Runnerville

”Keep your hand on the burner!”

My former coach, Mike Dilley, would bark this out to me every time I ran by. It was his mantra, his philosophy.

Keeping your hand on the burner conjures up thoughts of foolishness and unwavering determination. To Dilley, the precise mixture of these two attributes makes a great distance runner. A champion runner is usually just dumb enough to go out too fast, but determined enough to hold the pace until the finish line.

When I came to Dilley after graduating from the University of Portland, I was a 29:16/14:04/3:46 guy. For six years I trained under Dilley and dropped my times down to 28:05/13:33/3:42. During that time I placed in the top three at a handful of USA Championships and made a few international teams.

After winning the bronze medal at the 1999 Pan American Games in the 10,000 Meters, I figured I could do better and sought out another coach and a faster training group. That decision marked the end of my dramatic improvement as a runner.

I moved to Palo Alto to train with the Farm Team where I took daily punishment from youngsters like Brad Hauser, Chris Graff, Matt Lane and Jonathan Riley. The constant stress of trying to keep up on every run led to my demise. By the time I left Palo Alto 13 months later, I couldn’t run one mile under five minutes. I had over trained despite the obvious warning signs. Side note: I can remember at least five occasions when Lananna told me to back off or slow down on both hard days and easy days. In my opinion, Lananna is one of the top five coaches in the world and I know he wanted the best for me.

It’s easy to look back in retrospect and tell myself that moving to California wasn’t the wisest decision I made in regards to my running development. I had a great thing going with Dilley and I just walked away from it.

Sometimes athletes leave a coach for very good reasons. If an athlete is not improving under a training system after a few years, they should leave the system and try something new. After all, athletes need to take control of their own running and part of that control is making sure you are in the right training environment. An athlete trains to improve. He or she doesn’t train to train. With Dilley, I was improving rapidly, yet I still left and it probably cost me.

I just hope Dilley knows that I never took my hand off the burner.

• Olympic Dream Fulfilled - July 15th, 2008