#CVC4THEWIN: Alumni Christian Van Cleave's Thoughts on being a successful runner

My Thoughts on Being a Successful Runner

By Christian Van Cleave

As Jefferson Academy Cross Country gears up for the 2018 Colorado Cross Country State Championship, I wanted to write this post not only as a way of saying good luck to the boys and girls that will be competing, but also to pass on my thoughts on being a successful runner.  But first, a little background as to why you should take these thoughts into consideration.

I am a Jefferson Academy alumnus (class of 2017) who ran cross country and track all four years of high school.  I didn’t qualify for any state championship until my sophomore year of high school, where I ran myself into an individual qualifying position (top 15 at regionals).  From then until my senior year of high school, I qualified individually and as a team, finishing 4^th individually at regionals in 12^th grade.  After securing a first team all-state finish my senior year at the Cross Country State meet, I went on to run cross country and track at the collegiate level at Concordia University, Nebraska.  Since moving up to the college level, I have dropped my 5k personal record by 20 seconds and qualified for the Outdoor Track and Field National Championships as a freshman on the 4x800 relay.  I’m not a professional runner or an expert at running by any means, but things have gone right in my career to get me to where I am today.  Those things are what I’m about to share with you.  Take advantage of them and your career might progress forward beyond high school.  For this post, I will focus on being a successful runner at the high school state level.

Last week I read a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (10/10 recommend this book to anyone looking for reading on the psychological and cultural causes of success).  The author gave insight into many topics such as taking advantage of opportunities, the 10,000-hour rule, Bill Gates, Chris Langan, being a Jewish lawyer in New York in the 70’s, and even why Asians are so good at math.  Gladwell didn’t just tell me the success stories, he told me why those people are successful.

I feel like in the running world, it’s easy to look at the top runners and say “yeah, they must train pretty hard to get to where they are”.  Which is true.  I’m not at all inferring that hard work will not get you to the top.  However, taking my newfound insight from Outliers, and personal experience from my own career, I can say that successful running goes beyond just training hard.  For that reason, I’m not going to tell you to train hard and eat right.  Those things should be a given.

It starts with recognizing that running isn’t just about you.  Being a successful cross country runner starts with realizing and accepting that you’re running for your team.  Nobody ever made it on their own.  Take Bill Gates for example.  Everybody knows that he is one of the richest men in the United States, starting Microsoft out of his garage.  But not too many people know the circumstances that got him to where he is.  In the 1960’s, when computers were first becoming popular, they were beasts of a machine.  They took up entire rooms, costs millions of dollars, and could only handle a few user requests at a time.  Bill Gates attended Lakeside High School in Seattle, one of the only high schools in the world at that time that had their own computer lab.  This is where his opportunity started (keep bold words in mind for later).  As he progressed through high school and college (before he dropped out of Harvard his sophomore year) he became better and better at programming (this is where the process lead to).  From there he kept programming day and night until he had developed an operating system and started Microsoft in 1975.  That’s seven years of hard work and dedication. 

Getting back to nobody making it on their own.  Bill Gates’ parents pulled him out of public school and sent him to Lakeside in 1968.  His teachers let him program more than do his school work.  Parents at Lakeside paid for computer access.  There are many more factors not mentioned here that lead to his success.  He did not do it on his own. 

Now let’s transfer that to you – how does this first example translate into your own training and racing?

Remember where I bolded the word ‘opportunity’ above?  Being a successful runner stems from the opportunity your coaches are giving you.  You don’t have to come to running practice every day.  You could just as easily go home, do your homework, and sit around playing video games for the rest of the night.  You don’t have to compete hard in races.  You could just as easily take it easy during the race because you’re not on varsity, or you’re not as fast as the top runners in the meet.  It’s mindsets like those that need to be flipped.  The coaches are giving you the opportunity to do well.  They’re providing you with workouts and racing experience that you really can’t get anywhere else than on a high school cross country team.  So, I encourage you, even though there’s only one week left in the season, take advantage of those opportunities – and if you’re not running at state but plan on running track, apply this mentality of taking advantage of the opportunity to your training in the spring.

