Starting Over

Sub 4:00: Alan Webb and the Quest for the Fastest Mile
by Chris Lear

For more than three decades, not one American schoolboy had run a sub-4:00 mile. Then, in January 2001, Alan Webb clocked a 3:59.86 mile, the fastest indoor U.S. high school mile ever. Just a few months later, the young track star ran a 3:53.46 mile - a full 2 seconds faster than former record holder Jim Ryun. Webb was hailed as "America's Next Great Miler."

Sub 4:00 follows Webb to college at the University of Michigan. As we witness his freshman track season - watching him struggle with injuries, the politics of the collegiate track world, and his own aspirations to become the best miler ever - we get an unprecedented view of one of the nation's most promising track athletes.

I arrive at the University of Michigan during the first week of March 2002, at the beginning of the outdoor track sea son. A handful of athletes will compete at the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in a few days, but for the vast majority of collegiate and post-collegiate runners in the United States, the spring outdoor track season has arrived.

Only it doesn't feel like it in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Old Man Winter is hanging on something fierce.

Practice starts in an hour, at 3:30 p.m. After a 2-day cross country drive, I'm loath to spend any more time driving my little jalopy around campus. So I walk to the athletic department to try to catch Michigan coach Ron Warhurst before practice. I find his office door open, and, as I peek in, I spot him hunting and pecking at his keyboard.

I knock. He turns, "Christopher!" He grins broadly and waves me in. I take a seat on his couch beside a rag-tag pile of old newspaper clippings and track magazines. I notice a few All-Am e ri ca plaques on the wall from Warhurst's early days at Michigan. I know they're hardly representative of his total haul: In his 27 years with the university, his athletes have won 94 All-America honors in cross country and track and field combined.

Warhurst looks as I remember him from my visit last November, when I traveled here for an initial visit to talk up my book project and get everyone on board. As we chitchat about my trip and his runners, I listen to his deep baritone voice, gravelly from years of smoking. His laughter erupts freely and often in an infectious cackle. An ex-Marine, Warhurst has both the authoritative air and the incisive wit of a drill sergeant, and he brings a drill sergeant's old-school approach to his coaching. He coaches on feel and instinct and tests the limits, both psychological and physical, of his athletes. Yet at times, he's also remarkably collegial.

On his desk sits a framed wedding photo of him and his wife, Kalli. It wasn't too long ago that Coach Warhurst thought he'd die a bachelor, but now, this May, at age 59, the decorated Vietnam vet will become a father for the first time.

For fatherhood, he's had practice. In coming months, I'll hear from multitudes of Michigan trackmen, some of whose names I see on the wall above me, who will tell me how Warhurst not only coached them to great performances but also helped steward them to manhood.

Also in the next few months, Warhurst will face the greatest challenge of his career, one that will test all the assumptions and tenets of his three decades of coaching. That challenge will revolve around Alan Webb, his newest track sensation.

ALAN WEBB: MAKING A COMEBACK

The phone rings. Warhurst takes the call and I duck out. I walk briskly across the parking lot from the athletic building to the University of Michigan Indoor Track Building to await the arrival of Webb and the rest of the Wolverines. The building is like a large airplane hangar, and, at first glance, I think I'm alone.

I notice a couple of old bleachers. As I walk past them, I notice movement out of the corner of my eye. "Hey!" Webb yells to me from beyond the second set of bleachers. Although practice won't start for another half- hour, Webb is already here, stretching to ready his body for the upcoming workout. He springs up, bounds over, and greets me warmly.

Webb didn't compete this past winter due to a nagging Achilles tendon injury that first flared in December, persisted through the winter, and finally forced him to take a 2-week layoff from running. As we chat, I give him a once- over, searching for signs that this training break has softened his powerful physique. I see no marked changes from when I saw him in the fall. And I'll never forget what I witnessed then, 5 months ago.

It was in November 2001, the week after Webb won the Big Ten Cross Country Championships. He was preparing to run the NCAA regional qualifying meet en route to the NCAA Cross Country Championships. Webb's teammates told me that he had been demolishing workout after workout all fall, consistently running times that boggled the mind. Yet I was still unprepared for how indefatigable and indomitable he looked.

That day, I watched in awe as Webb ran a better Michigan (a workout that Warhurst's harriers have been running for some two decades) than anyone else ever had. The Michigan tests the range of a runner's talents, requiring the speed to devour track intervals of 1 mile and 400, 800, and 1200 meters, plus the stamina to endure punishing l¼-mile road runs between the track intervals. Essentially, they run ha rd for just under 7 miles, with little break between repeats.

With extraordinary control, Webb ran incredibly fast splits of 4: 19, 0:54, 2:04, and 3:06 for the track work. He raved afterward about how much he had progressed since he ran his famed 3:53 mile (in the Prefontaine Classic), how in just half a year he'd made huge strength gains while preserving the ballistic speed that allowed him to run a 54-second 40 0-meter sprint while his teammates could manage nothing faster than a 58. "I felt so in control of my stride," he said after the workout. "I've never felt that much in control of my body, ever, even last year at the end of outdoor [track season]."

It seemed that attending Michigan was agreeing with Webb, propelling his running to yet another amazing level.

Coach Warhurst was just as excited about Webb's progress. Although Webb 's fall training was designed to pre pare him to run 10,000 meters-not the mile-at the NCAA Cross Country Championships, he had adapted so well to the training and had such natural speed that Warhurst knew Webb could go on to stun the world with a much faster mile time.

"He can run a 4-minute mile right now," Warhurst told me after that spectacular workout. "So? I'm thinking [he can run] under 3:50. Everyone else in the world wants to know when he will run under 3:50. Well, it's gonna come, it's gonna happen, but I don't want it to happen next week. I want it to be at the NCAA outdoor 1500 or at the Penn Relays or in the summer. The summer is the key. I have to train him not only to represent Michigan. I have to train him to represent the United States."

To train Webb to reach his potential, Warhurst planned a series of workouts to test both his mental and physical limits. "Basically, I want to see how far he can go without breaking down, and I want to see how he responds to the training. He's going to get faster by getting stronger to sustain the basic leg speed. It's simple, simple for me. And it basically starts with cross country to develop the strength."

Then, in December, Webb 's success began to unravel. After pushing hard, he injured his Achilles. He battled the injury throughout the winter.

I know that now he fears another layoff. Spring track season is his season. The mile is his race. He doesn't want to do anything to his body that would jeopardize this.

© 2003 by Chris Lear. All rights reserved. No Part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

About the Author

Chris Lear is the author of the critically acclaimed Running with the Buffaloes. A miler, he earned All-Ivy, All-East, and All-American honors and was a two-time cross-country captain at Princeton University. He lives with his wife, Shawn, in Boulder, Colorado.