  Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a difficult
• 17:41
  profession that you, you know, you, I, I think like any
• 17:46
  profession, you probably should do a few internships before with
• 17:50
  different. I mean, I wish that that existed
• 17:52
  more called graduate assistant these days, but it has been,
• 17:56
  but, but really you need to do an internship with some
• 17:59
  different coaches and really figure out this is what you
• 18:01
  want. Now, you know, the amount of
• 18:05
  travel, not necessarily collegiately, you do some
• 18:08
  travel, of course, but I mean, if you're if you're a distance
• 18:11
  coach, you're traveling year round, you cross country season,
• 18:15
  indoor, outdoor, you know, you're gone a lot of weekends
• 18:20
  and, you know, do you want that for your children, you know, to
• 18:23
  do? But I mean, these are all pretty
• 18:26
  hard. These are tough decisions to
• 18:28
  make. And do I regret not having that?
• 18:32
  Yeah. Well, without a doubt, I wish I
• 18:34
  did, you know, but it's just the way it, the way it worked out
• 18:40
  and, and, and in the end, it is what it is.
• 18:44
  And you do your best to work around it and, and, and fulfill
• 18:50
  the needs because you're here to help them reach their dreams.
• 18:53
  But what you can't lose is the fact that you have to also keep
• 18:56
  your dreams. And that is that is really hard
• 19:00
  to do unless you have the right spouse.
• 19:04
  So just like Indiana Jones and the What is the Temple of Doom?
• 19:07
  Choose that challenge wisely, you know, whatever.
• 19:12
  Choose wisely because it is. And I mean, it sounds like
• 19:16
  probably a weird subject to be talking about, but it's
• 19:19
  important. But it's not, you know, Yeah.
• 19:21
  In fact. Not only is it not weird, but we
• 19:24
  should be having these conversations more.
• 19:26
  We love as track coaches to have conversations on how'd you make
• 19:29
  those long jumpers better, Randy?
• 19:31
  How did how did you work with Sue and make them faster, blah,
• 19:34
  blah. And we have those conversations.
• 19:35
  That conversation is happening 24/7 social media clinics at the
• 19:40
  sand pit, etcetera. We're not having the
• 19:42
  conversation. We're not having that
• 19:44
  conversation enough about the actual profession of coaching
• 19:47
  track and field. You're you're exactly.
• 19:49
  Yeah. What what it is that it takes
• 19:51
  for us to actually excel in this?
• 19:53
  And now you look at some. Yeah.
• 19:55
  I mean, you look at, you look at a lot of coaches that are my age
• 20:00
  group did not have healthy lives because of it.
• 20:03
  Whether it's personal, whether it's their own demons,
• 20:07
  sometimes, you know, everybody has, everybody makes mistakes in
• 20:13
  the in course of their professional life and those
• 20:17
  mistakes, you know. And I tell say this to China all
• 20:21
  the time, which they do not get, but they're getting it slowly.
• 20:25
  And that is we fail our way to success.
• 20:27
  It sounds cliche, but we do. And you know, I mean, I imagine
• 20:32
  that you're a high jumper or pole vaulter.
• 20:34
  You always end in failure, always your fail and you win,
• 20:40
  right? How does that work out, you
• 20:42
  know? Name another sport, right?
• 20:44
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like wait a minute, I failed and
• 20:46
  I win. No one misses the field goal at
• 20:48
  the end of the. Game he still wins.
• 20:50
  Yeah, exactly. You know, it, it, it, it, it
• 20:53
  takes a very special mind. And, and I tell people I said
• 20:57
  it's, it's, it's not that you have to work with smart
• 21:02
  athletes, but you have to work with athletes that have a high
• 21:05
  EQ, you know, and, and you have to learn how to develop their
• 21:09
  EQ. Now try doing that in a foreign
• 21:11
  language. Sure.
• 21:13
  Every coach as far as I'm concerned, should have to do 2
• 21:16
  things. Coach at the middle school and
• 21:18
  coach in a foreign language. Because the middle school, it
• 21:22
  breaks down, it breaks it down to the bare minimum and the same
• 21:26
  thing happens in a foreign language.
• 21:27
  You go to the minimal effective dose.
• 21:30
  If you wish a minimal effective, you get right to the nitty
• 21:34
  gritty and you get rid of all the the crap because you can't.
• 21:38
  Think about that. You can't espouse 20 different
• 21:41
  things. You don't know the language.
• 21:43
  Oh, that's interesting. And.
• 21:45
  Even if I did know the language, even if I did learn Chinese, the
• 21:49
  IT would have given me some basic communication, but I would
• 21:52
  never ever have had the nuance. Like we can nuance language here
• 21:56
  with us. We understand a little bit about
• 21:58
  the gist of what we're talking about.
• 22:00
  That would never I would take me years and years and I would have
• 22:04
  had, I mean, I would have effectively had to really dig in
• 22:08
  to do it. But I got there when I was 60,
• 22:11
  you know, and it was like my brain was not quite ready for a
• 22:15
  new language. Do I regret that?
• 22:19
  Yes. I wish I had learned the to the
• 22:25
  credit of other, I mean, whether it's Altus, Well, not Altus
• 22:29
  didn't do it, but certainly Exos did.
• 22:33
  So Exos bought language teachers for their people over there when
• 22:38
  they were over there in the early on.
• 22:40
  So they had six months of language three days a week, you
• 22:43
  know, so they learned and and but they were strength coaches
• 22:48
  and you know, da da da and others medical.
• 22:50
  So they really needed to. So did I.
• 22:52
  But, and I've told the Chinese this now, I said you if you
• 22:56
  bring in coaches over foreign coaches, just a translator is
• 23:00
  not good enough unless they're really good.
• 23:03
  And I had an excellent translator in Aki recently who
• 23:07
  was an Iowa grad honors and then USC grad honors and in
• 23:12
  communication. So.
• 23:14
  But she knew nothing about track of the field.
• 23:16
  But she was smart as a whip and learned everything, I mean, to
• 23:19
  the point where she could do Ralph Mann's lectures.
• 23:23
  She could lecture for Ralph Open, Yeah.
• 23:26
  And unders and everything. So she's she?
• 23:29
  I mean, yeah, without her, none of what I've been able to do
• 23:33
  over the last six years would have been possible.
• 23:35
  You mentioned EQ and now I think about that with a translator,
• 23:38
  because you're right, it's not just the words, there's
• 23:40
  tonality, even your body language as the as the
• 23:43
  translator that that speaks into the actual message.
• 23:47
  Wow, that's true. Well, it's even harder than
• 23:50
  that, Mike, because it's the language of sport.
• 23:53
  It's not the English language. It's the technical language, you
• 23:57
  know, to the science language, the biomechanical, the
• 24:00
  Physiology, all of it. They don't know any of it.
• 24:03
  And I was like, so they're trying to make up words.
• 24:07
  They're actually making up words to get people to understand
• 24:11
  unless, unless they've had because I was in South Korea
• 24:16
  before China for for for almost three years.
• 24:21
  And I had a, a professor there who went to Indiana.
• 24:25
  Her and her husband went to Indiana and they were there with
• 24:28
  Jesus opinion. And so, you know, one time she
• 24:32
  came down and we're talking and everything and we went outside
• 24:36
  for a walk. She said, you know, Randy, I
• 24:37
  don't understand a thing you're saying.
• 24:40
  Your translator is not telling them anything about what you're
• 24:43
  saying. I said, you got to be kid.
• 24:45
  I said no wonder this is so hard because not he didn't understand
• 24:48
  a word you know and and this is that's why I say you need to
• 24:53
  experience failure. Like that?
• 24:55
  Abysmal failure and realize that it's not you, but it's your
• 25:00
  communication. And then all of a sudden you
• 25:02
  take that back to your native language and your communication
• 25:05
  skills change for the better. That's interesting.
• 25:07
  I love that. OK, Randy, let's pause for a
• 25:09
  second. Sure one.
• 25:11
  You mentioned a great movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of
• 25:13
  Doom. And.
• 25:14
  Half our audience is like, what movie is that?
• 25:16
  Who's Indiana Jones? I don't know about.
• 25:17
  That and unfortunately because of your career and I'm gonna
• 25:22
  call it your age and stage, half of our people are like who is
• 25:25
  Randy? Why is he the 350 special
• 25:28
  guests? So let's take a step back
• 25:30
  because you and I know each others history.
• 25:33
  That's great. But we want to actually our main
• 25:35
  goal, our first goal, and we started this seven years ago
• 25:39
  now, was to uplift an honor the person's journey in this
• 25:42
  profession. Because I, I, I do hold this
• 25:44
  profession. Coaching track and field is
• 25:45
  super, super high level. So I like to show how people got
• 25:48
  into the profession, how there's different paths.
• 25:50
  And certainly your path is a little bit different than I'm
• 25:52
  about the norm. So let's sure.
• 25:54
  But let's take a step back here and let's let's kind of get into
• 25:57
  our what I call our normal groove and we'll get back into
• 26:00
  there's so many topics with you, Randy.
• 26:02
  We've had such a great conversation.
• 26:03
  So I wanted to try to hit them all and that'll be impossible,
• 26:06
  but we'll do our best. Let's start with so Randy, where
• 26:10
  does track and field start for you?
• 26:12
  We're assuming you were an athlete and that we'd know.
• 26:15
  That's a not necessarily a good assumption that we've got great
• 26:17
  coaches that weren't athletes. Where does track and field the
• 26:19
  sport start for you? Yeah, it, you know, so let's go
• 26:22
  back to 1967 or 66 when I was in middle school and just before I
• 26:31
  went into high school. So it started for me back
• 26:34
  actually, when you talk about mentors or people, the, the, the
• 26:37
  1st, the first mentors I had were women.
• 26:42
  I had an incredible PE teacher in elementary school called Mrs.
• 26:50
  Pills who went to Southern Illinois.
• 26:52
  She was a great athlete to Southern Illinois in the 50s.
• 26:56
  So she was older, yeah, 40s and 50s.
• 27:00
  Yeah, this is unheard of during this time, honestly.
• 27:02
  No, yeah, no, absolutely. And but, you know, you look at
• 27:05
  you look at physical education in Michigan, Iowa, Illinois,
• 27:08
  we're kind of the pillars. Oregon as well.
• 27:11
  We're sort of the pillars of physical education in Southern
• 27:14
  California sort of followed as people moved around the country.
• 27:17
  But so Henrietta Piltz was her name.
• 27:21
  She really instilled in me two things.
• 27:23
  One, women were equal, meaning that or could be or could be
• 27:28
  athletes as well, because almost all of us got our butts kicked
• 27:32
  by some girl in fifth grade sprinting or 600 yard dash or
• 27:37
  whatever it may be. And you know, because it just,
• 27:40
  we just weren't mature yet. And of course that could have
• 27:43
  continued for years too. But so she was the first one.
• 27:47
  And then when I went into junior high, I was actually so, so, so
• 27:54
  I, we did, we had our track and field back then.
• 27:57
  It was the president's physical fitness thing.
• 28:00
  And you know, I was, I was the best in the school of 600,
• 28:05
  second in the agility. I was fastest in the 50 yard
• 28:10
  dash and, and, and, and, but I was weak in the upper body.
• 28:13
  But these are all things that you remember.
• 28:16
  And we would have our little track meet at the high school
• 28:20
  every year. I won a few medals that kind of
• 28:22
  got me interested, got me going. Then when I went to junior high,
• 28:26
  I mean, we're not only got too much detail, but I, I, I was
• 28:29
  then introduced to track and field by Mr. Nix, who is the
• 28:34
  track and field coach there. And then another, another
• 28:42
  female, actually two female PE teachers who again, were role
• 28:47
  models about how male and female could be.
• 28:51
  I mean, we're, this is early on, unfortunately.
• 28:54
  I would, you would call me woke or DEI back then, which is bad
• 28:58
  words today, apparently. But yeah, these, these women
• 29:03
  were Missus Lamb was 1. Missus Young was another one.
• 29:07
  Miss Young was another one. And then just forgot her name.
• 29:14
  My gosh, she was, she was Japanese and tough as nails and
• 29:20
  she made sure that we all understood that we could all be
• 29:24
  great. And I never sat down with her
• 29:27
  and I wish I had. There was there was a husband
• 29:30
  and wife team, Mr. and Missus Lamb, who you know, we're both
• 29:34
  out of Michigan State and you saw how they treated each other
• 29:39
  with respect and how they saw. So it's just years ahead of.
• 29:43
  Dude, this is fascinating because we've had there's been
• 29:46
  several, but off the top of my head, Sue Humphreys and Karen
• 29:50
  Dennis have been on the podcast and Karen, both of their ladies
• 29:53
  stories of like there just weren't opportunities.
• 29:55
  Women were not seeing anywhere remotely equal on the athletic
• 29:58
  field of like we didn't even have NCAA women's sports at this
• 30:02
  time frame. This is unbelievable that you
• 30:04
  had this so early in your life. This is a fascinating.
• 30:09
  Yeah. I mean we had GAA, that was the
• 30:11
  Girls Athletic Association. You know, that was like 3 on
• 30:15
  three or four on 4 basketball. That was kind of the yeah, it
• 30:19
  was not even 5 on five if I recall.
• 30:23
  I do not think it was 5 on five. And and Miss Komanega, there we
• 30:28
  go. Yeah.
• 30:31
  So, so those first mentors and, and as it kind of is, as you're,
• 30:36
  as you're growing as a young man, you're, you're often times
• 30:39
  enveloped with females before you get to the male part,
• 30:42
  depending upon, you know, back then, all our dads were working,
• 30:45
  you know, and, and the dads that weren't working full time, I
• 30:49
  mean, were, or working full time, the ones that could come
• 30:51
  out were ones that had special jobs so they could come out and
• 30:55
  coach, you know. So for me, it was like Beaver
• 30:58
  football, you know, I started out playing football and, and
• 31:01
  then then I'd never played basketball and I finally got
• 31:04
  hooked on basketball and then track and field became that
• 31:09
  third sport. I wasn't a baseball player.
• 31:14
  And I liked it. I mean, my heroes, you know, and
• 31:17
  and to go on a tangent for a second, I'll never forget my
• 31:21
  first time in Stockholm, walking from the warm up track over to
• 31:25
  the stadium and in my mind thinking, you know, Jim Thorpe
• 31:28
  might have walked this pathway. Yeah, you know, I mean, that's
• 31:31
  the kind of thing you have because those were our heroes
• 31:35
  from those are the books in the library.
• 31:38
  You just went there was a all the sports heroes books.
• 31:41
  But you don't get hard to find probably these days.
• 31:43
  And and it's it's different now. The heroes are on YouTube or
• 31:47
  they're something else. Back then we read about our
• 31:49
  heroes. There weren't many videos of a
• 31:53
  week or at least not easy to find, right.
• 31:57
  So from there on into high school, Bernie Stafford, which I
• 32:02
  think the relays at walled like Western and Michigan are still
• 32:05
  named after Bernie. I'm not sure if they have the
• 32:07
  Stafford relays anymore. Been a long time since I've been
• 32:09
  back. Went out for the team.
• 32:13
  There probably should have been an 800m runner.
• 32:16
  Sprint jumps. I was a good, I was a good
• 32:21
  vertical jumper. I mean, I could dunk when I was
• 32:23
  in 9th grade, you know? And see, I never excelled in in
• 32:36
  track and field. I got kicked off the team two
• 32:39
  years in a row. Perfect.
• 32:42
  Stuff cuz you're a a a normal bratty little boy.
• 32:47
  Well, one time as I drove, I had to get dentist appointment.
