Interview with Ryan Hall

by Scott Dance

Ryan Hall, 23, is just finishing his first year as a professional runner after a whirlwind summer of 2005, during which he won the NCAA 5000 meters outdoor title in a Stanford record and personal best of 13:22.32, got engaged to his college girlfriend and teammate Sara Bei [whom he is now married to], and qualified for the world championships with a third-place finish at U.S. Nationals in another personal best, 13:16.03. This past winter, he qualified for another world championship with his first national cross country title in the senior men’s 12K. He trains with Team Running USA, which is based in California.

As a collegian at Stanford, his career was highlighted by a runner-up finish at the NCAA cross country championships in 2003. He had an accomplished high school career at Big Bear High School in California, including a 3:42.70 1500 meters, a course record at the famed Mt. SAC cross country course, and a third-place finish behind Dathan Ritzenhein and Alan Webb at the 2000 Foot Locker National Cross Country Championship.

Mensracing.com spoke with Hall while he drove from his parents’ home in Big Bear to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. For online journals by Hall and other members of the USA Distance Project, go here .

MensRacing.com: So you’re headed from the mountains back to the Olympic Training Center? How is training going there? I had a friend who trained at the one in Colorado Springs, and I hear it’s pretty nice.
Ryan Hall: Yeah, I headed up to Big Bear, where I’m from, just to get to the mountains one last time before heading to nationals and to Europe, where we’ll be around all the major cities. It was just a little mini-retreat before the season gets going. It’s always good to be home.

We’ve been at the Olympic Training Center for about three weeks, going back and forth pretty much between Mammoth and San Diego. This training center is a little smaller than the one in Colorado, I think. There’s no pool, but there’s a track, a dining hall, dorms, a therapy room—it’s got everything we need right there. Everything’s just a stroll away, so it’s easy if you need to go ice or go do workouts. It’s like a little training monastery; that’s how I think of it. It’s also really inspiring to be there, too, with the Olympic rings everywhere. You feel like you’re doing something special.

MR: How is training going gearing up for nationals and the European track season? Nationals was such a big race for you last year. How are you approaching it this year?
RH: I’m really excited for nationals, because I haven’t done a 5K yet this season. I’ve been feeling really strong, which is good, so I think the longer I go, the better I’ll be. All I have raced this season is a two-mile and a 1500, so I have yet to really test my strength. I know that nationals will provide a perfect opportunity to test out where my 5K is at because it’s a really loaded race.

Training-wise, this year has had a slightly different approach. I moved my base phase of training from the winter to the spring. Our team is based out of Mammoth Lakes, so I was able to get some good base training at altitude. After getting in a good base of tempo runs and long runs, I have been doing more 1500-specific training than I had last year over the past three weeks or so. My training has left me really optimistic about the season ahead, both in the States and Europe. I like to run well in the States, and doing well at nationals is a big goal for me, but last year I had run six or seven 5Ks before nationals, which left me feeling pretty tired for the remainder of the summer, and this year it’ll be my first one. I feel a lot fresher and ready for the summer season this year. Last year, it was hard to enjoy the experience of the summer circuit because I was pretty tired. It will be nice to be feeling good, Lord willing, of course.

MR: This year is kind of unique since it’s sort of an off year in terms of big races. What event will you be focusing on?
RH: Last year was really my first year of focusing on the 5K. This year, I also want to hit some good 5Ks and see where I’m at there, but I also want to do a little experimenting with the 1500 and the 10K. I’ll continue to do some 1500-specific workouts, such as 8 by 400 at 1500 goal pace. I really want to run a better 1500 time, because if I can’t run, say, a 3:38 or better, it doesn’t matter how strong I am, I will have trouble running under 13:00 [for 5K], and will eventually have to move up to the 10K or the marathon. Seeing where I am at over 1500 meters will be an important goal for this summer. I also want to try a 10K, because I haven’t run one on the track yet. Hopefully I’m going to run one later in the summer. It looks like there’s going to be a good one in Hechtel [Belgium], with some really good Americans in the field for me to key off of..

