by Chris Lear
Wetmore is more encouraged by their third place showing than his guys. “They’re all right for now. They’ve got to understand how unready we are to mix it up on this day. We’ve done no anaerobic work, we’re really race rusty, and we’re tired. We raced Saturday, ran Mags Sunday, and ran 90 minutes on Wednesday. They’re not well rested at all. But if they’re going to panic, I’ll have to remember that and give up that rate of training in the future.”
Goucher does not panic. He ran 23:54, or 4:48 a mile, just as Wetmore planned. He is not upset with how he competed; he is more dis-pleased with Mwangi’s glee. “That guy was celebrating,” he says through pursed lips, “a little too much.” Regardless, Goucher felt “like trash” the whole way. “It sucked,” he says. “I didn’t have it. I don’t have any anaerobic capacity right now. When I’m usually at my best, in the last mile, I didn’t have shit. My legs were tired and they felt heavy.”
His heavy training load has affected his legs and his mind. He continues, “My head was working against me. I was already condemning myself before the end. I’m training so hard right now, it’s hard to get motivated.
I mean, I doubt that guy did what I did last week.”
Like the spectators, Goucher thought he had the race won when he passed Mwangi at the top of the climb. When Mwangi came back at him, he had nothing. “At the top of the hill, I was tired, and I thought, ‘This is it.’
But I just didn’t gap him enough. When he came up it was like, ‘Oh, hello,’
you know. I thought I’d get him there, but up here [he points to his head]
my legs were yelling at me, ‘You’re sore, you’re weak.’”
Goucher feels their meeting at NCAA’s will be a different story. “I had a bad race today and I was second. When it comes to that point in the race later on, then we’ll have some fun. We got six weeks. See what happens then. He was jumping around like he’s the national champ. I’m not worried. I’ll destroy him when I’m ready. I’m a little worried because I’m not too worried about it [losing], but that’s because I’m training so hard. The fire’s a little low right now, you know.”
He does not plan on running the NCAA’s much differently than he ran today. He says, “I may push the hills a little more. I ran conservatively RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
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up the hills and I may need to run a little harder. But I probably won’t change anything. The main change is just a matter of being ready to run.
I did everything right, I just didn’t feel well enough to continue on with that. We got six weeks.”
His supporting cast passed their first big test as well. Wetmore is particularly pleased with the performances of Friedberg and Ponce, who were racing against a national-caliber field for the first time. Like Goucher, Ponce knows how unprepared they were to race today. Next time, the battle with Stanford may turn out a little differently. Of his race he says, “I followed Sev for a while and we were running on the outside of the course. I just wanted to go with Stanford’s four and five. They outkicked me, but next time it will be a 10k so . . .” His voice trails off into the distance. With another mile and a quarter, Ponce will look for his strength to give him the edge against Stanford’s middle-distance runners.
As they board the van to head back to the hotel, the men are subdued. They lost to Stanford and Oregon, but they managed to beat Arizona and NC State, among others. Next time they come here, they will have more time to catch people in the extra mile and a quarter who made too many mistakes early on. Ponce alone passed an estimated fifteen people in the last 1000 meters today. He hopes to double that figure in the last mile six weeks from Monday.
Certainly, other teams
are training as hard as CU is
now. Georgetown finished in
seventh place behind a strong
eleventh place showing by
senior Justin McCarthy. Wet-
more’s college coach and
longtime Hoya mentor Frank
“Gags” Gagliano thinks the
ante has been upped in re-
cent years, and that all teams
are training more like they
used to in the seventies and
in Georgetown’s case, the
early nineties. “In the last cou-
ple of years,” Gags says after-
wards, “some of the Old
Timers, some of us may have
stopped working them hard.
Severy charges up Billy Mills Hill.
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But I tell you what, I’m going back to it. You can’t do that [train with low volume and be successful]. Back with [Pete] Sherry, [John] Trautman, and
[Steve] Holman, we were busting it every day. Hey, I’m going back to that.”
McCarthy’s result is an example of the dividends such training can produce. Says Gags, “He was a 9:18 high school two miler. He got eleventh today. All summer he was devoted to running 100 mile weeks.
He was completely devoted to running, you know what I’m saying?”
Sev ices his knee before boarding the van. As expected, he passed about a dozen guys in the last mile, but he wanted more. “I was 21st,” he says [he was actually 20th]. “Man that’s awful.” Sev, too, figures to benefit tremendously from the added distance in six weeks. His face brightens as he sees Wetmore. Sev says to him, “Mark, there’s more evidence that God’s in control. There was an icepack in the van.” He laughs about the aches and pains now plaguing him. He turns to his good friend Batliner,
“Bat, get healthy, I need someone to take my place.” He does not know it now, but Batliner will remember these words for the rest of his life.
BOB TIMMONS INVITATIONAL
PLACE
NAME
UNIVERSITY
CLASS
TIME
1.
Julius Mwangi
Butler
Sr.
23:47.5 CR
2.
Adam Goucher
Colorado
Sr.
23:54.37
3.