Second is ‘process’.  Once you are taking advantage of your training opportunities, it comes time to trust the process during your race.  One mindset of running that I like to tell people and even remind myself of from time to time is that you are stronger than you ever think you could be.  In his book How Bad do You Want It? Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle, Matt Fitzgerald gives many examples of athletes who push through adverse conditions and circumstances to be the best.  One of my favorite examples from that book is about Siri Lindley, a triathlete.  In 1992, when she first got on the scene after graduating college, Lindley couldn’t swim.  She was at risk of drowning if she went into water.  But she had a dream and she trained hard for eight years to eventually earn herself a spot in the triathlon Olympic qualifiers.  She trusted the process, but the process let her down in April of 2000, where Siri missed qualifying for the Olympic triathlon by only a few spots.  She redoubled her efforts and in 2001 after a year of rigorous, vomit blood from your eyeballs training, she took the title of world champion at the Edmonton World Triathlon Championships.  This time, the process worked.

My favorite part of the story?  The day she won the world championships was a day her legs felt fatigued and trashed.  Not only did she have to swim 1.5 kilometers, and bike 40 kilometers, she had to run a 10k directly after.  Yet she still went on to be a world champion in the triathlon.  How could somebody push through the horrible feeling of heavy legs and fatigue and still come out on top?  By reminding themselves they are stronger than they ever think they are.

How Bad Do You Want It? also mentions that even when you think you’re at your breaking point, you’re really only about 60% there.  It’s convincing yourself to push through that pain that separates the boys from the men in cross country races.  Easier said than done for sure, but if you remember my favorite saying, it gets a little easier: “You’ll never win if you’re too afraid to lose”.

The lesson to be learned from the Siri Lindley story is to trust the process.  Even when her legs felt their worst, and she thought there was no way she was going to ever win the Edmonton World Triathlon Championship, she proved herself wrong and relied on her training to get her through.

Now that I’ve given you a very long, but necessary, explanation of how to get yourself in the right mentality for successful running, let’s get back to your teammates. 

It is true that cross country is an individual sport, but more importantly it is a team sport.  Everything you do on the team should be in consideration of your team.  I think that the biggest motivating factor in a race like the state championships should be the desire to do well for your teammates.  My sophomore year of high school was arguably one of the best cross country teams I ran on during my tenure on JAXC.  We were fast, strong, but most importantly, we had an indescribable bond that really set us apart.  That was the year we won St Vrain as a team, which was the trigger that set off a successful season.  We ran our way through league and regionals, placing second at each. At state, the team placed 11^th, but that year everyone on the boy’s state team ran one of the best races of their lives.  We felt an obligation to our teammates to do well and we couldn’t let each other down.

That same trust again came into play my senior year at regionals.  We were going into the regionals meet with a lot of uncertainty about qualifying the boy’s team for state.  I recall having a team circle-up minutes before the race started, where Ryan Lehmuth and myself hyped the team up by saying things like, “Do this for your teammates, not yourself”.  We finished second.

The lesson to be learned from my sophomore and senior years is that your teammates are your greatest asset when it comes to running well.  Push yourself so you don’t let your teammates or yourself down, and the results will follow.

My last thought is about pack running.  Now that you’ve established trust with your team, it’s time to utilize it.  Pack running is the way teams win races and having a low 1-5 split (meaning the time between your first runner crossing the finish line and your fifth) is the key.  This is where a strong running mentality comes back into play.  You need to stick to the guys (or girls) in front of you and run as a team, no matter how much it hurts.  During that third mile when you feel like slowing down, do everything in your power not to.  You have 5:45 left of the race at most. 

My college cross country men’s team won our first meet of the season because our top five runners finished within 10 places of each other.  Again, this is easier said than done, but there’s nothing more intimidating during a race than seeing four or five guys from the same team go striding by. 

By now I hope you can see the importance of running for something greater than yourself.  Training hard every single day is only part of the battle.  The real challenge comes when you start to tell yourself you can’t do it in the middle of a race.  Fight that voice in your head.  Think about your teammates.  Tell yourself you’re stronger than you think.  Most importantly, trust your training, your teammates, your coaches, and yourself.  This isn’t your first rodeo.  You know how to run a 5k.  All that’s left is to do it.