MR: Will you eventually strategize for what event you like the most, or what you have the best chances of medaling in? And how fast do you and your coaches think you can go in different events?
RH: I feel like I’m still kind of figuring out what my potential is because I spent a good deal of college struggling on the track. I don’t think I ever got a good idea of what I could run in the 1500. Like I said before, improving my 1500 time is a big goal for this season. I am not sure how fast I can run. I definitely enjoy 5K-specific training more, and believe that I am more suited for the 5K and maybe even the 10K.

At this point in my career, I’m trying to just go with the flow and not be stubborn about what event I’m going to end up being most suited for. In college, I was pretty stubborn about trying out the 5K, because I was so attached to the 1500. I wasn’t really willing to try the 5K until my junior year, and I was so frustrated with my 1500 that I was willing to try anything at that point. So I’m taking the same approach here. If my best event is the 10K or the marathon, I’m willing to do that. I just want to do whatever God has created for me to do.

As far as my potential goes, I really don’t know what my limits will be. I think a major determinant is basic speed. I know I have good basic speed, but I am not sure it will be fast enough to run with the world’s best over 5K, although it seems like everything from the 800 to the 10K has the winner closing in 53 [seconds] or better over the last 400 meters in the World Championships and Olympics. My personal belief is that all things are possible. I don’t really care to throw any times out there that I think I can run, because I really do believe the sky is the limit. However, I try to not make the times and achievements the purpose or the end of my running. If it becomes all about running fast times and winning medals, then I have missed the best parts about running. Worshipping God with my training and racing, the people I have met, the relationships that I have built, the places that I have been blessed to see, and the process of training are all the parts of running that make it worthwhile for me, regardless of how fast I end up running.

MR: As the season starts to heat up, what are your plans, and do you have any specific goals for the next year or two you’re going to be using as benchmarks?
RH: My only goal really is to praise God out on the track and try and get everything out of me that I can. I used to be really into time goals, but I just found myself really caught up in performances. Running ceased to be fun, and I was feeling a lot of pressure. Now I hope to make every season into a win-win situation by doing all the training to the best of my abilities and then being content and grateful with whatever outcomes God has for me. I admit that this is easier said than done, but it is my goal as I mature as an athlete and a person. I do sometimes think about running under 13:10 or squeezing under 13:00, but I try not to let myself go too far down the mental road of what’s going to happen this season. As far as my racing plans, I am planning to run the 5K at USAs and then a couple of 1500s in Belgium before running a 5K in Heudsden. We will see how things go at that point and decide what races to point at for the second half of the summer.

MR: Last year saw you and Ian Dobson’s breakout along with Tim Broe running some of the fastest times the U.S. has seen in years all in one race, and then you were followed up that summer by Alan Webb, Adam Goucher, and the newly American Bernard Lagat. Everyone talks about and is on the lookout for resurgence in US distance running—what do you think? Do you expect the trend to continue this summer and/or by Beijing?
RH: My feeling about it right now is I know there’s going to be some guys breaking 13:00 [for 5K]. Lagat did it last year, and I think there are some guys who are going to take a crack at it this year. I would like to take a swing at it as well if I am feeling good and ready to go. It will be exciting to see how the summer plays out for all the American boys. Hopefully, we will have a bunch of guys go under 13:00, but you never know. I think as some guys start breaking some barriers, more and more guys will step up to the plate. When you see or hear of other guys running fast, you start to think, “I know I can run with these guys.”

MR: Last year was, of course, a huge breakthrough after a few tough years in college. Can you talk about how that struggle went the past few years?
RH: It was really a tough time, not just running-wise, but in my life in general. Having success makes you hungry for more success, and sometimes it’s hard to be content with where you’re at when you’re successful. Having success in high school made me put up these huge goals for myself in college, and when that wasn’t happening, it was a really difficult time in all areas of my life. It made it hard to go to classes and to be social. It just made it tough to be happy. Luckily I had an amazing girlfriend, now my wife, who was there through it all with me.