• 32:51
  I didn't tell the coach and I had to drive to the dentist and
• 32:54
  then I had to drive to the meet and then he would let me compete
• 32:58
  and that was the district. So I never made it out of
• 33:00
  districts to regionals and I probably would have won the long
• 33:03
  the high jump in districts I. Love, that's the reason, because
• 33:07
  today people, coaches will complain, rightfully so, that a
• 33:10
  kid will just miss practice because they have a hair
• 33:12
  appointment or a dentist. Nothing new guys, this has been
• 33:14
  going on for decades. Well, it's, it's a hard one
• 33:18
  because the coach later on apologized to me because I had
• 33:21
  to drive because my brother had just died and my parents
• 33:25
  couldn't. And so I so it was this, this
• 33:27
  thing, this and he didn't know. And my brother actually ran for
• 33:31
  him years before. But yeah, it just didn't didn't
• 33:36
  work out for me. So when I went, when I, I got
• 33:38
  out of high school, I had this feeling that I just wasn't a
• 33:42
  good athlete. I just didn't, didn't have that
• 33:45
  sense of I was worthy. 2 things happened that that made pushed
• 33:51
  me into coaching. One really bad high school
• 33:55
  coaching, not necessarily in track and field, but in other
• 33:58
  sports. You know, we were at a time,
• 34:00
  Vietnam transitioning culturally in the United States.
• 34:04
  You know, yeah, we're transitioning out of a
• 34:07
  militaristic type of physical education coaching venue to a
• 34:11
  more culturally different, maybe a little more humanistic
• 34:17
  coaching, which is what I kind of grew up learning in, in, in
• 34:21
  university. And I went from high school to
• 34:25
  Western Michigan. And in in my freshman year we
• 34:31
  had to have APE class, so I'm did.
• 34:34
  You go. Did you go to run track there?
• 34:36
  No. OK.
• 34:37
  You went there academically, A. Student.
• 34:40
  Yeah. Academically.
• 34:41
  And what were you as a 18 ish year old kid?
• 34:43
  What were you thinking? You were going there to stay,
• 34:45
  like I'm going to become a doctor.
• 34:47
  Lawyer. No, I was, I was pre Med, yeah.
• 34:50
  Because you're going to. You wanted to become a doctor.
• 34:53
  Yeah, so I, I, I took all the test, different tests and I
• 34:56
  unfortunately I advanced placed out of a lot of freshman
• 34:59
  classes, which is a real mistake, by the way.
• 35:02
  It's a miserable experience because I was way in over my
• 35:05
  head. But so I had to take APE class.
• 35:09
  It was mandatory that back then. And I chose basketball.
• 35:14
  And the basketball teacher was the former head coach
• 35:17
  Basketball. He just retired.
• 35:20
  Eldon Miller was the guy who came in and replaced him.
• 35:23
  And, you know, we're there the first week.
• 35:26
  And he says, did you ever play basketball?
• 35:28
  I go, yeah, but I wasn't very good.
• 35:31
  And he goes, oh, no, no, no, you're very good.
• 35:34
  It's first time anybody ever said you're good.
• 35:38
  Wow. That's A and that's a powerful
• 35:41
  message for anybody because you're, you're, you know, as a,
• 35:46
  as a kid, I don't care if you're the, the number one quarterback
• 35:49
  or whatever, it's still in there, man.
• 35:51
  You're still that confidence level is still got to be pumped
• 35:54
  up and that. Was the first.
• 35:57
  This is 50. It's 1972.
• 36:02
  Yeah, 50 plus years ago and you remember that.
• 36:05
  Oh yeah. That's that's the, to me, the
• 36:08
  story right there of like you wouldn't talk about the impact
• 36:10
  of a coach. And I know this guy now is your
• 36:12
  teacher, but he was a coach. You remember that?
• 36:14
  That's unbelievable. That's amazing.
• 36:17
  Well, because it didn't happen very often, you know, I mean, it
• 36:20
  just didn't. It's like, oh, oh, that's
• 36:23
  interesting. The first time in basketball,
• 36:25
  everybody anybody ever said you're you're talented, you
• 36:29
  know, and he tried to get me to go out for the team because I
• 36:33
  think you should walk on. That's crazy.
• 36:36
  And I was nothing in high school.
• 36:38
  I mean, right. And and I said, Nah, probably
• 36:42
  I'm studying everything. So I didn't do it.
• 36:46
  So to move on real quickly that year that back then we had an
• 36:51
  all an all university track meet, which is kind of fun.
• 36:56
  Oh, wow, yeah, It was really cool.
• 36:58
  Really. So all the dorms, fraternities,
• 37:00
  everybody came and they had a track meet.
• 37:03
  That's cool. And, you know, separate from
• 37:05
  obviously the varsity team. And I, I somebody said, they
• 37:10
  said, hey, did anybody run tracking?
• 37:11
  We got to meet, we got to go. You know what we want to do.
• 37:14
  So, you know, some of us rose our hand, raised their hands and
• 37:18
  I went to that track meet and they said, So what can you do?
• 37:21
  And I said, I don't know. What do you, what do you need?
• 37:23
  You know, I said, well, we need somebody for the 60, the long
• 37:28
  jump, the high jump in the 800. And I'm like, in one day, you
• 37:32
  know? Yeah, yeah.
• 37:34
  OK, I guess so. So I get to the 60 and I and I
• 37:39
  and I, I line up in the 60 and I look around me and it's like 6
• 37:45
  brothers and two white guys. I'm like, oh, I'm getting my ass
• 37:47
  kicked here. This is over because I recognize
• 37:50
  the guys I was running against because they were good high
• 37:54
  school athletes. I remember them from some of the
• 37:58
  meats. And you know the Long story
• 38:02
  short, we went 1-2 and you know, a so I went, I forget what I ran
• 38:08
  something like 6-8 in the 60 back, you know, with without any
• 38:12
  training. So it was fast enough.
• 38:14
  But then I went over to the long jump and went 22 one in the long
• 38:18
  jump. I always remember that and then
• 38:19
  63 in the high jump and then 158 in the 800.
• 38:24
  So and with no training. Wow.
• 38:28
  And at that, at that point I started to think I probably
• 38:32
  should have run track. Yeah, I'll say did.
• 38:35
  First of all, we need to bring this back.
• 38:36
  These all, you know. Yeah, that's awesome.
• 38:38
  It reminds me of the old Revenge of the Nerds.
• 38:41
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 38:43
  I love that. Did did the track coach take
• 38:46
  notice? Especially like the long jump in
• 38:48
  the in the 60 are kind of like, well, that's, you know, they
• 38:50
  could probably do something. That would have been worthy.
• 38:52
  I mean, I think that would have put me #5 on the track team or
• 38:54
  something. Without nothing, with no
• 38:56
  training, with training, who knows?
• 38:57
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They didn't.
• 39:01
  They had some pretty talented kids at that time.
• 39:04
  And I of course, they didn't pursue it either.
• 39:07
  So, and I'll never forget being because this is just the, this
• 39:12
  is the year before I moved to Oregon.
• 39:15
  So I'm out on the track and I'll never forget a kid named Dennis
• 39:21
  Bell, Denny Bell, Denny coming over to me.
• 39:25
  And I was just it, This is I was just at the track.
• 39:29
  This is as I was passing through actually because I had already
• 39:33
  left Western and so I I went for 2 1/2 years left and went and
• 39:38
  worked at Fords. So I worked on the line for two
• 39:41
  almost. Two years.
• 39:42
  This is a movie. No, I'll tell you, man, I worked
• 39:46
  in the Ford on the line. It was, it's it's, yeah, it was.
• 39:50
  It was a very interesting time. You learn what you don't want to
• 39:53
  do. Yeah, I'd say that's tough,
• 39:55
  right? Yeah.
• 39:55
  It was great money. I was I was making 60 grand a
• 39:58
  year at 9 to 21. Holy cow.
• 40:00
  Yeah, I mean, I was working my ass off, saving money, trying to
• 40:04
  do everything good. But I'll never forget being on
• 40:07
  that track and having Denny come over and he goes, he was just he
• 40:12
  was just disheartened. And I go, dude, what's wrong?
• 40:14
  He goes pre died. I'm like what now?
• 40:19
  I didn't know pre that well because I didn't, I wasn't in
• 40:23
  those events, Right, right, right.
• 40:25
  I kind of knew who he was, of course.
• 40:27
  And and then little did I know I was moving there in about 20
• 40:31
  days. So I made the decision to move
• 40:33
  to Oregon right at that time. And you know, that's that that's
• 40:40
  kind of started that process when I got to Oregon and.
• 40:45
  But why? Why moved to Oregon?
• 40:46
  What I mean that's Kalamazoo is different than Eugene.
• 40:48
  What? What are you Oh, it is, but not
• 40:50
  not a lot different, but it's different.
• 40:54
  Here's why I moved to Oregon. I was dating a girl who then
• 40:59
  went to work at Cedar Point, in in Ohio, you know, and her
• 41:05
  roommates aunt lived in Oregon and her roommate's aunt sent her
• 41:09
  a picture book, which I still have the same one back here
• 41:12
  somewhere. And it was a picture book of
• 41:15
  Oregon. I'm like, no place like this
• 41:18
  exists in the United States. I said I'm going there and I
• 41:22
  made it. I just said I'm no matter what,
• 41:24
  I'm going there. And so I picked up everything,
• 41:27
  left boards, and transferred out to to Oregon.
• 41:34
  With the idea of coaching track, are we still?
• 41:37
  Yeah, OK, so we're totally unrelated.
• 41:39
  Yeah. OK, OK, got it.
• 41:40
  Got. It yeah, I'm, I'm out of I'm not
• 41:42
  even in that mode yet. Wow.
• 41:44
  Dude. Yeah.
• 41:46
  And of course Oregon was everything that I thought it was
• 41:50
  going to be. I mean, of course I transferred,
• 41:52
  I would transferred out to Oregon State.
• 41:54
  So I wanted to go, I wanted to change to marine biology, but I
• 41:57
  got to Corvallis at that point in time and went, I don't know
• 42:01
  if I could live here, you know, drove down to Eugene and went,
• 42:05
  oh, this is cool. And it so happens that when I
• 42:07
  drove down to Eugene, it was the USC Oregon dual meet.
• 42:12
  OK. And I, I, I bought a ticket,
• 42:16
  went in and you know, there's 14,000 people that dual meet and
• 42:19
  I'm like. Never seen this before.
• 42:21
  No, no, I'm like. What is this?
• 42:24
  You know this is pretty cool. So I worked, saved more money,
• 42:33
  switched degrees. So I went from pre Med to
• 42:37
  physical education, had a great physical PE school at that time
• 42:40
  and still do. Went out to Lane Community
• 42:44
  College, worked in the bookstore, took the first two
• 42:47
  years of prerequisites for PE in one year and and then
• 42:52
  transferred into Oregon. My first class at Oregon, one of
• 42:56
  them was back then we had to do activity courses, which means we
• 42:59
  had to actually take, we actually had to take the course
• 43:02
  and do the sport. So you had to do every sport.
• 43:06
  You were going to potentially teach every sport.
• 43:10
  I mean, I did field hockey, I did everything.
• 43:12
  Wow. You know, each we had courses
• 43:15
  for all of them. One of them was track and field
• 43:18
  and one of the instructors who was my, what I would consider my
• 43:21
  first mentor is Dennis Whitby. And you know, I finished that
• 43:26
  course and Dennis, you know, took me aside at that time.
• 43:30
  He said, hey, I, I need an assistant because I was a little
• 43:33
  older. So I went back to school older
• 43:36
  and he said I need an assistant. You interested in helping me
• 43:40
  out? And that started the process of
• 43:43
  me learning how to coach. What do you think?
• 43:47
  Why you, I understand a little bit older and all that kind of
• 43:50
  stuff, but like did you like, did you ask more questions or
• 43:54
  more in depth? Like were you more curious about
• 43:56
  track and field than the other students or what?
• 43:58
  I think is the curiosity and I I displayed what looked like track
• 44:03
  and field talent in in the courses you know.
• 44:06
  Because you want to do them. So yeah, I saw you do them.
• 44:09
  Yeah, yeah, sure. He's like, oh, and I mean, I'll
• 44:11
  never forget this. This is another one of those
• 44:13
  things I'll never forget. 1976 Olympic Trials and Mel Darn Mel
• 44:21
  Mel Auburn. Let me, let me.
• 44:25
  No, no, no, shoot, I feel horrible.
• 44:29
  Anyways, he was doing, he was, he was doing, you know, they had
• 44:33
  the course back then. It would have a coach's clinic
• 44:35
  before, right, right. Or during.
• 44:38
  And I'll never forget we were doing drills and during this
• 44:42
  drill time, he looked he, you know, I'm doing the drills.
• 44:47
  He goes, that's a sprinter right there.
• 44:49
  And I'm like, who you, who you pointing at?
• 44:52
  I'm looking over my shoulder, you know.
• 44:54
  It was bugging me too, because I do love this man.
• 44:57
  Rest in peace, Mel Rosen. Yes.
• 44:59
  Thank. You.
• 44:59
  Yeah, yeah, no, he's bugging me too because I'm like, wait a
• 45:01
  minute, this guy deserves we make sure.
• 45:03
  He Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mel is no coach.
• 45:05
  Mel is great. And and I brought that up to Mel
• 45:07
  years later and he goes really, because he didn't remember it.
• 45:10
  Of course he didn't remember it. Yeah, yeah.
• 45:12
  And that was, again, you know, that other time where somebody
• 45:16
  reinforced who you were. I mean, if you think about it,
• 45:19
  I'm going now on just two reinforcements, right?
• 45:23
  You know, that's driving me right on top of my own.
• 45:27
  I, I'm, I'm, I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, which drives a
• 45:33
  lot of this, by the way. You know, it's a negative
• 45:35
  emotion, but you can do positive emotion or negative.
• 45:39
  Either one drives you, right. You know, and it's, I think it's
• 45:43
  easier to talk about this at this age than it is to talk
• 45:46
  about it when you're certainly 28 to 32 or whatever and you're
• 45:49
  just trying to be the smartest guy in the room, you know, cuz
• 45:54
  your ability to listen isn't often times as good as it should
• 45:56
  be. Yeah.
• 45:57
  But and things that we think are weaknesses cut deeper, like at
• 46:02
  our age stage now it's like, Oh yeah, I suck at this or I was
• 46:04
  bad at this. When you're 30 or something,
• 46:06
  it's like, Oh no, I'm, I'm invincible in your in your head,
• 46:09
  you in your head, you know you're not.
• 46:11
  But externally you've got to you feel like you have to show.
• 46:14
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For.
• 46:15
  Sure. Yeah.
• 46:15
  I mean, particularly when you're starting to coach, you got to
• 46:17
  be, you know, there's that little bit, that little bit of
• 46:20
  an ass, not much, but enough to where the respect, particularly
• 46:25
  if you're only a few years older than the athletes, you know, I
• 46:28
  mean, the athletes I started with are now 6566.
• 46:34
  You know, if you think about it, it's a hard to hard to imagine,
• 46:37
  but yeah. So that was, you know, that
• 46:42
  little thing from Mel Dennis would be asking me.
• 46:45
  So then I started my process of coaching from there.
• 46:49
  I listened to Dennis. I did the workouts, you know, I
• 46:52
  was his Gopher. I was timing everything.
• 46:55
  I did all the running drills. So I started out doing running
• 46:57
  drills and a drill, drill, drill, drill.
• 47:00
  I mean, I learned running mechanics really well.
• 47:06
  But, and this is where it gets interesting for people today.
• 47:09
  I did that for five years, but no pay six days a week, you
• 47:15
  know, and, and finished that thinking.
• 47:20
  I'm kind of know what I'm doing now, you know, and, and, and I
• 47:23
  did, the nice thing is years later, many years later, I had
• 47:29
  the chance in Hong Kong to do a lecture for a Hong Kong
• 47:32
  Institute of Sport. And I and Dennis had moved to
• 47:35
  Hong Kong. And I saw Dennis standing in the
• 47:37
  back of the room and, and I, and I, and I just stopped everybody.
• 47:41
  I said, look, I need to say this now.
• 47:44
  The reason I'm here is because of that man there, you know?
• 47:48
  And, and it's true, it's still true that Dennis really set me
• 47:52
  up for everything. That's.
• 47:55
  Cool, that's the. Second opportunity to.