Abdi Abdirahman
Arizona
Sr.
24:33.53
4.
Bernard Lagat
Washington State
Jr.
24:42.55
5. Brad
Hauser
Stanford
Sr. 24:46.11
6. Matt
Davis
Oregon
Sr. 24:47.65
7.
Brent Hauser
Stanford
Sr.
24:49.70
8. Jeff
Simonich
Utah
Sr. 24:56.85
9. Ricardo
Santos Iona
Sr. 25:01
10. Steve
Fein
Oregon
Jr.
25:03.03
20. Chris
Severy
Colorado
Sr. 25:24.42
30. Oscar
Ponce
Colorado
Jr.
25:37.49
32. Mike
Friedberg Colorado
So. 25:38.32
40. Tom
Reese
Colorado
Sr. 25:48
54. Brock
Tessman Colorado
Sr. 25:56.56
57. Ron
Roybal
Colorado
Jr.
25:59.04
170. Wes
Berkshire Colorado
Jr.
27:07.63
210. Chris
Valenti
Colorado
So. 27:40.26
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Sunday, October 11, 1998
Walker Ranch
Boulder, Colorado
A Day of Rest — for Some
The team arrived late last evening from Kansas City. They were exhausted, yet more excited about their performance at Pre-Nationals than they had been directly following the race. There are six weeks until Nationals, and they like their prospects of upsetting Stanford and winning it all when they are sharp and rested. Wetmore is giving the team a welcome day of repose — between an hour and an hour thirty on their own. The long run will not be forgotten, however; it is simply postponed until tomorrow.
Despite Wetmore’s instructions, not all the runners run easy today.
Friedberg joins Severy for an “easy” eighty-minute run up the road from Sev’s cabin at Walker Ranch. Nearing the final climb on a relentlessly hilly run, they spot a mountain biker ahead. Sev starts hammering, and they motor wordlessly until they catch and pass the biker. When they finish, Severy apologizes for the brisk pace. “Sorry about that, I just had to show him how you climb this hill. I thought we should pass him.”
This is typical Severy: determined, unassuming, and unfailingly polite.
His demeanor would suggest that he is placid and mellow. But underneath that exterior burns the fire of a fierce competitor. Zeke Tiernan, his former Aspen High and Colorado teammate, likes to recount how in high school, when someone biked past them as they biked to school, Sev would hammer. Characteristic of Sev, he would deny he was racing. He would tell Tiernan, “I just wanted to ride.”
Later this evening, while relaxing at his sister Robin’s apartment in Boulder, Sev calls Reese to see if he wants to go grab dinner and catch a flick. Reese cannot make it, and Sev decides that he had better go to his cabin anyway to get some work done. They talk about the rest of the season, and Sev tells Reese that he is going to do everything to the “T” to be as fit as can be on November 23rd: extra strides, extra morning runs, and no second helpings of dessert (the biggest challenge of the three). In addition, he pledges to start bicycling down to school from his cabin instead of riding his motorcycle. He has been riding his motorcycle without a license or registration, so he promised his mother that he would commute to school in some other way.
Only Sev would even consider riding his bike to and from school every day. The ride from school to his cabin is an extremely arduous 2500
foot climb that switchbacks relentlessly to the top of Flagstaff Mountain.
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Pedaling hard, an elite cyclist can scale the mountain in thirty minutes.
The thought, however, of doing this each day, after practice, with a back-pack full of books, in the dark, is absurd. Reese questions the wisdom of doing this, but Sev reasons, “It’ll get me extra fit, and it won’t be hard because I’ll be pedaling easy.” While cycling up Flagstaff would undoubtedly be physically taxing after a hard training session, Sev is certainly capable of doing it. For as good a runner as Severy is, he is perhaps an even more talented cyclist.
In high school, Severy spent his summers cycling competitively in open races in the western United States. He sheepishly admits winning over $2,000 on the roads from his sophomore through senior years against more seasoned competitors. His success as a cyclist prompted Mark Barbour, his high school cross country coach, to suggest he quit running to further his cycling. Sev almost did, but the camaraderie of cross country running and the dirty tactics often employed in bike racing kept him on track.
On one occasion, in a cycling race the summer before his senior year at Aspen High, a competitor sprayed Cytomax into his spokes in a race, making it difficult to switch gears. Incidents like this dampened his enthusiasm for the sport. Yet, such occurrences were counterbalanced by astonishing successes; perhaps none greater than his victory in the ama-teur portion of the Mt. Evans Hill Climb in Idaho Springs as a 15-year-old high school sophomore.
He raced the Mt. Evans Hill Climb, a ride that starts at over 7000 feet and finishes at over 14,000 feet, clad in a T-shirt and shorts. He was then, and still is, “anti-gear,” and he loved “how all the other cyclists would be pissed when some kid in a T-shirt and shorts beat them.” He was there, he said, “to race, not to win a fashion contest.” Nobody thought much of his chances there, yet he recounts with a grin how as he reached the summit in the lead, spectators shouted to one another, “Hey! Look! It’s a munchkin on a Merlin beating Mark Allen!” He beat legendary triath-lete Mark Allen by two minutes, and his time would have placed him 20th among the pros. The following year he finished third in 1:55, a performance that would have placed him ninth among the pros.