The climax of the struggle was when I went home my sophomore year. I needed to evaluate where I was at and think about why I was putting so much emphasis on running. For example, I had a countdown in my room to the 2004 Olympics from like 1,000 days out. I put a lot of pressure on myself. That winter at home was hard, because I was trying to change how I saw myself. What resulted is that I got away from my self-image being “Ryan the runner” to being just Ryan again. It was also hard because I was away from Sara, and a big reason why I kept running was because she was there and was encouraging me through it all. There were a lot times I just wanted to throw in the towel and end all the frustrations I was experiencing. Having someone there with you, it helps you make it.

The bad races and the frustrations continued until my fourth year, when I experienced a drastic change in my running. Last year I didn’t know what to expect. I just did exactly what [then Stanford] coach [Andrew] Gerard was telling me to do, and I started feeling better and better, and the season started to come around. It was amazing to go from the desert to the Promised Land in such a short time. I saw a lot of my dreams come true right before my eyes, like qualifying for the World Championships. Going through a struggle made the success that much sweeter when I had been persevering through the hard times for years. It made me super thankful.

My faith was the thing that allowed me to make it through the hard times. I really felt strongly that like the Biblical Joseph, God had me in a season of struggle to teach me a lot of things—things about myself, about God, and about life. There were so many things that I learned through the struggles. I wouldn’t want to change anything about my past. I am a lot better off now than I would have been had everything gone according to my plans.

One major personal issue that I had to deal with, besides learning to define myself apart from my running, was coming to terms with what makes me happy in life. Ever since high school, my happiness was completely dependant upon my running. When the running was going well, so was the rest of my life. But running wasn’t dependable, even if I trained as perfectly and hard as I could. Now I find my happiness in knowing and serving God. Everything else falls into place after that.

MR: What circumstances do you think there were that made a difference in the breakthrough?
RH: One thing that was a huge blessing and made a huge difference was having Coach Gerard at Stanford. Over the couple years I worked with him, he got to know my body really well, and he did a stellar job of designing workouts and making adjustments when they were needed. Also, having Ian [Dobson] there to work with, that was huge. He played a huge role in helping with my confidence. Training with Ian every day made it easier for me to believe that I could also race with him. We helped each other out a lot in both workouts and races. In my opinion, not having to lead every interval in training and having someone in a race to help with the lead is an essential for getting American distance running back on track with the rest of the world.

Last year, a lot of things had to kind of click for me, and they did. The Lord was just blessing me last year. There was a crazy three weeks last summer when Ian and I went 1-2 at NCAAs on Friday, and the following week I got engaged to Sara, and then the next day I turned professional, and the next week, I qualified for worlds. If I had had one of those things happen to me, it would have been enough excitement to hold me over for a long time, but they came one after the other.

It was funny, about a week before NCAAs I was talking to Sara’s parents about asking their permission to marry her, and I remember telling them that I didn’t have a clue how I was going to provide for Sara, but that I was committed to doing whatever it took and trusted that the Lord would provide for us. I had no intentions of turning professional at this point. However, right after I talked to them, NCAAs went really well and the timing was right for me to turn professional, and I would have enough to provide for the both of us. All that stuff just worked out perfectly. It was quite a month.

MR: Training-wise, what did that time last year look like?
RH: Since we were focusing on the 5K, we did stuff like 10 by 1000 meters, threshold work, and 5 by one mile, and we just kept hitting the strength stuff. I had always done more speed work, but I found I respond pretty well to strength training. I started feeling really good in workouts halfway through the season, and I realized if I kept it up and didn’t get too ambitious or strain myself, it’d turn out pretty well. Ian and I worked out a pretty good system of training. We’re comfortable following each other and do a good job of not racing each other in workouts. We run at the proper effort level, which is something I didn’t do my first few years at Stanford. It was tough coming from training by myself in high school to Stanford; I was racing every day.