• 47:57
  Do that. That's it really is.
• 47:59
  I mean the second person and the person who then gave me the next
• 48:02
  opportunity is Tony Sandoval and Cal.
• 48:06
  And you know Tony bet on me. I was a nobody.
• 48:11
  I had left Oregon, graduated, moved on.
• 48:14
  I would gone to Florida, not University of Florida, going
• 48:16
  down to Palm Beach, opened up some health clubs, worked with
• 48:19
  the PGA, you know, I mean. How did you get involved in that
• 48:23
  though, Because I mean, I'm just think of this like, you know,
• 48:25
  freshly undergrad grad student. I I guess, but maybe not since
• 48:30
  you talked about going to Florida and doing PGA golf,
• 48:32
  things like that. I don't really see like you are
• 48:35
  set that I'm going to become a track coach at this point.
• 48:37
  Don't, no, I mean, it was, you know, I was, I would like to
• 48:40
  have, but there was no, I applied for jobs but didn't get
• 48:43
  any. My, my, my grandmother lived at
• 48:46
  near Palm Beach. So I, it's I, it was a free
• 48:49
  place to live and you know, you run out of money.
• 48:52
  So I moved down there and at PGA was Gary Wyvern, who was an
• 48:58
  Oregon PhD and a couple other Oregon grads were all working
• 49:03
  there. So it was natural for me to go
• 49:05
  in and start working, you know, working seniors and everybody.
• 49:08
  It's just, it was at PGA. I mean, it was no big deal, but
• 49:12
  then I went to the Palm Beach and opened up the Summit Health
• 49:15
  Club and then the first health club at the Breakers.
• 49:19
  Yeah. So I mean, kind of an
• 49:21
  interesting part. And then off of that, and that's
• 49:24
  where I put in my first line of Kaiser equipment.
• 49:27
  That's 1983. Wow, That's how long Kaiser?
• 49:30
  It's been that long. Yeah, right.
• 49:33
  Wow. Yeah, that's it's, you know,
• 49:34
  we're looking at 43 years I've used it.
• 49:37
  Now. Too.
• 49:37
  So it is part of my DNA? Absolutely.
• 49:41
  And, and, and that's where I actually met the whole Kaiser's
• 49:47
  thought process. It's like, you mean you can do
• 49:49
  this? OK, that's easy enough.
• 49:53
  And on that, that occurred to me at a pretty young age and it, it
• 49:58
  kind of, I didn't think of myself as being that smart, but
• 50:04
  it's, it's taken so long for so many people to figure out how to
• 50:09
  use it. And, and then it's, I mean, I,
• 50:12
  I've tried to succeed without it, never been able to it just
• 50:16
  it, it is, it is a necessary part of my programming.
• 50:22
  And, and I don't get paid by Kaiser.
• 50:23
  None of that. It's the, it's, it's the way it
• 50:25
  is. So I was introduced to Kaiser at
• 50:30
  a little trade show down in Fort Lauderdale in, you know, 1983.
• 50:35
  And when I saw that, I went, this is what we need.
• 50:39
  And, you know, particularly given that, like at the
• 50:42
  Breakers, you're in a hotel situation with a very
• 50:46
  considerably different group of people.
• 50:49
  And I went to the 1984 NC 2A's in Eugene, went out there and
• 50:58
  somebody said, hey, you know, Cal's looking for a coach, went
• 51:02
  up in the stands, talked to Tony, you know, And so I, I, I
• 51:09
  told the people in, in the at PGA and Breakers, because I was
• 51:15
  doing both that I was going to just going to go leave and go
• 51:20
  coach. So the guy offered, he said,
• 51:22
  because look, I'll pay you 70,000 a year to stay.
• 51:26
  This is 1983. And I said and no.
• 51:30
  OK, so now, now you're going to get how stupid I am.
• 51:33
  I know how much that is back then, and I just have a bet that
• 51:36
  Berkeley ain't paying you that. Berkeley was 6500.
• 51:42
  I thought you might say 65 grand.
• 51:43
  I was like to God, 6500 sprints, hurdles.
• 51:48
  Relays wait. OK, hold on.
• 51:50
  I've always thought of you a very intelligent.
• 51:52
  No, no, no. You're.
• 51:53
  You're you're you're it's worth worth.
• 51:56
  No, no, I mean this ain't even in the same stratosphere, my
• 52:00
  friend. That's how strong a pull
• 52:02
  coaching was for me at that. Point, that's what I was going
• 52:05
  to, I was going to say track and field, but that's was that the
• 52:08
  pull coaching track and field. Track and field, track and field
• 52:11
  coaching, yeah. It was that pull.
• 52:14
  So that's how strong that was to actually leave that kind of
• 52:18
  money. Yeah, which changed my lifestyle
• 52:21
  completely. I mean, you know, I moved out
• 52:25
  there. I'm like, where am I going to
• 52:26
  live? Yeah.
• 52:27
  What was Berkeley I ended up like?
• 52:29
  Like today, Berkeley is a is a super expensive place to live.
• 52:32
  Was it like that back then or was it more?
• 52:34
  It was, it was rent control, but it's 6500.
• 52:37
  What are you going to? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:38
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I ended up living in a
• 52:40
  garage. Yeah.
• 52:43
  I literally lived in a garage. You mean what you it's, it's a,
• 52:48
  it's a fascinating journey that people just don't understand.
• 52:52
  And, you know, this is what this is what you do.
• 52:54
  I mean, I remember someone once saying to me, no, you guys, just
• 53:00
  you guys are different than us because you'd go, you'd go sleep
• 53:03
  on a park bench just to get information, just to learn.
• 53:07
  I mean, I'm like, Oh yeah, done it.
• 53:10
  Been there. You know, and, and, and most of
• 53:13
  us have back in those days, you weren't, you weren't paid very
• 53:17
  much as a coach. You know, I mean, 6500 at Cal
• 53:21
  was, I mean, probably the highest paid assistant in other
• 53:25
  sports outside of the, you know, basketball.
• 53:27
  Another was maybe 18 back then. Is this still the time frame?
• 53:32
  Because it's not until I'm going to say recently and now recently
• 53:35
  could be 20-30 years, but our track coaches weren't really
• 53:39
  seen as that was what your profession was.
• 53:41
  You were a a teacher in the physical education department
• 53:44
  who also coached almost like our high school coaches.
• 53:46
  You were a teacher who also happened to coach track.
• 53:49
  Was it still that time frame? Or was just the ending of it was
• 53:53
  just the ending of it? It used to be that you coach
• 53:58
  that it Depending on the school, if you were a coach, you
• 54:01
  probably taught one course or maybe 2.
• 54:05
  But in this particular case, it was the time where it was just
• 54:07
  starting to become track is becoming its own, not just
• 54:10
  track. Football coaches had it.
• 54:12
  I mean, you know, in Oregon I had to head football coach
• 54:15
  teaching. They had basketball coach
• 54:16
  teaching. They were all teaching classes
• 54:18
  for us in physical education. So I mean, you got that.
• 54:22
  You got their view of the world. It was really.
• 54:25
  I think, I assume fascinating because of the hierarchy of
• 54:27
  sports. It was just more track and
• 54:29
  field, but all sports. Wow, that's interesting.
• 54:31
  At that point, Nick Saban would have been coaching how to coach
• 54:34
  or teaching how to coach football.
• 54:35
  I'm sure Nick did it, yeah. Anybody in Nick's age group?
• 54:39
  Yeah. Probably did, because Nick's
• 54:41
  just a couple years older than me, I think.
• 54:42
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, that's.
• 54:47
  So is your just the beginning of that big old $6500 salary?
• 54:51
  Are you just coaching track and field?
• 54:53
  Are you also? I imagine you had to be
• 54:55
  supplementing somehow. Whether you're at a local gym or
• 54:57
  you teaching a class, you're just coaching track and field
• 55:01
  for six. Nights when I had sprints,
• 55:03
  turtles, jumps, relays yeah, I hadn't.
• 55:05
  And Heptathlon. Yeah, I.
• 55:07
  No time it was. You know, and so that first
• 55:10
  year, I think we, we didn't have many, many good kids.
• 55:14
  And I'm going to say this, and this is going to sound horrible
• 55:17
  to say. So we're, I, I, I was talking
• 55:21
  with Tony and I remember having this conversation with him one
• 55:24
  day. I said, Tony, we got to get some
• 55:25
  better athletes here. We're going to be two years out
• 55:30
  of this. I said, I'm going to propose
• 55:32
  this to you. And I said I noticed something
• 55:35
  when we were at like Mount SAC or whatever, when USC or UCLA
• 55:39
  came walking on the track, people, people watched.
• 55:44
  Now, these were just some good looking athletes.
• 55:48
  I mean, they were not only talented, but they were
• 55:51
  beautiful girls. They just had this aura about
• 55:54
  them like we're going to kick your butt, you know, I don't
• 55:57
  care who you are. And I said we need to get some
• 56:00
  girls with confidence, even if they're not great athletes yet,
• 56:03
  we can coach them up, you know, So I, I think we ended up with
• 56:08
  like 8 valedictorians or something like that, or 9.
• 56:12
  And, and, and, and more than half were homecoming Queens.
• 56:17
  What we figured out in this, at this particular time is that
• 56:20
  women were attracted to women. I mean, not sexually, but they
• 56:26
  just wanted to be in a space where there was this really
• 56:29
  uplifting, good, positive situation.
• 56:34
  And that really, I mean, as crazy as it sounds and it sounds
• 56:38
  horrible, but it helped us find some of the better ones.
• 56:43
  And after I left Cal, that continued and they got better
• 56:46
  and better and better athletes. I mean, they just start
• 56:49
  recruiting. What's the?
• 56:50
  Status of women college are we still AIW or AIU whatever it was
• 56:54
  or we. No, we were.
• 56:56
  We were the beginning of NCS. OK.
• 56:57
  So we're at that. Point second year of NC, I think
• 57:00
  Texas won the first year, didn't they that.
• 57:02
  Makes sense, yeah. 85, yeah. That makes sense.
• 57:05
  So this was so my first year there was 8485, I think Texas
• 57:10
  won in 85 and I think that was the first or second year, I
• 57:12
  can't remember because Gary, Florida State might have won the
• 57:16
  first one, but I do not remember what year it changed 838485
• 57:21
  somewhere in there, but it was NC 2 as at this point.
• 57:24
  It's interesting that you're, I'll call it your instincts
• 57:27
  because you're still a pup as it comes to coaching.
• 57:30
  But most of us would have come into that situation and our
• 57:32
  statement to Tony would have been we got to get better
• 57:34
  talent. They got to run fast.
• 57:36
  And I know that was still a part of your caveat, but you were
• 57:39
  more focused on we got to get confidence because we can coach
• 57:41
  them up, but they can't come in thinking like, well, I'm already
• 57:43
  second. There's USC.
• 57:45
  That's the best we can do. That's interesting.
• 57:47
  That was your instincts. Well, the, I mean, the instinct
• 57:50
  was what attracts better talent OR more talent to the team?
• 57:56
  And it was whether they're good or not, what they look like when
• 58:01
  they walked on that track. And I'll tell you, I mean, we
• 58:04
  had Sheila Hudson and there was some other women.
• 58:06
  So there was, you know, but when they walked on that track, they,
• 58:11
  they had presence. And even if they weren't the
• 58:13
  best women on the track, they had presence.
• 58:16
  And that presence said something to other, other young women who
• 58:21
  had talent. And then the talent started
• 58:23
  following the presence. That's interesting.
• 58:26
  So I mean, so it was strange, but worked because Cal was hard
• 58:35
  and academically, Cal was really, really difficult.
• 58:38
  I mean, you know, Stanford was easy compared to Cal back then.
• 58:43
  So you had to be bright or you weren't going to make it.
• 58:46
  So we couldn't recruit any Dum Dums.
• 58:49
  That just was not going to happen.
• 58:50
  These were all really, really smart women.
• 58:53
  Was this is this even before the PAC 8 or what?
• 58:57
  What kind of conference? That was the NOR PAC.
• 59:00
  Back then, so we weren't even in PAC-8 type.
• 59:02
  No, because in the beginning we were N so USCUCLA weren't even
• 59:07
  in the same conference yet. Think the PAC 12 started either
• 59:14
  my last year or 88, I cannot remember.
• 59:16
  OK. I think it was the second year.
• 59:21
  Yeah, Tony would know. Yeah.
• 59:22
  And Tony, you should have Tony on at some point because Tony's.
• 59:25
  Yeah, Tony's Tony. Tony has so many stories and so
• 59:29
  much history from the Duke City dashers all the way up until his
• 59:33
  time. You know, you kind of forget all
• 59:36
  that, that that history back in in Albuquerque where he started.
• 59:40
  Yeah. I mean, he, Chuck Davis and
• 59:43
  others all came out of that. Yeah.
• 59:45
  You know. I don't think I knew that he was
• 59:48
  a ABQ guy because I'm always fascinated with New Mexico track
• 59:51
  and field because it's a, you know, very sparsely populated
• 59:54
  state. But man, specifically coaching,
• 59:56
  obviously athletes too, but coaching wise, we've had some, I
• 1:00:00
  mean, just monsters of coaching. Obviously the Henry is Mario
• 1:00:04
  Satania. Gosh I always forget my guy the
• 1:00:08
  the Catholic that went to Duke. The good 1500 meter long jumper.
• 1:00:14
  Young and you know, he's coaching now, but I mean just
• 1:00:17
  some amazing coaches out of this just small population in New
• 1:00:23
  Mexico well. You know, you mean you talk
• 1:00:25
  about Tony, you know they made the movie about the Duke City
• 1:00:27
  dashers. Yeah, that's when you said that
• 1:00:29
  I was like, oh, I know that. Yeah.
• 1:00:30
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and that was yeah.
• 1:00:33
  I mean, that's one of those relatively good track and field
• 1:00:36
  movies, you know, from from the early 70s.
• 1:00:39
  Yeah. And that was his, that was his
• 1:00:42
  coaching partner that passed away.
• 1:00:44
  Oh, is that right? Yeah, yeah, they, they had to do
• 1:00:48
  that, that group, Yeah, but. So you're at Cal Berkeley.
• 1:00:52
  This is the kind of the start of your coaching career We would
• 1:00:55
  think, man, you know, that means you've gone on and coached, you
• 1:00:58
  know, 20-30 decades of college. And we know that's not true.
• 1:01:01
  So how how long that Cal and what was next?
• 1:01:04
  Two years, OK. And I and, and I just couldn't
• 1:01:07
  afford to deal live anymore. You know, it was the other a few
• 1:01:14
  other extenuating circumstances in my personal life.
• 1:01:17
  But I just said, you know, I just need to leave.
• 1:01:20
  I need to get to live. I made that decision several
• 1:01:24
  times in my life thinking that, OK, I need to have a balance.
• 1:01:28
  And both times really didn't work out well for me.
• 1:01:32
  Balance is this does not seem to be part of in my particular
• 1:01:36
  life. I'm going to have to laugh about
• 1:01:38
  that a little bit now. So yeah, there.
• 1:01:43
  And then what happened is I coached Sheila Hudson and Sheila
• 1:01:48
  did pretty well her her freshman year, which is, you know, the
• 1:01:51
  1986 NCS. And then I left and I went to
• 1:02:01
  work for Jack Scott and doing some things and it, you know,
• 1:02:03
  old friend Jack who's, you know, just had this incredible career
• 1:02:10
  in sports, sociology and everything.
• 1:02:12
  I mean, Jack was just an icon. But off of that, I moved.
• 1:02:18
  I moved to LA to help with Jack. And I'm down there and I get a
• 1:02:23
  call from Willie because Willie, Willie had married one of the
• 1:02:29
  800 meter runners from the team. And he says, and I, you know, he
• 1:02:32
  was, he had been working with Chuck Davis and he just, he had
• 1:02:35
  to get out. He was getting too dicey with
• 1:02:37
  Chuck. And he says, hey, I, I need to
• 1:02:42
  coach you, you know, you're willing.
