PUBLISHED 11/06/2007
Interview by Dimity McDowell
Ed. Note: Before his tragic death, Ryan Shay was one of several runners to be included in an upcoming Runner's World article called "Running Through the Ages." The writer of that article, Dimity McDowell, spoke with Shay at length in early November, 2006 - nearly a year to the day before Shay would collapse and die in mile 5 of the Men's Olympic Marathon Trials in New York's Central Park. "He seemed like such a good, albeit a little intense, guy," Dimity recalls. "Very polite, too."
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that interview, minus the reporter's questions.
I got into running because all my older siblings were runners. I have four brothers and three sisters. I'm No. 5 in the order, and the second boy. My older sister was a really good high school runner and my older brother was a great distance runner; I wanted to be at least as good as he was in high school. He was four years older than me, so we weren't together in high school.
As a kid, I ran for the Motor City Track Club, and everybody did the AAU and USATF age-group cross-country stuff. I traveled around the country, doing regional and national comps. It was always a given I would compete-my dad was one of the youth coaches. I remember going to an AAU regional at the state level in Michigan, and I came in 2nd, to Jorge Torres. That was one of my first encounters with him.
My dad didn't start coaching for my high school until I was a freshman. He coached me with a 10-K collegiate career in mind. My older siblings were all distance runners, so it was a given that I would follow in their footsteps. From an early age, it was clear I was going to be a distance runner.
But my body type is more of a sprinter's physique. On all my college recruiting trips, everybody thought was I was, at most, an 800-meter runner. I didn't know what I was doing in high school, in regard to lifting weights. I was too muscle-bound. I weighed 15 pounds more in high school than I do now.
Going from high school to college threw me into a totally different training environment. In high school, I trained on my own because we had a very small school: I had a graduating class of 26 people. During my freshman and sophomore team, we didn't field a full cross-country team: it was just me, my younger brother and one other guy. By my junior year, we recruited a few people and raised our roster to five athletes. Still, I trained for everything on my own. I just ran local track and cross-country meets, and didn't see any better competition until I did post-season stuff: AAU, USATF meets, Foot Locker.
In college, I saw huge improvements. Being able to train with guys who were faster than me was amazing. I wanted to step up to that level right away. I remember a workout during the first couple weeks of cross-country that was 3 x 1 mile, finishing with a two-mile on the track. My PR up until then for 2 miles was 9:20. That day, I ran a 9:03, and thought, OK, so this is a little different. I came into college with a different mentality: right away, I wanted to maximize my potential. The guys on the team at Notre Dame saw that right away, I had an intensity with regard to running they hadn't seen in anybody before.
I obviously increased my mileage in college. In high school, I averaged about 50 a week. Typically in college I was around 110 or 120. I felt like I wanted to do more and more, but my coaches held the reins on me. I started reading Joe Vigil's book Road to the Top, which my dad used to coach us to. I started wanting more input in my own training. My junior year, I'd meet with my collegiate coach on Monday, go over the workouts for the week, and fine-tune them: I'd say, "That workout sounds good, but this is what I was thinking..."
Up until my senior year in 2001, when I won the 10-K national championship, I didn't think I'd be able to run post-college. I didn't think it could be my full-time job. I've always had a dream of making an Olympic team, but I didn't think I could be a professional runner when I graduated. But after I won the 10-K, I thought, OK, maybe I can pick up a sponsor.
After college, I knew who I wanted to coach me: Joe Vigil. I'm still with him today. I'd already been talking to him during my last year in college, and we both thought the marathon would be a good event for me.
I have pretty good speed, but I always thought that one of my strengths in running is my endurance. Later, physiological testing at the USOC confirmed that. Although my VO2 max isn't the highest for a distance runner, it's up there, but my running economy is really good. At my lactate threshold, I'm utilizing over 90% of my VO2 max, while other runners might be using 70 to 80%. That high of a number is a good indicator of a marathon runner.
