Interview: Ryan Shay

by Parker Morse

"Make it quick, then go back and get some rest." Coach Joe Vigil made sure his newest Team USA marathon star got that message as soon as he spotted us walking over. Ryan Shay would be running 26.2 miles pretty hard the following day, and he needed to get off his feet. So we tried to keep it brief.

Going in to the Olympic Marathon Trials, Shay has the seventh-fastest time in the field, and is one of eight who already has the Olympic "A" standard. That's a nice distinction, but the credit that earns Shay more respect is the title of defending USA Marathon Champion, a title he earned on this very course last year. Not a stranger to winning, Shay was also the 2003 USA Half-Marathon Champion and won the USARC Championship last year. At Notre Dame, Shay won the 2001 NCAA 10,000m title and nine All-American certificates.

After his 2002 graduation, Shay took the unconventional step of going directly to the marathon, with a fall 2002 debut in Chicago (2:14:30). The 2003 USA Championship was only his second marathon, a one-second PR of 2:14:29; his third, the World Championships in Paris, was a DNF. Shay told Charlie Mahler of the Running USA Wire, "I learned a lot from [Paris]."

With a win at his most recent race (the Rock and Roll Arizona Half-Marathon,) Shay is coming in to the Trials with confidence. "On a decent day I should make the team. On a good day I'll win," he told Mahler.

We talked to Shay briefly after the Friday press conference, and asked him about expectations, transitions from the track, and developing American runners.

MensRacing.com: After we pull out the three fastest seed times [Alan Culpepper, Meb Keflezighi, and Dan Browne] you're the next name people mention. Are you feeling any pressure going in?
Ryan Shay: There's always going to be pressure. I put pressure on myself all the time. It's how one deals with that pressure that makes or breaks a person.

MR: Is it mostly your own expectations?
RS: Yeah. Every time I go in to a race, I don't care what other people are expecting. It's what I expect from myself. I've got my own goals, my own standards, and the best I can do when I run is to meet those standards.

MR: The marathon seems to be something you've been pointing towards for a long time. Even when you were running in the NCAA, were you thinking of these Trials as something you wanted to be ready for?
RS: Well, maybe not so much in the marathon. It was always in the back of my mind, but not until my last year at Notre Dame did I really start thinking, "That's what I want to do post-collegiately." In 2000, when I ran the 10,000m Trials on the track, after the race, I was thinking, "In 2004, I want to be ready for the 10K again." Now it turns out that I've decided to go for the marathon.

MR: Was there anything in particular that changed your mind?
RS: I just thought it would suit me more, that my chances at this event were better than the 10K.

MR: Your style on the track pointed towards good marathoning, as well. In Eugene (where Shay won the 2001 NCAA 10,000m), you set a strong pace from the beginning and burned everybody up.
RS: That was probably out of spite from the [previous year's] NCAAs, which was the opposite. The race went out really slow. I had a chip on my shoulder for the whole year, I decided I was never going to let a race go out that slow again. I don't care if people are going to draft off me, or whatever. I'm going to keep it an honest race, and it's going to end an honest race, too.

MR: It turned out not to be much race at all, in the end. You were gone.
RS: I was surprised. I was hoping that a few more people would have challenged me a little more in that race, but it didn't happen. Then the next year, I wasn't very healthy going in. In the early spring I was run over by a car, so things weren't going all that well for me.

I knew since it was hot, people would try to cool it down and slow the pace down. I wanted to push the pace, make it honest, and get it going. Make people decide whether they were going to go along for the ride, or just sit back. That's basically my racing strategy, is to make it honest in the beginning and let things unfold from there.

The thing is that, for distance running to gain any popularity, you can't have these sit-and-kick races all the time. People get bored with them. Especially in the 10K, people aren't going to stick around for 29 minutes to watch one fast lap. They want to see something that's competitive through the whole race, a good pace the entire time they're watching. That's what they got at the World Championships last summer, when the two Ethiopians were going right at it, hammering right away.

MR: You'd rather be in the middle of a fast race than the front of a slow one?
RS: Sure. But ideally I'd like to be in the front all the time.

MR: In that last year, did you know you were going to coming out to run for Coach Vigil and Running USA once you graduated?
RS: I did. I knew that after my senior year at Notre Dame, before my fifth year. I had to make a decision whether or not to graduate, or use my athletic eligibility.

MR: How did you handle the step up to the marathon that fall?
RS: You know, I don't think I prepared all that well for my debut. I had taken basically the whole summer off, after graduation, because I did the 10K at the USATF Nationals. I kind of relaxed during the summer, and didn't start my training until late. I really didn't start training for Chicago until the middle of August, when I went up to Mammoth Lakes to do altitude training with Coach Vigil and Team USA California. That was basically my training, from then until Chicago. I would like to have had better training than I did.

MR: Had you done altitude training before?
RS: No, that was my first time. That also made it a little bit difficult going in to a debut marathon, doing training that was totally different than anything I'd ever done before. But it was necessary, it was another step of the process that I had to go through.

MR: We've heard a bit lately from people who say that the NCAA wears out athletes, that they take a few years to get their legs back under them in the open world.
RS: I don't buy that theory. If you look at African runners — and Coach Vigil loves to give this little statistic — the average African runner's aerobic system has 18,000 more miles put into it than your average American distance runner. [Even after] putting in the work to have an NCAA career, they're still behind the Africans. I do get the point that trying to peak multiple times during an NCAA career might be over-racing. There's something to be said for that.

MR: Is it possible that, as a 10,000m runner, you just didn't have to race that many times in a season? You'd only have to race it three, four times a season.
RS: Yeah, but I'd run anything from the 1,500m up to the 10K. I was racing the same weekends that everyone else was racing. And at conference meets you're doubling up, and running the 5K and the 10K on the same weekend. That does take a toll. But the quality of running that can be expected of you, as an athlete, from your coach, the performances they're expecting on a weekend to weekend basis for meets that don't really mean that much, that puts a lot of strain on you.

I try to concentrate more on the training leading up to a good peak, one major race. And that's the big difference in what I do now. I'll take a major race that I want to perform well at, and then start counting backwards from that, and that gives me a training protocol. Instead of saying, there's this race I need to peak for, and that race I need to peak for.

MR: Has the transition from your college coach to Coach Vigil been a big change?
RS: It was an easy transition, because I was using a lot of Coach Vigil's training methodologies in college. I knew he was someone I wanted to work with post-collegiately. It was an easy transition. He's all about hard work, and we have the same mentality.

(Interview conducted and posted February 6, 2004.)