• 1:02:44
  And I, I lived about 10 blocks from him.
• 1:02:47
  He says, and I, and I got this other guy.
• 1:02:49
  He's, he's decent. You know, his name's Mike
• 1:02:52
  Powell, you know, so that started me working with Mike and
• 1:02:58
  Willie. OK, so first of all, he's saying
• 1:03:00
  Willie, Willie Banks, who's been on the podcast, by the way, he's
• 1:03:03
  amazing storyteller. Highly recommend you go back and
• 1:03:06
  listen to him when you say, OK, so we know what Willie Banks was
• 1:03:09
  at this point. He was, you know, super good.
• 1:03:11
  Where was Mike Powell at this point?
• 1:03:12
  Was he good? Or like he said he had this
• 1:03:15
  other guy but like was he jumping 8 meters at this point
• 1:03:18
  or is he? He had a windy 8 something, but
• 1:03:23
  it was majority of time he was 25 feet, you know, 26 feet,
• 1:03:29
  right, right. Just around 8 meters or under.
• 1:03:32
  Kind of like what happened in China.
• 1:03:34
  You know, I get to China and the majority of guys, they are 780
• 1:03:38
  to, you know, 795. And off of that group, I had
• 1:03:44
  just just from that group only 847-840-7843, 834-830-1829 and
• 1:03:51
  then one more at 8:24. You know, it's, I mean, I mean,
• 1:03:56
  I hit 8 guys in China over 820, which is crazy.
• 1:04:00
  Yeah, yeah. There's not a lot of guys have
• 1:04:02
  even coached an 820 guy well. There ain't that many 820 guys
• 1:04:06
  in the whole scope of the the thing not not.
• 1:04:09
  Today, that's for sure. Yeah, what is you know so.
• 1:04:11
  Backwards So So what? What gives you?
• 1:04:14
  I'm going. To use the word audacity here,
• 1:04:16
  Randy, Yeah, What's the. It's a good word, yeah.
• 1:04:19
  To coach these guys, maybe a Mike because he's where he is at
• 1:04:24
  that point. He's not becoming who becomes
• 1:04:26
  because of you, but Willie is certainly the highly achieved at
• 1:04:30
  this point. What?
• 1:04:31
  What makes you even think like I can work with these guys?
• 1:04:35
  Well, I you know, the triple jump is one of those events I
• 1:04:39
  had a a fairly high IQ in and I just did it did came to me
• 1:04:44
  naturally easily. Matter of fact, I coached Sheila
• 1:04:48
  three different times in her career over the years.
• 1:04:52
  But what really did it for me is that our Willie and I met and
• 1:04:57
  then with a week later or so, we're going to Iowa with Doctor
• 1:05:01
  Hay. So I'm in my first meeting with
• 1:05:04
  Doctor Hay, you know, which was like putting a kid in a candy
• 1:05:08
  shop, you know, I mean, there's just like, this is incredible.
• 1:05:13
  This is fun. Doctor Hay became a dear friend
• 1:05:17
  and and and and my next mentor. Really.
• 1:05:22
  Tony. You know, he went from dentist
• 1:05:23
  to Tony. Now I have a scientific mentor,
• 1:05:25
  biomechanical mentor in Doctor Haigh didn't get much better
• 1:05:28
  than that. Yeah.
• 1:05:29
  You know, in a, in A and as. An academic setting, meaning
• 1:05:32
  that. You know, yeah, that.
• 1:05:33
  That can more easily occur if you're in that, that academic
• 1:05:35
  setting, you're on the sports setting, the athletic setting.
• 1:05:37
  Yeah, and what people forget is Doctor Haigh was a long jumper,
• 1:05:40
  triple jumper himself. I didn't.
• 1:05:42
  Know that and his assistant, his graduatist at the time was you
• 1:05:46
  Bing, who was Chinese from Beijing, who's been over in
• 1:05:49
  China with me helping us over there a little bit.
• 1:05:52
  So this, the continuity of Doctor Hay from 1987 until today
• 1:05:58
  has been carried on through Bing and who's now retiring out of
• 1:06:03
  North Carolina, I think. But so I went there, had this
• 1:06:10
  opportunity to sit with Doctor Hay and learn everything that I
• 1:06:14
  whatever I didn't know about the triple jump, that it was coming
• 1:06:18
  to me really fast then. And you know, of course, when
• 1:06:21
  you're when you're dealing with somebody like Willie, you, you
• 1:06:24
  definitely are learning on the job.
• 1:06:28
  You're learning what's good and what's bad.
• 1:06:30
  You can see what's what Willie was missing.
• 1:06:33
  And you know, we kind of tell my Willie story.
• 1:06:40
  We were down at in San Diego and I, I was working Willie and Mike
• 1:06:44
  pretty hard that that first year was, was really difficult for
• 1:06:50
  them. And we went down to San Diego
• 1:06:53
  and, and, and I sort of explained to Willie what, what I
• 1:06:56
  was looking at peeking wise. Now, Mike was a very fast twitch
• 1:07:00
  guy and Willie's not as fast twitch.
• 1:07:02
  Willie is just a little bit more moderate.
• 1:07:04
  And Willie may not remember this, but so we're there and
• 1:07:09
  he'll remember this for sure. But he's at the old mobile
• 1:07:12
  meeting in San Diego and he jumps like 4963 weeks before the
• 1:07:19
  Olympic trials. Oh dude, not good.
• 1:07:21
  Yeah, I mean. You can imagine where his head
• 1:07:23
  was. Yeah.
• 1:07:25
  And, and I said, look, Willie, don't worry about it because the
• 1:07:29
  way I'm peaking you, you're coming, you're going to come
• 1:07:32
  down. There's that delayed onset of
• 1:07:34
  peaking, which a lot of people forget about, but particularly
• 1:07:37
  in the jumps, you go down a little bit before you come up
• 1:07:41
  because the training effect, I mean, training in itself is
• 1:07:43
  destructive in nature. And it's, you know, so you've
• 1:07:46
  got that training effect that continues.
• 1:07:48
  And then it's start, then you're then you're starting to actually
• 1:07:51
  go into the peaking part. Now, as you get older, you get
• 1:07:54
  better and better at that little part of it, but just the same,
• 1:07:57
  it still happens. And you got to prepare them
• 1:07:59
  mentally. I didn't prepare Willie mentally
• 1:08:01
  for. But what we did see that day and
• 1:08:05
  and he pointed out to me, he goes, you know, I'm just not
• 1:08:08
  getting on the board, right. And a couple of days later we
• 1:08:14
  had practice and he and he was out there before me and he came
• 1:08:19
  over and says I got it. I mean, he said, I got it.
• 1:08:23
  Now, that's when I had Willie, Mike Gordon Lane and Al Joyner,
• 1:08:28
  you know. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:31
  You know, out of the in the 88 trials, I had four of the top 8
• 1:08:36
  or 10, four of the top ten, I guess.
• 1:08:40
  But and, and, and I saw Willie come down the runway and, and
• 1:08:45
  this has been something ever since.
• 1:08:48
  And it's something I try to get across to people.
• 1:08:50
  And we, I, I, you may or may not have seen me talking different
• 1:08:54
  podcast about the 2M mark. And it's something Doctor Hay
• 1:08:58
  and I worked out back in the, in the 80s because I, that, that
• 1:09:02
  very first meeting with Doctor Hay was long jump and triple
• 1:09:05
  jump. So we had Mike in the long jump.
• 1:09:07
  I asked him about him. He didn't have Mike there, but I
• 1:09:10
  said, can you, can you, can you share with me what you're
• 1:09:13
  seeing? And that next year when we went
• 1:09:18
  back, he went through it all again and he's showing it.
• 1:09:22
  And I, I, you know, I put my hand up.
• 1:09:25
  I said, Doctor, hey, I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but
• 1:09:30
  you're only showing us the, the posit that the fair jumps.
• 1:09:34
  And he says, well, well, yeah, I that that's, that's true.
• 1:09:38
  And I said, but that's not our longest jumps.
• 1:09:41
  Our longest jumps are falls. What are we doing in the falls?
• 1:09:44
  It's different than the fair jumps because that's what we
• 1:09:47
  need to learn, because then we need to find a way to make that
• 1:09:50
  foul jump a fair jump biomechanically.
• 1:09:53
  And you know, he went, duh. I mean, to his credit, in such
• 1:09:59
  an incredible intellect, he goes, you're right, let's figure
• 1:10:04
  that out. Some humility there, because I
• 1:10:05
  could easily see the opposite happening of hey, I'm doctor,
• 1:10:09
  hey, not you brother, Shut off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:12
  And and he got and he went back and.
• 1:10:16
  You know what's interesting about that same thing because
• 1:10:18
  it's easy to point out what I just pointed out about you know,
• 1:10:20
  doctor, Hey, having some humility there there is there
• 1:10:23
  has to be some credit for you as well.
• 1:10:25
  You easily. I could see this if we ran that
• 1:10:28
  same scenario 100 times. I'm gonna say 9090 times out of
• 1:10:32
  a 100 you going because we talked about imposter syndrome.
• 1:10:36
  We didn't hasn't named it yet, but that's what we've been
• 1:10:38
  talking about. And that's what I could easily
• 1:10:40
  90 * 100 seeing someone in your same situation Go on how?
• 1:10:44
  Raise my hand and tell Doctor, hey, he might be wrong or he's
• 1:10:47
  not looking like no way. I'll shut up and listen.
• 1:10:50
  That's what I'm supposed to do. You took the courage to raise
• 1:10:53
  your hand to to you didn't know what the the result was going to
• 1:10:56
  be could smack your hand publicly shame you and embarrass
• 1:11:00
  you. You didn't know what was going
• 1:11:02
  to happen here. So there's there's both sides of
• 1:11:03
  that that had to coalesce together.
• 1:11:05
  So that's. Really.
• 1:11:06
  And I was the guy who was coaching Mike Fowl, you know.
• 1:11:11
  So if anybody in the room was going to stand up, it was
• 1:11:13
  probably. Going to be me.
• 1:11:16
  But no, it was it, it was, it was it, you know, I mean, I was
• 1:11:19
  quiet for a while and I'm like this, this is a doc.
• 1:11:24
  Look, these aren't our longest jumps and our longest jumps are
• 1:11:28
  these jumps. So what are we doing over here?
• 1:11:31
  I, I, I need you as a scientist to help me understand that.
• 1:11:35
  And, and you know, like I said, I mean, this is what, this is
• 1:11:40
  what created our, the relationship that Doctor Hay and
• 1:11:43
  I had. Because from there on we went
• 1:11:47
  into, OK, what's, what is the length of that last step?
• 1:11:51
  I was asking him because I wanted to see, I wanted to see
• 1:11:54
  how was the last step being working?
• 1:11:59
  And then what was the length of it?
• 1:12:00
  And you know, that's where we came up with that 2m mark
• 1:12:05
  because we knew later on, I'm going to tell this story.
• 1:12:09
  But 2002, we're at the national championship, Stanford.
• 1:12:13
  I'm watching a women's long jump and I think 642 won the women's
• 1:12:17
  long jump that year, 643, something like that, horrible.
• 1:12:20
  And every one of those women were like a 2.4 meters, 2.3
• 1:12:25
  meters way outside Powell and Lewis and others and Larry and
• 1:12:31
  all those guys that were jumping far and too far away, pushing to
• 1:12:35
  the board, high heel, all these things that you do wrong in the
• 1:12:40
  long jump. And, and, and that came from
• 1:12:44
  understanding Doctor Hayes, you know, helping me figure out how
• 1:12:51
  do we do those last three steps? Because until that time, to be
• 1:12:56
  honest, you know, you had some of the older coaches who said we
• 1:13:00
  never coached the last three steps.
• 1:13:03
  We don't worry about it. We don't talk about it.
• 1:13:07
  We just let it happen. They would just let it happen.
• 1:13:10
  And I'm like, no, now Tom was different.
• 1:13:12
  Of course, Tom was obviously a a, a damn good biomechanist in
• 1:13:17
  his own right. But that that was the big the
• 1:13:26
  guys that were leading the long jump and triple jump for the US
• 1:13:29
  at that point, the coaches, the older coaches were definitely
• 1:13:34
  against trying to manufacture the last three steps.
• 1:13:40
  You know, one of the things that we like to explore a lot, mainly
• 1:13:42
  because it changed my life. So I like to talk about is
• 1:13:45
  coaching education. Now at this time, the coaching
• 1:13:49
  education, formal coaching education mean like back then,
• 1:13:53
  TAC level 1 and things like that is still it's very infancy at
• 1:13:56
  this point. But but but I'm catching on that
• 1:13:58
  your, your coaching education is being able to be like a doctor,
• 1:14:01
  hey, and stuff like that. But that doesn't seem like it
• 1:14:03
  was very open to a lot of people.
• 1:14:05
  I mean, are you, I'm going to use the word lucky here.
• 1:14:08
  Now, we manufacture our own luck, of course, at some points.
• 1:14:11
  But are you just lucky that you're able?
• 1:14:12
  Because there's a lot of other coaches that could have
• 1:14:14
  benefited from sitting in that room and listening, but you're
• 1:14:17
  there. There was a lot of coaches
• 1:14:19
  there, OK. I mean, you got to remember that
• 1:14:21
  was the they brought in top 6 or 10, I can't remember in each
• 1:14:27
  event so. This is a formal thing that.
• 1:14:30
  They're doing, Yeah. No, it was.
• 1:14:32
  I was a guy. This was you because of Willie.
• 1:14:34
  No. OK.
• 1:14:35
  OK, OK, OK. No, this is this is this is the
• 1:14:38
  long jump, triple jump group. So I mean, you come in, you got
• 1:14:41
  Dick Booth, you got me, you got Dean, you got Tom Talez never
• 1:14:45
  came. Carl's mom, Carl's mom came.
• 1:14:49
  Evelyn always came. Boo came.
• 1:14:55
  Danny, I think was there. I think Danny was there.
• 1:14:59
  Sue obviously was there and, and, and, and a number of others
• 1:15:04
  that were there along this whole paint picture a little bit.
• 1:15:06
  OK, I gotcha. So yeah, this was a this was a
• 1:15:10
  an event specific meeting and it was held every year at the
• 1:15:14
  University of Iowa. And so we went in and, you know,
• 1:15:19
  we learned, I mean, we learned individually.
• 1:15:22
  I mean, it was a difficult, difficult because Doctor Haywood
• 1:15:25
  put the athlete up there and we'd all criticize and we'd all
• 1:15:28
  learn from it. Yeah.
• 1:15:29
  Well, yeah, you can imagine what that was like.
• 1:15:32
  I mean, you had to do some some pretty good kahunas to sit.
• 1:15:36
  There and get for that, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:39
  But it was worth it because you, you learned how.
• 1:15:45
  You learned how much you had to learn.
• 1:15:47
  You learned, you know what? What am I missing and what can I
• 1:15:50
  add to this? And because Doctor Hayes had
• 1:15:53
  such a good handle on the events themselves, on top of being a
• 1:15:57
  great biomechanist and being able to, because he was in the
• 1:16:02
  events, he could talk about the events from that perspective,
• 1:16:07
  not as just a scientist. And, you know, the beauty of
• 1:16:11
  Doctor Hay is he let us lead him.
• 1:16:15
  You know, I mean the first person I called when Mike broke
• 1:16:18
  the world record was Doctor Hay 3:00 in the morning or whatever
• 1:16:22
  woke him up and I just said Mike did it.
• 1:16:26
  He said did what? Never forget that because did
• 1:16:29
  what I said he just broke the world record.
• 1:16:31
  And you know, there's a there's a great story with Don Chu, who
• 1:16:35
  is a great high jump coach in his own right.
• 1:16:38
  And you should have Don on sometime talk about stories.
• 1:16:41
  I mean, people don't realize how many 7 footers Don Chu coached a
• 1:16:45
  lot, you know. But Don it tells the story that
• 1:16:50
  he was watching the meet live because he was back in New York
• 1:16:53
  for the tennis. What's the?
