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Ryan Hall was in New York City over the weekend of June 1-2 to see his wife, Sara Hall, run the 1500 meters in the Reebok Grand Prix meet at Icahn Stadium. Ryan, having already excelled on the track (he ran the 5000 meters at the 2005 World Track and Field Championships in Helsinki) and on the trails (he won the 2006 USA Cross Country Championships 12K in New York’s Van Cortlandt Park, has recently made yet another quantum leap in both distance and achievement: His debuts at the half-marathon and marathon have yielded an American record of 59:43 at the Aramco Houston Half-Marathon on January 14 and the fastest marathon debut in U.S. history--2:08:24--at the Flora London Marathon on April 22. He’s currently preparing for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Men’s Marathon on November 3 of this year, much of which will be run on a five-mile loop through Central Park.
MensRacing.com: What’s Sara hoping to do at the Reebok meet?
Ryan Hall:
She wants to get the A-qualifier. It’s 4:06, which would be a big PR for her. She’s getting ready to make that big jump. She’ll get there—it happens to different people at different times.
MR: Do you get nervous for her races?
RH:
The most nervous I ever get is at her races and at my brother Chad’s, ’cause all I can do is sit there and watch.
MR: You’ve got to be thinking a lot about the Trials marathon. You and Meb [Keflezighi, 2004 Olympic marathon silver medalist] are training partners, and you’re both among the favorites to make the team. In the race, will it be more of a competition or a collaboration between you two?
RH:
We’ll definitely be helping each other. I’m really hoping that he’s on the team, and he’s really hoping that I’m on the team, so we’d love to scoop up two of those spots.
MR: Well, Frank Shorter and Kenny Moore tied in the ’72 Trials, and they went on to take first and fourth in the Olympics, so it might be a good strategy. Have you ever run the five-mile loop in Central Park?
RH:
No, never.
MR: You seem okay with running laps, though—you did pretty well at the long-course USA Cross Country Championships race here last year [he broke away after 6K and won by 27 seconds on the six-lap course]. Was that one of your first clues that you were going to be better at the longer stuff?
RH:
It was. There were a lot of good guys in that race—Ritz had a bad day, though [Dathan Ritzenhein, a favorite, was ill]—and I’d been third to Adam Goucher and Dan Lincoln the day before in the short-course. But I’d been doing a lot of hard eight-mile tempo runs, and that 12K felt very familiar.
MR: It takes a lot of good runners their whole careers to move all the way up from the mile to the marathon, and you’ve already done it at age 24. Are people being premature when they say that you’ve obviously found what you were made to do?
RH:
Actually, I think it is what I was made to do! I really enjoy it. I’ve been running 100-mile weeks since high school, and I like high-mileage training and longer tempo runs. The long stuff really is right for me.
MR: But you concentrated on the mile and 5000 for quite a while. Why not, say, the 10,000?
RH:
It’s weird—I used to hate the 10K. Even in cross country. I remember running a 10K cross country race in college and crossing the line, seeing my coach, and saying, “Coach, I hate the 10K!” [Laughs].
MR: So what made the difference between that and winning a national cross country championship at 12K?
RH:
Getting out of school, really. I had so much going on then—all my classes, and the Christian ministries on campus that I was involved in—those were all really important, too, and then there was running for the team. My running never really clicked at Stanford. I train much differently now.
MR: What’s the main difference?
RH:
I make sure I have easy days, for one thing. In college, our “easy days” were all at around six-minute pace. You know, when [former 1500m/mile world record-holder] Noureddine Morceli was at [California’s] Riverside Community College, he’d run 10-minute pace on his easy days sometimes! But we got into a kind of group-think in college. When I became a professional athlete, and I started to train with Meb and Deena [Kastor, 2004 Olympic marathon bronze medalist], I started to learn what works for me.
MR: Do you know Anthony Famiglietti well at all?
RH: Sure—he’s a cool guy.
MR: He just told me almost exactly the same thing. He said that when he finally learned how to back off when he should, instead of just going hard all the time, his racing took off.
RH:
Yeah, my rest days have to really be rest days.
MR: There’s a great field in the men’s 5000 at the Reebok meet tonight. Are you still interested in track racing?
RH: You know, I’ll be watching the 5000 at the big meets, and those guys’ll go out with a four-flat mile, and then they’ll cruise a little in the middle, and then they’ll finish with another four-flat. I have to be realistic. Maybe that’s in the future for Alan [Webb], or maybe Fam [Famiglietti], but probably not for me.
MR: Before you ran the London Marathon, a lot of people seemed to be thinking of your race there as though it would prove either that you were “the real deal” or that your half at Houston was some sort of fluke. Did you feel that kind of pressure?
RH: Nah, I don’t listen to that—the message-board stuff. I mean, it’s good for the sport, but those people don’t see anyone’s training, so they really can’t know very much. My training before London went really well, so I went there feeling confident. I was looking forward to it.
MR: What was it like to look around in that lead pack and see [Paul] Tergat, [Haile] Gebrselassie, [Khalid] Khannouchi…
RH: I caught up to the group and I thought, “Hey, cool, there’s Geb.” And then I thought, “There’s him, and there’s me; we’re both running this pace—there’s really not so much difference between us.” So I went up to the front. [Laughs].
MR: Yeah, I guess you could say you were confident!
RH: Well, I like to lead, and I like to push. I was okay in that situation.
MR: That certainly became obvious. […] So, how’s your brother Chad doing?
RH: Great. He’s a really good runner. He’s going to go to [the University of] Oregon, and I’m hoping that when he gets out of college, he’ll join up with our group.
MR: So I guess you guys get along pretty well.
RH: Oh, yeah, we have a great time. He’s the fifth of five siblings, and he’s just very relaxed.
MR: Really? A lot of youngest siblings feel that they have to measure up, especially when the older siblings are successful.
RH: Well, not him—he’s got a great attitude.
MR: You were quoted somewhere recently as saying that he might beat you in a quarter.
RH: [Laughing]: I might have said that.
Postscript: At the Reebok Grand Prix, Sara Hall ran 4:14.26 for 12th in the 1500 meters in very tough racing conditions: high heat and humidity. Because she was nevertheless being remarkably friendly and accommodating with reporters afterward, MensRacing asked her a question:
MR: Ryan told me that he gets more nervous for your races than for his own. Do you get more nervous for his races?
Sara Hall: Not very often. Only when it could go either way—but at races like Houston and London, he’s been so confident that I don’t get nervous at all.
Interview conducted June 2, 2007, and posted June 14, 2007.
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