MR: Are you trying to duplicate some of that for this year?
RH: A lot of my training was very similar this winter. Terrence Mahon was really good at transitioning us. This spring, we’re doing some different workouts from last year, though, which is good, so we don’t get into comparing ourselves to last year. This year, it’s been nice to mix things up and run some workouts we’ve never done before, but it’s still the typical threshold or interval workouts that we did in college. The training is different enough to make it fun, and I really trust Terrence a lot. Deena [Kastor] has been doing great, and so has Jen [Rhines] and a lot of the athletes he’s working with. I’m trying to just do whatever he tells me, and it’s been working out so far this year. He is extremely knowledgeable about everything from nutrition to designing a great training program. It is nice to be trained by someone who is so well in touch with the professional running circuit.

MR: Do you still have any contact with Coach Gerard?
RH: I talk to him randomly, not anything very structured, but I like him a lot as a person and send him an e-mail once in awhile. Coach Gerard does a good job of respecting athletes’ decisions wherever they decide to go. He doesn’t step on other coaches’ toes and try and coach athletes who are being coached by a different coach. He just told us that he would be involved with us at whatever capacity we wanted him to be involved. We bounced some things off him early on, but now we just e-mail to keep in touch.

MR: So you’re training along with Ian, with whom you had a great partnership last year, and the rest of Team Running USA. How has that environment been so far this year?
RH: It’s been great. It’s made the transition really easy out of college. I am very grateful for groups such as the New York Road Runners for investing in post-collegiate groups such as ours. There are going to be some more medal winners that come out of groups such as ours. Our group is very similar to how a college team would function, but just without the school. It’s nice because our training is very structured, unlike at home when I often put my runs off saying, “Oh, I’ll do it later in the afternoon,” and then end up doing half of a run at twilight. We always meet for all our runs and our workouts, and you kind of arrange your life around that and not vice versa. I feel like I respond well to routine, and that’s been really good for me to keep. It’s good for my body and how it responds to the training. The people are great, too—keeping the same training partner has also made post-collegiate running much easier. Also, it is nice to have a training partner that I genuinely like hanging out, with regardless of the running. Having Gabe [Jennings]with us brought a lot of enthusiasm to the group as well. It was really fun to train with him again. Everyone brings their own flavor to the group, and we all influence each other in positive ways. For example, having Deena and Meb [Keflezighi] around reminds us that it is possible for the U.S. to get medals in the distances.

MR: I read that you and Ian enjoy fly fishing up in Mammoth. Is there anything else that you consider unique about your experience with the post-collegiate group up there? How does the camaraderie play into training and life there?
RH: We have fun dinners up there, like we had a Mexican fiesta night and Ethiopian night a few weeks ago. We’ll do fun dinners and outings periodically. And I love to go fly fishing, and we’ve been trying to get some of the guys to go with us. We haven’t had a lot of luck yet. It is nice to hang out with people who are like-minded. For example, no one wants to go out late the night before a workout.

For Sara and I the other thing that’s interesting—besides getting to hang out all day together—is being homeless. We’re just kind of trucking our stuff with us in the back of our CRV from Mammoth to Palo Alto, and Palo Alto to Mammoth, and Mammoth to San Diego. We stay in a condo in Mammoth, so it is not like we are roughing it, but it’s kind of weird living out of a suitcase. It’s kind of the ideal young-person lifestyle, but I feel like we’re ready to get a place of our own in Mammoth, hopefully.