• 1:17:01
  Tennis meeting in New York City. Sorry.
• 1:17:04
  No clue. Tennis, Yeah.
• 1:17:05
  Yeah. No, no, no.
• 1:17:06
  I mean, the big one on the top, the four, you know, like U.S.
• 1:17:09
  Open, Yeah, U.S. Open.
• 1:17:11
  Thank you. Sorry.
• 1:17:12
  So you he was at the US Open because he was really involved
• 1:17:14
  in in tennis at the time. So he's watching and he's got a
• 1:17:17
  competition next morning. So, you know, Carl jumps 891 and
• 1:17:21
  he he goes to bed. He goes.
• 1:17:22
  I was. So it's.
• 1:17:23
  Over. Wakes up the next morning in the
• 1:17:26
  newspaper like what the you know and it's and he called me, you
• 1:17:32
  know, a few. He goes, Randy, you know, I was,
• 1:17:35
  it was really nice of Don because I've known him a long
• 1:17:38
  time and and you know it if you talk about people during that
• 1:17:43
  moment, and I know we're on several different tangents here
• 1:17:46
  and I apologize, but Mike did that.
• 1:17:49
  And the next morning, I walked the For people who don't know,
• 1:17:54
  the typhoon hit within about an hour after that, or two hours
• 1:17:57
  after. A.
• 1:17:58
  Huge typhoon. And so I'm in the Media Center
• 1:18:01
  and all this and my hotel is was about a mile away.
• 1:18:06
  So I walked back to my hotel in typhoon, this field, 50-60 mile
• 1:18:11
  an hour winds. I'm getting blown over rain.
• 1:18:13
  I was soaked. The next morning I went back
• 1:18:18
  because I I didn't have a pass. So I was the first day I was
• 1:18:25
  Hollis Conway. And the second day, yeah, the
• 1:18:31
  second day I was which was this a little bit better.
• 1:18:35
  Oh my gosh. Shot put coach, husband and
• 1:18:39
  wife, San Diego. Now Pagel can't.
• 1:18:42
  I was Kent and I took Kent's pass and I signed the back of it
• 1:18:46
  saying Mike Powell's broke the world record today.
• 1:18:49
  You know, I mean, it was. Really.
• 1:18:51
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:18:51
  Cool. Yeah.
• 1:18:52
  He probably, I mean, he still has it, I hope, because it's
• 1:18:55
  really one of those things. But the very first person that
• 1:18:59
  come to me was Bobby Percy. You know, Bobby didn't have to
• 1:19:03
  do this. Bobby came and says, man, that
• 1:19:06
  was incredible to watch. I mean, you know, and, and Bobby
• 1:19:09
  and I have been, you know, competitors and friends and, and
• 1:19:12
  I mean, I still, I, I consider him a friend even though we
• 1:19:15
  don't see each other but once every maybe 7 or 8 years.
• 1:19:19
  But, and of course, he's a legend in his own right, but
• 1:19:24
  that that's that, that moment. You want those moments to define
• 1:19:32
  you, but at the same time they can't define you.
• 1:19:35
  Because I was hoping that would get me a job.
• 1:19:40
  Sure. Never did.
• 1:19:42
  Yeah. What else do you got to freaking
• 1:19:43
  do? Yeah, right.
• 1:19:44
  Yeah, exactly. Kind of you know, after Willie
• 1:19:47
  at 18 meters and Mike, I couldn't buy a job.
• 1:19:51
  There was nobody was hiring me. I.
• 1:19:54
  Mean why? I just don't.
• 1:19:57
  I understand some of the things you've explained before in
• 1:19:59
  regards to. You know, a head coach and
• 1:20:03
  having to trust the assistant and you know, if you have this
• 1:20:05
  assistant with these accolades as they're always looking over
• 1:20:08
  my shoulder, things like that. I get that.
• 1:20:12
  But then I think, you know, we mentioned Dick Booth and Boo
• 1:20:14
  Schexnader, you know, they had accolades and they had assistant
• 1:20:18
  coaching jobs. Is there any?
• 1:20:21
  Is there any? I feel like I can ask you this,
• 1:20:23
  Randy, is there any, were you over demanding?
• 1:20:27
  I want a million. I'm making up numbers
• 1:20:29
  $1,000,000. Was it?
• 1:20:31
  No, you know, I, I, I want to be the head coach.
• 1:20:35
  So I, I'm not going to take an assistant coaching job.
• 1:20:37
  I mean this is. Definitely not that.
• 1:20:39
  No, I was begging. I was.
• 1:20:41
  I was begging basically. I was not.
• 1:20:45
  I think people assumed I would want a lot of money, so they
• 1:20:47
  just didn't. But you know, look, I work for
• 1:20:50
  6500 bucks. Come on, you know, let me tell
• 1:20:53
  you, let me tell you 20 grand. I would have jumped at at that
• 1:20:56
  point. And later on, years later when I
• 1:21:01
  finally got to Michigan State and it was like 42 grand or
• 1:21:03
  something. And it was a, it was a drop from
• 1:21:05
  what I was making in the private sector because I was working out
• 1:21:08
  of track and field at that time. It's, it's still, people thought
• 1:21:15
  I wanted more money. I'm like, you just understand
• 1:21:17
  this. This has never been about money
• 1:21:20
  for me. If it hadn't been, I wouldn't be
• 1:21:21
  doing this. And there's a lot of coaches
• 1:21:24
  will tell you that one. And and that's also why I think
• 1:21:28
  that if it's a good pairing, we go back to a previous
• 1:21:30
  discussion, Coaches who who end up in a relationship marriage
• 1:21:34
  with a woman who is already on their own career path, who has a
• 1:21:38
  steady, secure job. A lot of times they're
• 1:21:41
  supporting that guy for a while until he gets to a certain level
• 1:21:45
  and then then he can support. But you know, that is that.
• 1:21:53
  I wish I could answer why. There's probably people out
• 1:21:56
  there who could. I mean, maybe I was a jerk.
• 1:21:58
  I don't know. Yeah, see, that's not, that's
• 1:22:01
  what I try not to be. That's what I say.
• 1:22:03
  I see that other side because I've known you for a while,
• 1:22:04
  Randy, I and you know, I I have friends who are I'm like, yeah,
• 1:22:08
  I could see why maybe you wrote people the wrong way.
• 1:22:12
  I, I've never gotten an air of superiority from you, meaning
• 1:22:16
  like I'm, I'm more important than you, Mike.
• 1:22:18
  I mean, I've, I've been no one to you my whole entire time that
• 1:22:21
  I've known you and you always. I still cherish.
• 1:22:24
  We talked about this before we hit record during world juniors.
• 1:22:28
  We, we walked up, we kind of, we weren't playing this.
• 1:22:30
  We, I think we just kind of met there and I was like, oh man,
• 1:22:31
  you want to have lunch? And we had lunch and you hadn't
• 1:22:33
  seen me in forever at that point.
• 1:22:35
  And we had lunch and had a great hour, hour and a half just
• 1:22:38
  conversation. So I don't get this like, oh,
• 1:22:41
  well, Randy, you're kind of a jerk.
• 1:22:42
  That's why people don't. That's not there for me.
• 1:22:45
  I don't. It just, it boggles me.
• 1:22:47
  It boggles me. I've had people comment that,
• 1:22:50
  you know, as I said this earlier about that situation, about not
• 1:22:56
  getting employed. I mean, quite frankly, it was
• 1:22:58
  disheartening. You know, they talk about
• 1:23:01
  failing your way to success. I managed to do that.
• 1:23:06
  You know, I mean, you could look at some of the obvious stuff and
• 1:23:10
  that is that and this this is something which I supported.
• 1:23:13
  But quite frankly, a lot you looked at there were very few
• 1:23:18
  female coaches there needed to be more totally in totally in
• 1:23:21
  there. A lot of the in back in the
• 1:23:25
  early days, a lot of the female coaches were hired without a lot
• 1:23:30
  of experience. And I felt that I was in in my
• 1:23:36
  own particular case, that I was a pretty good candidate for
• 1:23:40
  being an assistant that then who would teach and would want to
• 1:23:44
  help female coaches rise. I wanted to see them be better
• 1:23:49
  because in the end, I knew they'd be judged by what they
• 1:23:53
  couldn't do. Or I mean, and men and mental
• 1:23:55
  judge will judge women inappropriately all the time,
• 1:24:01
  but I wanted them to be judged by their ability coach, not by
• 1:24:06
  their sex, you know, not not become that.
• 1:24:09
  Now, this is you remember, this is 30 years ago.
• 1:24:11
  Yeah, Yeah, 35 years ago. This is a long time ago.
• 1:24:14
  So it was a different deal. And a lot of women got jobs well
• 1:24:18
  before they should have should have had them and and and they
• 1:24:22
  didn't have a chance to to grow. Now, the good part for women is
• 1:24:27
  that they tend to communicate with each other.
• 1:24:29
  And so any of those younger women ended up with like usually
• 1:24:34
  a pretty good mentor group to pull from.
• 1:24:38
  I mean, you had you had you had the Terry Crawford's and the
• 1:24:41
  Dorothy Doolittle's and some of the the early and, and Karen
• 1:24:44
  and, and, and a lot of Karen, I think is the same age as I am.
• 1:24:49
  You had those women who were there and we're coaching at a
• 1:24:53
  high level that were that became the mentors, you know, for a lot
• 1:24:57
  of young women coaches and push for it.
• 1:25:00
  And I, I was so 100% behind all of that, but to my own detriment
• 1:25:06
  and the detriment of a lot of male, a lot of men were were
• 1:25:10
  moved out of coaching in the late 80s through the mid 90s or
• 1:25:15
  more. It's it's a from my seat.
• 1:25:19
  It's a weird, I'm going to call it Enigma.
• 1:25:22
  Now you're describing 30 years ago.
• 1:25:24
  You know, today these exact same conversations are happening and
• 1:25:29
  being stated. What I mean by that is if you go
• 1:25:31
  on everybody's favorite sarcasm there.
• 1:25:34
  What was that? Let's forget.
• 1:25:37
  I love that you knew where I was at.
• 1:25:39
  There's there's one thread that I, I, I watch every day.
• 1:25:42
  I, I freely admit every day I go and I check this thread and it's
• 1:25:45
  the annual coaching Vegas. There's a lot of wackadoodle
• 1:25:50
  stuff that's on there, but there's also there's a lot of
• 1:25:52
  people you might be surprised that are on there and know about
• 1:25:54
  jobs and you know, I like to keep my pulse on where people
• 1:25:56
  are going, etcetera, things like that.
• 1:25:58
  But there is invariably multiple times a year, you know, Dum Dums
• 1:26:03
  because they're anonymous and things like that, you know,
• 1:26:05
  state that, you know, women get every job they want, blah, blah,
• 1:26:08
  blah, these kind of things. And it's crazy because you know,
• 1:26:11
  I'll go to USTFCCA convention, I'll go to track meets and I'm
• 1:26:16
  sorry if you I host socials where there'll be hundreds of
• 1:26:19
  coaches. And if I look at those hundreds
• 1:26:21
  of coaches, I don't see anywhere near a 5050 male female split
• 1:26:26
  guys. I still see a vast majority of
• 1:26:28
  males. By the way, the same with our
• 1:26:30
  races. I see way majority more white
• 1:26:32
  people than I see what I see in my athletes.
• 1:26:34
  I don't see close to 5050 African Americans, Asian,
• 1:26:37
  Hispanic, etcetera. So I hear it's just a weird
• 1:26:40
  enigma that you have this like, oh, every woman can get any job
• 1:26:43
  she wants, but just because she's a female.
• 1:26:45
  And then I look, I go and look at the jobs.
• 1:26:46
  I'm like, well, that's just not true.
• 1:26:49
  I'm not seeing it. You know, it's the same
• 1:26:51
  questions and and concerns about keeping women in our profession
• 1:26:56
  yeah of having them, you know, after they've had children and
• 1:26:58
  and have families can they this isn't a profession that you can
• 1:27:01
  still do You will have maybe have to do it differently.
• 1:27:04
  Well, any job when you have children because to do it
• 1:27:06
  differently, I think, but. Well, that would be a great
• 1:27:08
  podcast by the way of of a male female coaches in that age
• 1:27:12
  group, you know that say they're now like 55, approaching 60 who
• 1:27:17
  went through that at the same time, because it notice there's
• 1:27:21
  nothing wrong with digging this stuff up.
• 1:27:23
  There's no, let's not hide. Let's just talk openly about
• 1:27:27
  what it is that that we've gone through.
• 1:27:30
  Now we don't have answers. Perhaps so maybe we will, but
• 1:27:33
  it's it's a worthy discussion. My experience has been women
• 1:27:40
  tend to be hungrier than men to learn and more open to learning.
• 1:27:48
  And I've told this to the coaches going into China.
• 1:27:50
  I said, look, you're going to do coaches education there.
• 1:27:53
  Look for the women because the men, they're way too arrogant
• 1:27:57
  and they do not want, they do not, they do not want to learn
• 1:28:00
  as much. Now that's changing because the
• 1:28:02
  coaches are getting younger and they're more educated because in
• 1:28:07
  in in China, it is really the epitome of I was an athlete, I
• 1:28:11
  became a coach. Now you know, it's, it's that
• 1:28:14
  lineage, it's not education, right?
• 1:28:17
  So they were surprised that I never competed in track.
• 1:28:20
  And field. After high, so they're like,
• 1:28:21
  what do you mean you never competed?
• 1:28:23
  How could you coach? And then they were surprised I
• 1:28:25
  could coach more than one event that you can't do that in.
• 1:28:29
  China, I was. I'm glad you brought that back
• 1:28:30
  up because I wanted to make this point again after 350 plus
• 1:28:33
  interviews, some of the top coaches we've had.
• 1:28:37
  This really changed kind of my mindset about coaching because
• 1:28:40
  when I was coaching, I wanted to be as deep as possible, the best
• 1:28:44
  sprints and hurdles coach in the world.
• 1:28:46
  So that meant I ignored some things with with the jumps and
• 1:28:51
  of course distance and throws and stuff like that.
• 1:28:53
  We've had some amazing Brooks Johnson.
• 1:28:55
  I know you know Brooks. Rest in peace.
• 1:28:56
  One of my favorite interviews. I've never got to do Cliff
• 1:28:59
  Ravelto. I know it was the 3rd, but some
• 1:29:02
  of our top guys and those two for sure I would put in my top
• 1:29:04
  guys. Blue Scheck Snider actually
• 1:29:06
  would be like this as well. They don't consider themselves a
• 1:29:09
  jumps coach or just whatever. They're they're a track and
• 1:29:12
  field coach. Like I remember Brooks this
• 1:29:14
  really kind of like the way he explained it, just like the like
• 1:29:18
  the scales off my eyes. He goes Mike, every event is the
• 1:29:21
  same. We're just trying to move the
• 1:29:22
  center of mass from one place to the other.
• 1:29:24
  He goes, now there's some differences, right?
• 1:29:26
  He goes, obviously a 10K person does that a lot of times and a
• 1:29:28
  long jumper has to do it and then execute.
• 1:29:30
  You know, a long jump and shot putter does it spins in a
• 1:29:33
  circle. But we're still because you're
• 1:29:35
  not a, a Sprint coach, you're a track and field coach.
• 1:29:37
  If you're doing it right, you are a track and field and that
• 1:29:39
  really, and you are very similar to that in this case.
• 1:29:43
  It's hard for me. Sure, sure.
• 1:29:44
  Right now I may call you a jumps coach, but I know you've done
• 1:29:47
  other events and done them at A at a high level.
• 1:29:50
  So it's just always interesting because our our young, I try not
• 1:29:54
  to generalize whether it's race or age or sex, But so it's hard
• 1:29:58
  for me to say our young coaches, but I know plenty of our coaches
• 1:30:00
  out there today. They want to ignore, they want
• 1:30:03
  to silo, they want to ignore the other events and don't think
• 1:30:05
  that they can teach me anything and just go super deep into
• 1:30:09
  their whatever event that whatever they think they are,
• 1:30:11
  throws coach, jumps coach, etcetera.