His climbing ability translated to another arena as well — snowshoe racing. He started snowshoe racing his sophomore year in high school, and by his junior year, Severy says, “I was up there with all the top guys.
I never beat [renowned altitude runner and snowshoer Matt] Carpenter, but I got a reputation as a hill runner in the state; that’s how Mark [Wetmore] knew me.”
Be it snowshoeing, cycling, or running, Severy has the temperament and the aerobic capacity to make him a climber non-pareil. He says, “When RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
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people are running uphill breathing hard, I can rest. I don’t know why.”
He cannot wait to run at NCAA’s when he is rested. Such a hilly, inconsistent, up-and-down course throws many runners for a loop. The course is similar in this respect to the 1996 NCAA course in Tucson, Arizona, where he finished a career-high seventeenth. He says, “No one liked it because it was so ridiculous, but I loved it because I am a fan of all things ridiculous.”
Climbing, however, is only half the story. Sev, as Wetmore aptly sur-mises, “doesn’t comprehend the concept of moderation.” Everything Sev does, from studying to dumping mammoth quantities of ketchup over his eggs and hash browns, he does full bore. There is little doubt that he descends all hills, no matter the mode of transportation, with reckless abandon. It is a skill he has learned from cycling and yet another of his athletic pursuits — downhill skiing. He learned to ski at an early age from his geologist-turned-ski instructor father. While he did not ski much with his father, who “was always teaching,” he mastered downhill skiing on Aspen’s renowned slopes. Whether cycling, skiing, or running, Severy knows only one way to descend a mountain — as fast as possible. And if someone gets down in ten minutes, he will be damned if he is not getting down in nine.
Sev’s competitiveness and recklessness are famed among his teammates. Last fall, while at preseason camp in Winter Park, some of his teammates went to an attraction called an Alpine slide — a concave, con-crete track that winds down a mountain like the bobsled track in the Winter Olympics. A rider lies down on the sled feet first, and a lever that lies between the legs is used to brake. As Reese explains it:
We were up at cross camp in Frazier, right outside of Winter Park at the YMCA of the Rockies. We spent a day hanging out in Winter Park, and at a ski resort there, there is this alpine slide. We all said we were going to time ourselves from the top to the bottom. Afterwards, we go and compare times, and mine was a second faster than the Dog’s. He was like,
“Oh, [grumbling] I was too careful, this time I’m not using a brake at all.”
So, we’re waiting for him at the bottom, when we see him running down with the sled without any skin. He’d been going so fast that he just went out of control and fell off. So then he got cleaned up, barely, I mean his skin was just gone, and he went up and did it again and beat the record.
Before leaving his sister Robin’s apartment, Severy gives his mother a quick call, and tells her about the race and how proud he is of the team.
They were beaten by Stanford and Oregon, but he tells her that CU will be prepared to give them a run for their money at Nationals. The last 146
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thing he says to her is that Goucher, “got beat by some fuzzy, freaking foreigner,” but that he is going to get him at Nationals.
Soon thereafter, JD spots Sev and Robin eating dinner at The Sink, a popular student eatery on the Hill. JD is there getting dinner with Cate Guiney, a stellar distance recruit from New Jersey, and Robin and Sev in-vite JD and Cate to join them. JD later laughs when he recalls that the newly svelte Sev was drinking a beer with his pizza. “JD,” Sev said, “I just had to have this beer. Besides, it’s twenty percent off here on Sunday night. How could you not come here!”
After dinner, Sev said goodbye to JD and departed to his cabin. No one could have possibly fathomed that on Monday morning, Christopher Severy would be dead.
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Monday, October 12, 1998
Tantra Lakes Apartments
3:15 p.m.
Black Monday
Goucher ran seventeen miles in 1:40 early this morning so that he could go give a speech to the high school team that his best friend Tim Catalano coaches in Denver. Giving these speeches is something Goucher does several times a year, and he gets a kick out of it.
He is scheduled to leave from his apartment around 3:30. But when it is time to leave, Goucher sits slouched on his sofa barechested and in jean shorts. He covers his eyes with his left hand and his body heaves as he bawls quietly. He composes himself before looking up a minute later.
“Sev,” he says, choking up with emotion, “is dead. He died in a bike crash this morning coming down Flagstaff.”
Wetmore called him a quarter hour earlier to tell him the news that he had received from the police earlier this afternoon. He tells Goucher moments before telling the team at a team meeting that had been previously arranged to discuss other matters. Unaware of the meeting, Batliner wandered into the field house a few minutes late, but he will never forget what he saw:
I came late, and they were all walking down the stairs. I’m walking towards the track office and I turned around. My first thought was, “Fuck, we had a team meeting and I didn’t know about it.” But then I see Lindsay Arendt, and her face is all red, and then five other girls look the same. Then I see Oscar and Ronald, arm in arm, holding on for dear life. I didn’t even move.