MR: Can you talk about the philosophies of your new coach Terrence Mahon and how they are similar or different than what you did in college?
RH: They’re pretty similar to [former Stanford coach] Vin [Lananna] and Coach Gerard, a lot of threshold stuff early on. We probably do a lot more tempo runs now than we did in college, especially in Mammoth. The training up there is just really different because you can’t do what you can do at sea level. We do a lot of hills, which there aren’t a lot of around Stanford, and that was something I always wanted to do. We do hill sprints once or twice a week. The basic philosophy is pretty much the same. Last year, our big workouts were repeat miles or 1K. We did those in Mammoth this fall, and in the wintertime as well. We told Terrence these workouts have worked really well for us, so we continue to do them, but Terrence has some great new workouts we’ve been doing as well. We’ve been doing some great 1500 workouts that I think will help with our 5Ks a lot this summer, and hopefully in running a good 1500 as well. Terrence is really intuitive and flexible, as well. It’s nice to have a coach I can come to with my own ideas, and he’ll really think through them with me. It’s really a partnership more than anything else.

MR: What does your calendar of training look like in terms of getting in a base and peaking at the right times, what with you running some cross country this winter and now gearing up in track?
RH: We got a really late start this fall getting our base in Mammoth. We got married September 25th, went on our honeymoon for a week, and then a photo shoot with Asics for a week, so we didn’t get up to Mammoth till the second week in October. That was our summer base period, in October and November. Once we left Mammoth and went to Stanford in the winter, we started doing some interval training, and then went through the cross country season, but we didn’t get on the track a lot. I took about a week off after worlds and started a mini-base season up in Mammoth, and we’ve been getting into intervals the last few weeks down here in San Diego. Basically everything is just shifted back in order to prepare for a late summer. One thing I like is being up at altitude doing our base work. I always come out feeling really strong, like when I was growing up at altitude.

MR: In the past year, your international experience has gone from almost nonexistent to pretty substantial, with a full slate last summer, including worlds, and then international cross country races this winter. How have you been encouraged or discouraged in that, and how does it affect how you look at the long-term?
RH: In some ways it’s very discouraging, like thinking, “Man, these guys are just on a whole different level,” but I kind of look at it the same way as going from high school to college. It took me awhile to adjust to college, and worlds is just another whole big step up. Some of these African kids can just run right on the scene, like [Kenenisa] Bekele, but for me realistically, it’s going to take a couple years to get to the world level. It’s helped me be content where I’m at and it’s also inspiring to watch these guys run, and it’s made me picture myself doing that and saying, “Hey, this is possible.”

I don’t like jumping in races where I’m going to get pounded, but at the same time, I like to stick my nose in them and go out maybe a little more aggressive than I should. You never know what you’re going to have on any particular day—Bekele could have a bad day and you could have a great day. I feel like anything could happen any day, and I try to go into races with this mentality. Most of the time it doesn’t work out exactly how I want it to, but sometimes it does, and it’s good practice for the future. When I get discouraged, I just think, “I need to be patient.” I think if I train really hard and smart and stay injury-free, I’ll have a shot at it. You just have to step up to the plate and take your swing and keep swinging every opportunity you get.

MR: Your wife, Sara, has talked about your plans as a family to shoot for Beijing and then reevaluate, with an eye on Christian missions someday. How do you see the next five or ten years playing out?
RH: It’s hard to know. I would have never guessed this past year was going to go how it has gone. I was planning on being at Stanford now finishing up my fifth year and graduating. So I plan to hold our future with open hands so God can use us however he desires. What that is, I do not know. We’ll both finish our contracts in ’08 and see what happens. I’m open to anything. I just want to do whatever the Lord has for my life. We are just enjoying this season of life. I feel like we’re kind of living life backwards right now, like we’re retired. Our lifestyle is pretty much the same as retired people—we travel a lot, work out during parts of the day, eat, take naps and do a lot of reading. It’s fun to just ride this out until ’08.

Editor's Update: Ryan Hall placed eighth in the 2006 USATF 5000-meter championships, with a time of 13:40.55.

Interview conducted June 12, 2006, and posted June 23, 2006.