• 1:30:13
  And when I take a step back and I look at the kids they're
• 1:30:16
  coaching because 99% of our kids are not going pro, they're not
• 1:30:19
  going to the next level. So you got to get as much as you
• 1:30:23
  can out of that with the time you have them.
• 1:30:25
  It's like you actually need to be much more general than you
• 1:30:28
  need to be specific trying to get that 1%.
• 1:30:30
  You need to improve this other 99% of them first to even think
• 1:30:33
  that they might get there. So it's just interesting to me
• 1:30:36
  that and maybe it's comes with age and stage, but it's
• 1:30:38
  interesting the the philosophy of becoming a coach and not just
• 1:30:43
  getting so because you think if I would be the if I'm going to
• 1:30:45
  be a math teacher, I'm not going to pay attention to English and
• 1:30:47
  philosophy. I'm going to go hardcore.
• 1:30:49
  I think that's different, specifically in our sport.
• 1:30:52
  I think the particularly the people that you Dame, those are
• 1:30:55
  some pretty bright guys, you know, and I think in general
• 1:31:02
  that if you go, if you do do it a little bit age, age wise, we
• 1:31:05
  were our education was, I'm not going to say more liberal arts,
• 1:31:10
  but it was definitely we paid attention to more things.
• 1:31:15
  I see cross pollinization. I mean, you know, in, in in
• 1:31:19
  different sports. I mean, so I started out in
• 1:31:23
  gymnastics actually coaching. So before I was with Dennis, I
• 1:31:27
  was with Henrietta Heine learning how to, I wanted to, to
• 1:31:31
  work with them to teach my eye how to see if you can see in
• 1:31:35
  gymnastics and spot you can see anything in sport.
• 1:31:39
  And, and, and then Ken Aldrich, who I consider a mentor, was a
• 1:31:43
  dance instructor. So I took Ken's dance classes at
• 1:31:48
  Oregon to learn how the body moves.
• 1:31:51
  And you know, I mean, I'll never forget having we had a, a, a
• 1:31:57
  dance. We're in a, in, in this, this
• 1:32:00
  activity dance course, the very first one I took.
• 1:32:02
  And, you know, I had to dance with shot putter and I'm like,
• 1:32:08
  Oh my God, this is gonna be hard.
• 1:32:11
  She was so light on her feet. It was ridiculous.
• 1:32:15
  Interesting, You know, I mean, it was like dancing with a
• 1:32:17
  feather. Wow.
• 1:32:18
  Compared to others. And I'm like, oh, jeez, I don't
• 1:32:22
  got a lot to learn here, don't I?
• 1:32:24
  You know, that was power. You know, you could feel the
• 1:32:29
  power expressed in the dance. So, you know, again, it's, it's,
• 1:32:33
  it's these different areas of life that you bring together to
• 1:32:38
  form you as a coach. And it's not, God forbid, it's
• 1:32:43
  not just track and field and and and, and neither should it be if
• 1:32:47
  if you do it right, I think I'm going to say this.
• 1:32:51
  I think distance coaches get more in this than than field
• 1:32:54
  event and spring coaches because I, I can say that because I
• 1:32:58
  watched distance coaches try to do running drills and, and it
• 1:33:02
  drives me crazy because they just, and now not all of them,
• 1:33:07
  of course, but I, I see it on the track.
• 1:33:09
  If I go to a national championship or well, Olympics
• 1:33:12
  or world champs, I'm just like, jeez, come on.
• 1:33:18
  Did you and where did you learn this?
• 1:33:19
  You know, did you do level 1 at least?
• 1:33:23
  You know something because, dude, you, you do not understand
• 1:33:28
  how to do these drills and so they're not helping your
• 1:33:30
  athlete. And now that's changed.
• 1:33:34
  I mean, I remember, you know, weightlifting was not a big part
• 1:33:37
  of it and that, you know, I mean, and people still today
• 1:33:42
  they'll say kind of just seems like you do a lot of general
• 1:33:44
  stuff in your weight training. I said, duh, You think that you
• 1:33:49
  think there's that much carryover from the weight room
• 1:33:51
  here. There's, you know, I, I, I, I
• 1:33:54
  call it integration. You integrate from the weight
• 1:33:55
  room too, and there's tools there.
• 1:33:58
  So the weight room is one thing, but then you have these
• 1:33:59
  integration tools that then lead over here.
• 1:34:02
  So you've got three parts. And the use of those integration
• 1:34:05
  tools is the art. You know, the weight room's
• 1:34:08
  actually kind of easy that and it should be.
• 1:34:11
  But then the integration tools, light implements, heavy
• 1:34:14
  implements, mini hurdles, you know, sleds, 1080s, I mean, you
• 1:34:19
  just go through activator belts, oxygen, whatever it is you, you
• 1:34:23
  know, you, you choose the tool to affect what, what the changes
• 1:34:26
  that you want. And that's, you know, the the
• 1:34:29
  the fun part of the art of coaching is that integration in
• 1:34:33
  the middle. How do you get it from here to
• 1:34:35
  here and get it using it. A lot of times they'll get a
• 1:34:38
  good here, but they will never learn how to use it over here.
• 1:34:40
  Right. And we've.
• 1:34:41
  Seen that we've all had athletes that that's for sure.
• 1:34:44
  And part of it's us as a coach, it's like, well, how do we did
• 1:34:46
  we help with that or not help in that transition?
• 1:34:48
  OK. And that's the integration tools
• 1:34:51
  and that's basically what you guys do for a living.
• 1:34:54
  Yeah, Yeah, exactly. OK, pause there.
• 1:34:56
  So we kicked off Season 7 with MO Satara, now University of
• 1:35:01
  Texas, right? And so he's coached a world
• 1:35:03
  record holder. And he's incredible.
• 1:35:06
  There are a handful and it's a small handful of coaches who
• 1:35:09
  have coached a world record. I mean, it's just it's the
• 1:35:11
  ultimate of the ultimate, right? It's the it's up to that point
• 1:35:14
  the the farthest because we're going to talk about long jump
• 1:35:17
  here in a second that a human has ever jumped.
• 1:35:19
  It's amazing. So I want to kind of double
• 1:35:21
  click into that with Mike Powell, you you've experienced,
• 1:35:25
  I think if I'm correct, more than one world record.
• 1:35:28
  Am I correct here? Well, well, Willie was the first
• 1:35:31
  person over 18 meters. Yeah.
• 1:35:32
  OK. 18 O 6/18/20 Yeah. What does it take?
• 1:35:36
  Because we just talked about how, you know, a lot of coaches
• 1:35:39
  try to get down to the NTH of a percentage when it's reality.
• 1:35:42
  It's like, you know, you need to do the basics better before you
• 1:35:45
  can even think about that aspect.
• 1:35:46
  And God bless only, you know, half a percentage point of us
• 1:35:50
  even have the God-given talent to get to that point that the
• 1:35:53
  the ultimate, you know, the world record Olympic gold type
• 1:35:56
  stuff. What's it like?
• 1:35:59
  I guess the simplest, dumbest way to ask the question is,
• 1:36:02
  what's it like coaching a world record?
• 1:36:04
  I mean, that's just a lot of, I'm going to say a lot of us
• 1:36:08
  this, we all have the opportunity to coach someone who
• 1:36:12
  will make the Olympics. It's super.
• 1:36:14
  That's a small fraternity, but it is an even infinitely smaller
• 1:36:19
  fraternity is those who have coached a world record.
• 1:36:22
  What is that preparation? How much is skill versus luck?
• 1:36:26
  Did you know it was going to happen?
• 1:36:28
  Why didn't it happen again? You know, there's so much that
• 1:36:31
  goes into this special number. Yeah.
• 1:36:35
  Well, let's start just briefly with Willie.
• 1:36:39
  You know, in Willie's case, you know, he he jumped 1820 there at
• 1:36:43
  the Olympic trials, 18061820, windy.
• 1:36:49
  But then then Willie had a choice to make.
• 1:36:52
  And and I'm not going to speak for him, but this is how I
• 1:36:55
  perceived it. His choice was make money
• 1:36:58
  family, not make money trained, get gold.
• 1:37:03
  He chose make money go to Europe.
• 1:37:05
  We went to Europe during that time his Achilles flared up,
• 1:37:09
  went into went into Seoul with an Achilles that wouldn't work
• 1:37:14
  as well as it should. Ended up but 5th, 6th, whatever.
• 1:37:17
  He ended up there now and so, but he made money so he could
• 1:37:22
  support his family. I mean, this is back then, that
• 1:37:25
  was the decision you had to make.
• 1:37:26
  I mean, there was there was a few guys who were getting a lot
• 1:37:30
  of dough. Willie could make money at the
• 1:37:32
  meats, you know, particularly after that 18 meter jump.
• 1:37:36
  Yeah, boom, that, that went up and, and, and, and that's those,
• 1:37:41
  that was the decision. So that's Willie.
• 1:37:43
  Now, Mike, on the other hand, Mike came in with a chip on his
• 1:37:50
  shoulder to a degree. I'm not.
• 1:37:53
  You know, I want to be great. I told Mike the first time I saw
• 1:37:57
  his his video. Doctor Hay sent me his videos
• 1:38:00
  and I looked at him and I said, you know, Mike, realistically,
• 1:38:04
  with your your sprinting ability and your jumping ability, you
• 1:38:09
  got a shot at the world record. I mean, I told him that the very
• 1:38:12
  first day we met and he was like, yeah, right.
• 1:38:16
  I mean, he'll remember it, you know, and he talks about it too.
• 1:38:18
  But because my back, my approach to the jumps is Sprint first,
• 1:38:26
  you know, because the technical aspects of the jump come out of
• 1:38:30
  sprinting. So in Mike's case, although he'd
• 1:38:35
  been with John and the others, you know, I, I started changing
• 1:38:38
  Sprint mechanics and started working on things.
• 1:38:41
  You know, one of the easy things is that a lot of guys,
• 1:38:44
  particularly back in those days, were really teaching lifting and
• 1:38:48
  they hadn't quite figured out ground to, to lift.
• 1:38:52
  The ground forces create the lift.
• 1:38:54
  And, you know, I started working with Mike on that pretty early
• 1:38:57
  on. And of course that came out of
• 1:38:59
  triple jump because if you don't do it right in the triple jump,
• 1:39:03
  you die. You know, you don't apply force
• 1:39:05
  to the ground properly. It's it hurts a lot.
• 1:39:11
  And in in, in bringing Mike along, the first thing you do
• 1:39:16
  was to make him a good a better sprinter.
• 1:39:20
  I probably should have let Mike run the 200.
• 1:39:22
  We didn't. I think he would have more than
• 1:39:25
  likely been top three in the US in the 200 if we had.
• 1:39:29
  I mean, he ran a let me think A145150, which is rolling out
• 1:39:35
  pretty good, certainly good enough to run sub 20.
• 1:39:38
  You know, if if we continue, you know, training him for it.
• 1:39:44
  But in in this particular case, I wanted Mike to be the best
• 1:39:49
  posturely everything 10M sprinter in the world, because
• 1:39:52
  that's what was necessary for him to be prepared.
• 1:39:57
  I had to look at Carl. Carl was this incredible talent.
• 1:40:02
  It's just amazing, you know, I mean, technically everything
• 1:40:05
  just, you know, almost perfection and.
• 1:40:10
  How are you going to beat that? You know, what do you, what do
• 1:40:12
  you have to do to beat that and sit down with Mike and say,
• 1:40:14
  here's what we need to do, doctor, Hey, what do we do to
• 1:40:17
  beat Carl? You know, and what we came down
• 1:40:22
  to is we're never going to be able to probably challenge his
• 1:40:25
  horizontal velocity. He's fast.
• 1:40:28
  And as you recall, he just broke the world record in the 102 days
• 1:40:31
  before the Tokyo long jump. So he's as fast as he'd ever
• 1:40:35
  been in his life. Yeah, right.
• 1:40:39
  You know, it's like, OK. This is going to be fun.
• 1:40:41
  He's fast and he's the fastest he's ever been.
• 1:40:43
  Yeah, yeah. He's as fast and he's the
• 1:40:45
  fastest he's ever been here in the long jump right now with us.
• 1:40:49
  Oh, great. But so we had to look at what,
• 1:40:55
  what could we do? And, and that's when we started
• 1:40:58
  going back and, and, and reviewing previous times and
• 1:41:02
  things. And that's where we looked at
• 1:41:04
  the 10 meter, 25 meter segments, acceleration onto the board.
• 1:41:07
  What was happening in the last three steps And what will, what
• 1:41:12
  I came up with with Doctor Hey, was that the only way we could
• 1:41:16
  beat Carl was to have greater vertical velocity at the board
• 1:41:20
  with close to the same horizontal velocity.
• 1:41:24
  So if you look at the statistics, I think Carl was
• 1:41:30
  about 3.3 meters per second off the board, but he had a great
• 1:41:35
  loss of horizontal velocity. He lost more horizontal
• 1:41:38
  velocity. Mike was about 4.3, so almost a
• 1:41:42
  meter per second faster vertically with less loss of
• 1:41:47
  horizontal velocity. So the, the secret there was the
• 1:41:50
  penultimate, the how quick and fast the penultimate step was.
• 1:41:53
  You know, it's, it's, it's, it's an impulse.
• 1:41:55
  It's the fastest step in the whole approach.
• 1:41:57
  So to get him over that and then to create that vertical
• 1:42:00
  velocity. And I, so I, I, I did that with
• 1:42:04
  Doctor Hay. And then I had a friend's name,
• 1:42:07
  Gideon Ariel. And Gideon also helped me see
• 1:42:11
  some of the things that we could do because Gideon was on the
• 1:42:13
  West Coast and I could chat with him occasionally that this was,
• 1:42:18
  this was the way, this is what we had to do.
• 1:42:21
  So, you know, I started focusing on what do I do to get my calf a
• 1:42:25
  more relaxed vertical velocity. And people forget that Mike
• 1:42:29
  jumped over 29 feet 6-7 times. They think it was just that one
• 1:42:34
  time he jumped over more than Carl did, even though Carl beat
• 1:42:39
  him. 16 out of 17 * 18 out of 17 * 2 out of no 17 out of 18
• 1:42:50
  times. Or yeah, that's right, 16 out of
• 1:42:52
  18 times. No, Mike should have been the
• 1:42:56
  gold medalist in Atlanta if he hadn't been injured.
• 1:43:00
  He didn't. There was extenuating
• 1:43:02
  circumstances I wasn't aware of at that point which had gone on
• 1:43:07
  to to create some difficulty in Mike's life.
• 1:43:11
  But, and he's dealing with it, but that is what it took to
• 1:43:18
  create a world record holder analyzing the strengths of the
• 1:43:21
  best, which was Carl and Larry, Right, Right.
• 1:43:24
  And figuring out what was Mike deficient in and what were his
• 1:43:28
  strengths that I could then build upon and weaknesses I
• 1:43:31
  could build upon to be better than them.
• 1:43:34
  Yeah, it was. It was by design, by the way.
• 1:43:36
  It was not like there was. Was there luck?
• 1:43:39
  Always, always luck. But but, but what we did was by
• 1:43:44
  design to get him there. It's interesting that Larry
• 1:43:47
  becomes the third part of the story, and Larry is his own
• 1:43:50
  legend with Long. John, that's for sure.
• 1:43:52
  How? And a great guy too, by the way,
• 1:43:54
  right? How important was it to have
• 1:43:58
  that rival meaning, you know, Carl's beaten you at that .14
• 1:44:02
  out of 15 or whatever, and he's the fastest he's ever been.
• 1:44:06
  Was that helpful in for the effort?
• 1:44:09
  I'm not saying that Mike would have not tried as hard, but was
• 1:44:12
  that helpful for motivation for Mike and for you?
• 1:44:16
  How important is it to have a rival?
• 1:44:18
  Mike's motivation was definitely negative, and I don't mean that
• 1:44:21
  in the I mean that in the most positive way.
• 1:44:23
  I could make that in that he needed to be the underdog.
• 1:44:28
  OK. He relished the role of
• 1:44:30
  underdog. And you know, you've probably
• 1:44:34
  seen to let us talk about it. He goes, he could see Mike
• 1:44:36
  coming. The Mike was coming.
• 1:44:38
  You know, I mean, Carl only beat him by a centimeter and a half,
• 1:44:41
  you know, at the trials. So Mike was was was getting
• 1:44:44
  there to have Carl be at his best.
• 1:44:51
  You know, if you recall, Mike jumped like 786 or something in
• 1:44:55
  his first jump in Tokyo. I mean, he jumped a meter
• 1:44:58
  farther in the same competition. MM was a is a was a very much an
• 1:45:05
  emotional guy, emotional jumper. And he was so amped up.
• 1:45:09
  I mean, just like I'm going to break the world record now.
• 1:45:12
  It's like Mike, bring it back a little bit here, you know, and
• 1:45:17
  I'll always tell them and I tell it to this day, it's the same
• 1:45:19
  thing. You break records, you do your
• 1:45:21
  best through process, you know, not not by not in any other way.
• 1:45:28
  Do the process execute and the result will happen, You know, so
• 1:45:34
  it's, it's so, as I said to Mike back then, it says it's, it's
• 1:45:37
  not how far do I jump? It's how do I jump far?
• 1:45:41
  It's just a little twist of the words, you know, it's, it's how
• 1:45:45
  do I jump far? That's what you're after.
• 1:45:47
  How close did it come to not happening?
• 1:45:50
  Meaning the winds were wicked that day.
• 1:45:54
  He easily could have fouled. He, he, he tweaked his ankle two
• 1:45:59
  weeks before. Was it, was it anywhere close or
• 1:46:01
  was it, I don't know that any of these things are ever a foregone
• 1:46:05
  conclusion because, again, because of all the things that
• 1:46:07
  can happen. But how much of it was like, Oh
• 1:46:10
  yeah, we were amped up, ready to go.
• 1:46:11
  We, we did the right practices. We, we, we knew we still had the
• 1:46:15
  underdog mentality because we still, we're not #1 going in.
• 1:46:19
  And how close was it to it just didn't even happen?
• 1:46:23
  Not that close. I mean, any, any, obviously any
• 1:46:27
  long jump, you could fall out, you know, and Mike did fall a
• 1:46:30
  couple big falls, obviously. So from that perspective, heck
• 1:46:35
  yeah, it could not have happened.
• 1:46:37
  Now you're talking about centimeters or millimeters, you
• 1:46:40
  know, and in terms of, of that, but I saw in Mike like about 5
• 1:46:46
  days before, we were doing drilling, we're doing some
• 1:46:48
  jumping and we're doing some van drills things.
• 1:46:54
  And it was pretty obvious he was ready.
• 1:46:56
  I mean, I, I walked off the track with him and said, you
• 1:46:59
  know, you're ready to, to jump far.
• 1:47:01
  I said, I don't know how far that's going to be because you
• 1:47:03
  don't predict that. Everybody always asks me, oh,
• 1:47:06
  how far are they going to jump? I think I don't know.
• 1:47:08
  But in that particular case, I think Mike was determined to
• 1:47:13
  jump as far as it as it took, you know, and you know, you look
• 1:47:18
  at it, if you look at the psychological aspect of that
• 1:47:22
  competition, which I still think, and and not because I was
• 1:47:26
  involved in, but I still think it's one of the best
• 1:47:27
  competitions in history. Oh, yeah, sure.
• 1:47:29
  Of course. You know, but Carl jumped 891
• 1:47:33
  and Mike was behind and Carl still had two more jumps.
• 1:47:38
  You know, I mean, the fact is you could have folded and Mike
• 1:47:42
  came out and still jumped pretty well right in this next two
• 1:47:45
  jumps, even though he followed it.
• 1:47:50
  It's the and, and you know, you got to give Carl credit.
• 1:47:53
  I would say that the only reason Carl didn't win is Carl pressed.
• 1:47:58
  Now that would be a conversation for Carl.
• 1:48:00
  He may say I didn't, but I mean, he's just so relaxed.
• 1:48:04
  He's so fluid in his, in the way he does everything.
• 1:48:06
  It's when Carl presses. It's probably hard to see, but
• 1:48:09
  I'm sure Talez could see it. Carl could feel it, perhaps.
• 1:48:15
  I thought I saw a little pressing.
• 1:48:18
  You heard Talez later on talk about he told him to straighten
• 1:48:21
  out, which probably took away from just the automatic nature
• 1:48:25
  of of what he was doing. And you know, is is Mike the
• 1:48:30
  best long jumper in history? Well, he's got the longest jump
• 1:48:34
  is Carl. I mean, you got to give it to
• 1:48:36
  Carl. Dude did everything.
• 1:48:38
  And it's a very LeBron Jordan conversation.
• 1:48:41
  Oh, it's it is, it is and, and very much so.
• 1:48:44
  And, you know, I I appreciate Carl.
• 1:48:48
  I don't know. I don't know if he's ever
• 1:48:51
  considered me a good coach or not.
• 1:48:53
  I've never had that conversation with him.
• 1:48:57
  But beating Carl was a big deal. No, I mean, you're not taking
• 1:49:04
  anything off that, right? When you beat Carl Lewis, that's
• 1:49:07
  a big deal. That's right.
• 1:49:08
  And, you know, Carl was the big dog.
• 1:49:11
  Rightfully and rightfully so. Yeah.
• 1:49:14
  And it was fun. I mean, that was it was fun.
• 1:49:17
  So let's stay on the long jump here a little bit and to get
• 1:49:19
  some of your your thoughts on things having coached world
• 1:49:23
  record holder, why has no one jumped 9 meters?
• 1:49:26
  But what do we got to do? And you know, we love these
• 1:49:29
  round numbers. That's why you're on the 350th
• 1:49:30
  by the way. And 350 is no different.
• 1:49:32
  Three 49351 because it ends with a zero.
• 1:49:34
  We love it, right? So 8.9 something versus 9 meters
• 1:49:38
  is not that different. But because it's 9 meters, we
• 1:49:40
  want to talk about it, right? 4 minute mile, 1010 seconds
• 1:49:43
  meters, etcetera. Why?
• 1:49:45
  Why have we not been able to produce 9m plus long jumper yet?
• 1:49:48
  I don't know. I mean, we haven't been able to
• 1:49:50
  produce an 860 long jumper really or I mean.
• 1:49:53
  So talk about that, you know, kind of a little bit of A and
• 1:49:56
  are we really in a decline in long jump?
• 1:49:57
  I remember this, there was an article on track and field news
• 1:50:01
  that was, you know, the decline of long jump.
• 1:50:03
  And of course, we always go back to Mike and Carl and we, we just
• 1:50:05
  weren't very good. And supposedly that really
• 1:50:09
  spurred on the only name in my head right now is Walter Davis.
• 1:50:14
  But we we, we got back. We, we will.
• 1:50:15
  Clay and. Dwight, Dwight, Dwight was
• 1:50:18
  there. Dwight Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:50:19
  We started a. Very good career.
• 1:50:20
  We started jumping better. Are we, are we just in a lull
• 1:50:23
  right now? Or is there something, I'm gonna
• 1:50:25
  call it fundamentally wrong and, and fundamentally wrong could be
• 1:50:28
  that our long jumpers are going to play football, by the way,
• 1:50:29
  that could be part of well. No, no, I think you're, you know
• 1:50:32
  it. It's a, it's a valid question
• 1:50:34
  that gets asked a lot these days because we, I'm going to say,
• 1:50:43
  you know, back back then, if you weren't jumping 825 or 830, you
• 1:50:49
  weren't in the conversation. And we had, you know, we had a
• 1:50:53
  lot of guys who were jumping that.
• 1:50:54
  Today you jump 830, you're meddling almost.
• 1:50:59
  In general, I'd say the long jump has gone back.
• 1:51:03
  I am backwards, but I'm also going to say that we may not be
• 1:51:09
  getting the talent in any longer.
• 1:51:12
  I don't want to pick on the coaches, but I will a little
• 1:51:16
  bit. I don't see the, I don't see the
• 1:51:19
  rhythms, I don't see the speed, I don't see the execution the
• 1:51:24
  last three steps. And yet here we are with gold
• 1:51:32
  medalist in the triple jump, American, but basically from
• 1:51:36
  another, you know, and competing for another country for the
• 1:51:38
  women. And you got Tara, who's
• 1:51:41
  obviously jumping well. But if you look at Tara's
• 1:51:45
  jumping, there's still places for her to improve.
• 1:51:49
  She's terribly talented, that's for sure.
• 1:51:52
  And and she's won. I mean, she's a winner.
• 1:51:54
  That's that's more important than maybe the the link.
• 1:51:57
  It's you know, you win when it's important.
• 1:51:59
  Doesn't matter what the distance is.
• 1:52:00
  Let's get the win. There is less or no drugs
• 1:52:07
  involved in the sport anymore in the jumps like that.
• 1:52:10
  So you know, those those women who were jumping really, really
• 1:52:13
  far back in the day, you got to, you know, were they involved in
• 1:52:18
  drugs? I don't know if they were or
• 1:52:19
  weren't, but we haven't had, but I think 1 athlete really over
• 1:52:24
  720 for the women, maybe 2, I don't remember.
• 1:52:30
  But mostly with the women. I don't see very good execution
• 1:52:34
  in the last three steps. I see a lot.
• 1:52:37
  I see some with speed, I see some tall.
• 1:52:39
  You know, almost all of our great jumpers for the female
• 1:52:42
  side were tall. Our male jumpers were tall.
• 1:52:46
  Will would be one of the exceptions that was is
• 1:52:48
  relatively small, but still long, greater trochanter.
• 1:52:51
  So I don't care about height. I care about GT length.
• 1:52:56
  I just don't see the same speed ability anymore.
• 1:53:00
  I mean, these guys are, you know, when you look at the
• 1:53:01
  statistics from the championships, they're running
• 1:53:04
  10.6 meters per second maybe. I mean, my Chinese guys are
• 1:53:09
  10.8. They're faster than the
• 1:53:11
  Americans. There's no way they should be
• 1:53:13
  faster than the Americans you know and they're.
• 1:53:16
  Do you think we've overcompensated the other way of
• 1:53:19
  where we used to not even think about the last three steps?
• 1:53:22
  Are we now so much in a technique world versus speed
• 1:53:25
  world first or? Well, if we were, I'd see some
• 1:53:28
  execution of the technique. And I'm not.
• 1:53:30
  I'm not seeing it. I'm not.
• 1:53:32
  Seeing technically, but not fast enough to jump far, people.
• 1:53:35
  Yeah, we don't. Really.
• 1:53:36
  Well, that or, or I'm not seeing the technique and I'm seeing
• 1:53:38
  speed, which means that, you know, you you can't, you just
• 1:53:42
  can't get enough vertical velocity.
• 1:53:44
  And and that's if I have to say something's missing, it's
• 1:53:47
  vertical velocity of the board. That's the missing component,
• 1:53:51
  unless you have Carl Lewis's speed.
• 1:53:53
  I mean, Carl was 11.2 meters per second at the board.
• 1:53:57
  I mean, yeah, if you got that kind of speed go, you know, but
• 1:54:03
  we're seeing 104106108IS a big day.
• 1:54:08
  Could the cultural aspect plan to?
• 1:54:10
  And what I mean by that is? And then this is probably a
• 1:54:12
  story as old as time. More guys and gals would rather
• 1:54:16
  be good to great 100 meter sprinters because there's money
• 1:54:21
  there and that's always been the case.
• 1:54:22
  That's not anything new. But do we have more of a case of
• 1:54:24
  that where our athletes are going to different events again
• 1:54:27
  or even different sports? Obviously with women's sports,
• 1:54:29
  we have much more opportunity for other sports with women
• 1:54:33
  today versus even 30 years ago. I mean, it's, you know, it's
• 1:54:39
  difficult to, I haven't been in the US in, yeah, 15 years.
• 1:54:43
  That's true. I mean, I'm really removed a
• 1:54:45
  little bit. Yeah, that's a good point.
• 1:54:48
  There's how many good jumps coaches are there in the US
• 1:54:51
  right now? I mean that that are good.
• 1:54:53
  There's some proclaimed guys, but how many are actually
• 1:54:56
  coaching people to and and it's not it's it's it's not that
• 1:55:01
  many. And can they do it with multiple
• 1:55:06
  people, different athletes? I mean, you look at Dick Booth,
• 1:55:10
  Dick Dick did it with a lot of guys.
• 1:55:12
  Now I've now done it with a lot of guys.
• 1:55:16
  There's others have done it with one, maybe 2.
• 1:55:18
  There's others have done it with multiple.
• 1:55:21
  I, I, you know, I don't, I don't want to throw in anything under
• 1:55:24
  the bus here, but I think we just have in general, we're,
• 1:55:29
  we're, we're, we're not. I mean, when I look back at guys
• 1:55:33
  like Brian Johnson, I don't remember Brian.
• 1:55:36
  Yeah, I know Brian. Well, Yeah.
• 1:55:37
  Brian. Brian should have been the man.
• 1:55:40
  That's a good one. Brian should have been the guy.
• 1:55:44
  Ten O 6, you know, 6665, I mean, if we had anybody who was going
• 1:55:50
  to go 9 meters, that was that man or Mike, you know, there's a
• 1:55:55
  couple others that that had that ability.
• 1:56:00
  But right now we're not doing a good job coaching sprinting
• 1:56:08
  aspect of this, I don't think. And once we once we can get past
• 1:56:16
  that. And I, you know, I've talked to
• 1:56:18
  USA track and field people at different times and said, hey,
• 1:56:22
  you know, do you want do you want any help?
• 1:56:26
  No, never got never. Nobody, nobody wants it.
• 1:56:28
  It's this arrogance we have that, you know, and this is this
• 1:56:33
  has been fun about China and they go, oh, Randy Huntington's
• 1:56:36
  over there. He can do it.
• 1:56:37
  He can make that happen. Come on, he's just Randy
• 1:56:40
  Huntington. No big deal.
• 1:56:42
  Now that's not propping me up, but that's not easy to do.
• 1:56:46
  To do what we did, what I did in China with with Sue, the long
• 1:56:50
  jumpers, the triple jumpers and now the hurdler as well, the
• 1:56:54
  hurdlers. You know, it is not easy to do
• 1:56:59
  and we have to stop. We're all guilty of it.
• 1:57:03
  Forgot I'm guilty of it. Everybody's guilty.
• 1:57:06
  We have to stop this. You're shit and I'm good, you're
• 1:57:12
  no good instead of how can I help make you better, right?
• 1:57:16
  Do you you know, or how can we talk to you can make me better
• 1:57:22
  And. And in the end, that's really we
• 1:57:24
  should be brothers, not yeah, not fighting each other.
• 1:57:29
  And there's a lot of if you sit down at a lunch table with
• 1:57:32
  coaches, it's like he's a Dick or he doesn't know what he's
• 1:57:35
  doing. And look at it.
• 1:57:36
  Look at that tick. You have no idea what the back.
• 1:57:38
  Story is yeah, that George no idea taught me very much if you
• 1:57:42
  don't know the if you're not in the huddle, you don't know the
• 1:57:44
  play and that changed my that changed my life with judgement
• 1:57:47
  tremendously. Yes, I I agree with that.
• 1:57:50
  OK and and so many more topics. OK when we first, yeah, we got
• 1:57:54
  online here Randy, we talked about that we might need 2
• 1:57:56
  parts. We we are you promised me.
• 1:57:58
  So here's my I have. No idea what time it is, even
• 1:58:00
  I've lost track. Here's my last question.
• 1:58:02
  I got about maybe 10 more minutes and I have to jump, but
• 1:58:05
  I have, but I want to ask this because it's a situation of what
• 1:58:07
  we've just been talking about and then we're going to pick up
• 1:58:09
  from here when we get scheduled for our next one, especially
• 1:58:13
  because it's very international here.
• 1:58:14
  What were your thoughts on the, because we're talking about you
• 1:58:17
  know how do we build a 9M jumper etcetera, etcetera.
• 1:58:20
  What were your thoughts on this long jump zone that was proposed
• 1:58:25
  for a bit? Hate, hated it.
• 1:58:26
  I hated it. It I, I just, I think it's, I'm
• 1:58:29
  glad they didn't do it. I think, yeah, everybody's sort
• 1:58:33
  of glad they didn't do it. It is part of the event.
• 1:58:36
  It's part of learning. You know, I've had people ask
• 1:58:40
  me, you know, I was doing a lecture not long ago when I
• 1:58:45
  brought up my vision test. And they're like, well, what do
• 1:58:48
  you, what do you do that for? It's because we have to learn
• 1:58:51
  how to track and we're learning how to track this way.
• 1:58:55
  Most of the time you're learning how to track this way.
• 1:58:57
  So diverging versus converging. And you know, there's, there's
• 1:59:02
  just different ways to do converging and one's going away
• 1:59:06
  from you, one's coming at you, you know, where's your dominant
• 1:59:10
  eye? You know, I, you know, can you
• 1:59:13
  even see? I mean, I had a triple jumper
• 1:59:16
  and, and even Sue. And this is a story I'll tell
• 1:59:19
  real quick. So the reason I put Sue on the,
• 1:59:23
  on the in #1 in the relay in 2019 when we broke the national
• 1:59:29
  record was because I, I, I, he wanted to be there one, because
• 1:59:33
  I want to start, Oh, you're the fastest starter in the world.
• 1:59:36
  I mean, yeah, you should be there.
• 1:59:39
  But more importantly, I, I look at him one day and he's going
• 1:59:45
  like this. And I'm like, Sue, do you wear a
• 1:59:49
  glass this early on? He goes, well, yeah, I'm like,
• 1:59:54
  and in my mind, I'm going, you're #3 you can't even see the
• 1:59:57
  guy coming in, you know, and I got into this discussion.
• 2:00:02
  I'm sorry, I'm on a couple tangents here, but I got in this
• 2:00:06
  discussion about the third leg with somebody and, and they
• 2:00:10
  said, God, who the heck put their guy out in the outside of
• 2:00:13
  the 3rd lane for the relay? I said I did.
• 2:00:17
  And they said shut up. Why?
• 2:00:20
  I said well. If you're in the United States,
• 2:00:23
  a lot of our tracks are old 440 tracks and they have long
• 2:00:27
  straightaways, which means that the third leg is basically on
• 2:00:31
  the straightaway. It's steel, which if it's on the
• 2:00:35
  straightaway, you can be on the inside and turn.
• 2:00:39
  But if you're on an international track with big
• 2:00:41
  curves, if you turned, you've got to turn all the way around
• 2:00:46
  to try to see. Now, what's your dominant eye?
• 2:00:50
  If your dominant eye is your left eye, you're going all the
• 2:00:53
  way around. If your dominant eye is your
• 2:00:55
  left eye, you're right here. So it depends on the type of
• 2:00:59
  track where you place them, which people don't talk about,
• 2:01:02
  but I just gave away a secret here.
• 2:01:03
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if so, if your third leg is
• 2:01:07
  on the curve, you put them on the outside so they can see.
• 2:01:10
  That's easy. If your third leg is on the
• 2:01:13
  straight, which is a lot. And you know, a lot of tracks in
• 2:01:15
  the US, you put them on the inside so they can see.
• 2:01:18
  Because if you're in the inside on, if you're in the outside on
• 2:01:21
  a big curve, you're looking down, you're looking on a curve,
• 2:01:24
  you're looking your runners coming in from over there, not
• 2:01:27
  from over here. So Sue couldn't see it literally
• 2:01:32
  didn't. He just took off and waited?
• 2:01:34
  Which means there was never that true explosion acceleration
• 2:01:38
  needed in through the zone, yeah.
• 2:01:40
  Which is a specialty, Yeah, yeah.
• 2:01:42
  Right. Well, I mean, you know that 3779
• 2:01:45
  we ran with the 1032102810221016 and we run 3779.
• 2:01:52
  We definitely will talk about relays.
• 2:01:53
  Go back to my long jump zone though.
• 2:01:55
  Oh sorry, would you have? This may be a dumb question.
• 2:01:59
  If that would have passed, would you have had to coach the long
• 2:02:03
  jump differently? No, I'm going to say this and
• 2:02:06
  tell you why because we talk about vision still.
• 2:02:10
  So I don't do it with everybody, but sometimes I do do it.
• 2:02:13
  I actually make a bigger board. So I'll start out with a 20, a
• 2:02:18
  20 inch board or a 16 inch board, double the size, and then
• 2:02:23
  slowly but surely take the tape away so that they're learning
• 2:02:27
  how to get better and better and better at visual control and
• 2:02:30
  tracking. And remember from Doctor
• 2:02:32
  Haysworth, visual control doesn't start until about 5 to 7
• 2:02:37
  steps out. So now you're moved away from
• 2:02:41
  programming, which you as a coach can do to the athletes now
• 2:02:45
  having another skill they need. And that is how to track
• 2:02:48
  visually, steering, visual control, whatever word you wish
• 2:02:51
  to use. So it the way you go about it is
• 2:02:57
  you lay a bigger board for a while and they did you start
• 2:02:59
  making the board smaller just like you would do have lost dog.
• 2:03:03
  I mean, you're just conditioning them to to get better and better
• 2:03:07
  and better at tracking a smaller and smaller surface and and.
• 2:03:13
  Would you keep that going and go under an 8 inch board at all?
• 2:03:17
  Never did, but I think you could.
• 2:03:20
  To make it even better, I also used the old Nike Vapor glasses.
• 2:03:24
  You know that you'd be if you, I don't know if you remember those
• 2:03:26
  or not. They're the stroke stroke
• 2:03:27
  glasses. And so you would set those fast
• 2:03:32
  first and then slowly, then you get them slower and slower so
• 2:03:35
  that you're teaching your brain to track faster and faster.
• 2:03:40
  Interesting. It's a so it's it's all brain
• 2:03:41
  training. Vision is vision is brain
• 2:03:44
  training. And and I think we are fully
• 2:03:48
  underestimate the role the the brain, the role the brain plays
• 2:03:54
  in visual control and steering in the horizontal jumps whole
• 2:03:57
  vault. You wouldn't have to coach it
• 2:04:00
  differently. Then why was it such a bad idea
• 2:04:03
  in your opinion? It's a bad idea because I, I, I
• 2:04:08
  feel that that having the board structured like that is a, is a
• 2:04:14
  part of the whole process. It's a part of what makes it
• 2:04:19
  great and what you could look historically now if you did that
• 2:04:23
  history gets thrown out. Oh, it's a different event.
• 2:04:25
  I I agree with that. Like the world record stops.
• 2:04:28
  It's not. It's like the old rules Javelin.
• 2:04:30
  We have that in our record book, but that's gone because we don't
• 2:04:32
  do that anymore. It's a new long jump post 2026
• 2:04:36
  or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a
• 2:04:37
  different event. I agree with that.
• 2:04:39
  Yeah, and I don't it would I have, you know when you heard me
• 2:04:45
  talk about the 2M mark, I mean when I do coaching, I don't look
• 2:04:50
  at the board. I rarely if ever look at the
• 2:04:54
  board I am coaching to the 2M mark or thereabouts.
• 2:04:58
  So I know if I'm in the zone of success, which is what that 2M
• 2:05:02
  mark is, if I'm not in that zone of success, it don't matter
• 2:05:05
  where that board is, I'm in trouble.
• 2:05:07
  So I need the athlete to be programmed to that point or
• 2:05:11
  visual control to that point, because then it's the mechanics
• 2:05:15
  of what the legs doing. You know, in, in the case of the
• 2:05:18
  Chinese, they are and, and the Americans as well, they do so
• 2:05:22
  many short approach jumps and they want to jump far.
• 2:05:26
  They get used to pushing to the board off of the penultimate
• 2:05:30
  really bad mistake because it's going to push you into fouling a
• 2:05:34
  lot because they push and lift and the you know, so that that
• 2:05:40
  six step jump, you know, the shorter jumps in which you
• 2:05:43
  really are trying to jump far. Bad idea, try to execute.
• 2:05:49
  Don't worry about the distance again, it's back to that.
• 2:05:52
  Not how far did I jump, but how do I jump?
• 2:05:54
  Far. How do I jump far?
• 2:05:55
  Yeah. And now I'm starting to get that
• 2:05:57
  concept. There.
• 2:05:57
  I got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:06:00
  And and that's why Doctor Hay helped us with that.
• 2:06:02
  He said, look, you know, at about 92 to 94%, you need to be
• 2:06:07
  at around 12 steps. So we do most of our jumping
• 2:06:10
  between 10 and 14 steps so that we're at least approximately got
• 2:06:14
  to be over 90% velocity and not underneath it and then execute,
• 2:06:19
  Sorry, we ran out of time. But no, no bro, come on, there's
• 2:06:24
  a reason why I picked you for 3:50 and not 372 or some random
• 2:06:28
  number, right? Oh, we may do 353513. 51 Yeah,
• 2:06:32
  exactly, exactly when when we first these are these are.
• 2:06:35
  Controversial topics some of these and it's going to yeah
• 2:06:37
  yeah yeah yeah it's going to light up a few people and it's
• 2:06:40
  not meant to I knew having a. Conversation with you it's
• 2:06:42
  interesting. I was just kind of thinking
• 2:06:44
  about normally we title these things like when we have Boosh X
• 2:06:48
  Nader Dash LSU and I'm thinking what do I do that with Randy?
• 2:06:51
  And now actually, I think this is, you know, when you get into
• 2:06:54
  our grooves on how we do things, I actually think because we need
• 2:06:57
  more than one part for sure. I think this is more of like a
• 2:07:00
  conversation with Randy Huntington.
• 2:07:02
  And that's more of what I envisioned because of my history
• 2:07:04
  with you of having these type of actually, we were doing podcasts
• 2:07:07
  before we recorded podcasts. Randy when?
• 2:07:09
  We were just right. Talk about they were called.
• 2:07:10
  Lunches exactly. So no, I am 100% good with these
• 2:07:15
  because part of my role as this track coach advocate is to help
• 2:07:18
  spur these conversations and to know that and maybe give some
• 2:07:22
  space that people can feel comfortable that OK, I can have
• 2:07:25
  this conversation, whether it's, you know, recorded like this,
• 2:07:27
  which it takes a lot of trust and I'm grateful for that, or
• 2:07:29
  it's within their own circles or own text groups and network.
• 2:07:33
  So I think it's extremely helpful.
• 2:07:36
  I agree with you, Mike. I think that the more we can
• 2:07:38
  communicate with each other about, yeah, some of these
• 2:07:41
  controversial subjects, and not all of them are, but there's
• 2:07:44
  some that are. Well, a lot of them are
• 2:07:48
  controversial because we don't talk about them, so they stay in
• 2:07:50
  this controversial world and it's not the reality.
• 2:07:54
  OK, Randy, first of all, OK, you gotta go.
• 2:07:55
  Yeah. Love you, brother.
• 2:07:56
  Thank you so, so much. I will get with you about your
• 2:08:00
  schedule and and figuring out when we can.
• 2:08:02
  My schedule's pretty open right now.
• 2:08:03
  I mean, you know, I just got. I'll holler at you through
• 2:08:06
  e-mail probably later on today and we'll we'll get that
• 2:08:08
  scheduled. But man, I'm just so, so
• 2:08:10
  grateful for you, man. The most expensive thing in the
• 2:08:12
  world you give me is your time. And this has been, I mean, we
• 2:08:16
  did two 2 1/2 and we're maybe at the half point to be rely on
• 2:08:21
  maybe so. So guys and gals, thank you so
• 2:08:23
  much for being here. I hope you've enjoyed this kind
• 2:08:25
  of a, almost like a fireside chat, like I said, a
• 2:08:27
  conversation with a guy who's been in a lot of different
• 2:08:29
  places, a lot of different areas in our profession, from the
• 2:08:32
  highest the world record and gold medals and national records
• 2:08:36
  to the low things that we, we, we all have struggled with
• 2:08:38
  getting a job, for crying out loud, turning down $70,000 jobs
• 2:08:42
  for 6500 jobs because that was the right place for him at the
• 2:08:46
  time. And, and so I just love this
• 2:08:48
  conversation that we're having with Randy.
• 2:08:49
  We're going to pick this back up in a Part 2 and and keep the
• 2:08:52
  conversation going because we're going to pick back up probably
• 2:08:55
  getting to Michigan State and we'll and we'll let the tangents
• 2:08:58
  go from there. I'm a tangent guy myself.
• 2:09:00
  That's why I think I enjoy conversation with you, because
• 2:09:02
  we just get to go and eventually we circle back and all that kind
• 2:09:05
  of good stuff. So what I hope, and I think this
• 2:09:07
  does Mike too, is it it brings guys like Dick and Boo and Cliff
• 2:09:12
  and having this same kind of conversation.
• 2:09:15
  Get out of the formality of yeah, I'm coach.
• 2:09:17
  And here's what we that's right. Get into, dude, How what what
• 2:09:21
  what happened to you? But what's going what was what
• 2:09:23
  did you experience? That's right.
• 2:09:25
  And how can you help others not go through the same thing
• 2:09:28
  potentially? Yeah, you know.
• 2:09:30
  We've had Boo and Dick both on the show and both unbelievably
• 2:09:34
  much like this one will be. I've had so many people come up
• 2:09:38
  to me about how it changed their thought process and how they
• 2:09:41
  thought about things. Not just not, in fact, not
• 2:09:43
  coaching. We don't really talk XS and OS
• 2:09:45
  about coaching, but the profession of coaching.
• 2:09:47
  And so I know this is going to be in that same vein.
• 2:09:50
  Brother, thank you so much. I'll get with you later on and
• 2:09:53
  we'll get the schedule. Guys and gals, thank you so much
• 2:09:54
  for being here. Be ready for Part 2, Part 3.
• 2:09:57
  I don't know how many times I'm going to get down with Randy,
• 2:09:59
  but we're going to, we're going to have some topics and I hope
• 2:10:01
  you see the value in that. So thanks again for being here.
• 2:10:04
  We'll see you next week. See you guys.
• 2:10:06
  Thanks, Mike. And the goals to appreciate the
• 2:10:11
  coach, the ones that point people most every season needs a
• 2:10:14
  voice of reason speaking the growth you got to prep before
• 2:10:17
  you carry the load. Ice coffee to the soul.
• 2:10:19
  For those of us stay on the go. Proper handoff to stay in the
• 2:10:22
  zone which you packing for the road.
• 2:10:24
  There's more than one way to go. Taking those SPAN you're told it
• 2:10:28
  ain't practice if your purpose ain't clear.
• 2:10:29
  It can't happen until you listen with both ears.
• 2:10:32
  You can't mentor without a mentor.
• 2:10:34
  Years of experience, you can reinvent those years every
• 2:10:37
  plan's got to stand and deliver to and the price sacrifice can
• 2:10:41
  you give up you. It's a choice and the fight not
• 2:10:43
  a win or lose. It's not a ploy boy device.
• 2:10:45
  Y'all can make more moves. It's not about how to, it's all
• 2:10:48
  about why you don't know till you know who you are inside
• 2:10:52
  6,000,000 waste of time, choose none so y'all cross the finish
• 2:10:55
  line. The work ain't done so we learn
• 2:10:57
  from the experts but y'all got to put in the leg work.
• 2:11:00
  Gil Athletics is the network. It's all about connections put
• 2:11:03
  together for the profession to where every track coach could be
• 2:11:06
  blessing.