Post Nationals Interview With Team Running USA Coach Terrence Mahon
by: Running USA Wire
July 1, 2007

At the 2007 AT&T USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Indianapolis last weekend, Running USA wire's Charlie Mahler sat down with Team Running USA coach Terrence Mahon to talk about the meet, coaching and the Mammoth Lakes, California-based training group.

Charlie Mahler: First off, how do you feel things went, overall, at the USA Championships?

Terrence Mahon: I think everyone performed up to their best, you know, for where people were in stages of their training and what we're peaking for the year. Deena won the 10K, which we needed her to go out at win to make sure she got the "B" standard to make sure she could actually compete in Osaka, without having to actually run another 10K.

Kate (O'Neill) did very well; she was 5th here. She wasn't even able to run here last year because of a foot injury, so she did a great job. The pace was slow in that second pack, but she competed well. Jen (Rhines) did a great job in the 5K. The same idea, getting on the team, which is obviously the most important thing we're trying to get done here, and set herself up to run a bunch of fast races in Europe to get ready to qualify for that final at Worlds and see what she can do there.

Ian (Dobson) is coming off of being banged up a little bit, so he had some hamstring trouble that we were worried whether he was going to be able to run or not. So he came here - we've been really working on the therapy with him - and I thought he ran the best he could on the day. We employed a strategy that we felt gave him the best shot to make the team - it was a good strategy - but he just didn't have the fitness behind it.

We weren't doing anything for Ryan (Hall) with this in terms of trying to make a World team. It was more just getting some races in prior to getting him ready for the Olympic Trials. You know, put him in some different types of scenarios he's not used to and just get him some experience. And Sara (Hall), today, ran a great race. She PRed by three-and-a-half seconds in a 1500 on the toughest day to do it of the year - at nationals. She's a little bummed out that she got fifth because she really wanted to be on that team, but at the end of the day you're going to look at it and say, wow, that was a huge improvement. She's jumped leaps and bounds in the 1500 this year and I think there's a lot more in the tank.

CM: You seem to have a real steadiness about yourself. Hearing you talk about people's success in context for where they're at. Is that part of it?

TM: It's a huge part! It's the job of the athlete to think they can shoot for the moon. Right? And you don't want an athlete that doesn't think they can shoot for the moon, because if you've got to instill that in them, then they're not where they need to be.

So it's my job to say "Great we want to shoot for the moon but let's work out some stages to get there so that every race isn't a disappointment that doesn't hit the moon." You'll get those rare scenarios that you hit it - when Deena and Meb get medals, Deena at London breaking 2:20, Ryan breaking an hour. You have those shoot for the moons, but more than likely most of your races aren't going to be that, so we have to contextualize it to give them a sense of "Hey, I really did a good job today" even if I didn't hit it out of the park. I think that's my role.

CM: Is that style just part of your personality or were their coaches you've been around that influenced you in that way?

TM: I think it's a combination of both. It's definitely my personality, I think of myself as a pretty balanced, steady individual not really high highs or low lows, just finding that middle ground, that's definitely my philosophy of life. I think being around enough different types of coaches out there in the world - like (Joe) Vigil is such a high motivator and Matt Centrowitz was definitely a down-to-earth, let's-get-the-job-done, let's just try to work it. Even to an extent Bill Dellinger at Oregon was similar to that, you know let's get in there, get the job done, when you're ready we'll let you know. I think it's that balance, that I'm not an overly emotional person so that just doesn't fit my personality.

CM: Apart from style and presentation, what have been your influences in your training theory and on physically bringing athletes forward?

TM: Obviously, my two most immediate influences are Coach Vigil and Coach Larsen, because that's where I came from. Probably more Vigil than Larsen because I worked with him a lot when I was in the group on a one-on-one and he and I would discuss a lot of the physiology and background that he brought to it. And then from Vigil it would expand out in different areas like Matt Centrowitz, who brings a lot of the common sense of running and life into it. Through Vigil I learned a lot about the Italian and Spanish coaches and how they trained because he had worked hand-in-hand with some of them when they had come out and trained with him in Alamosa. I've learned one-on-one, personally, from Kenyan athletes, training with them when I've had the chance. So I think I bring an amalgamation of a lot of the various approaches, a lot of the common sense approach of what the great athletes have done and the theoretical side of the table and then try to find the hybrid of what works.

CM: What would you say you've learned by doing from your experience as an elite athlete yourself?

TM: There are definitely things an athlete has to experience or I as a coach experienced as an athlete and you can tell it to the athlete and there are still things they're just going to have to experience. You cannot tell someone what Mile 23 in a marathon is going to feel like until you're at Mile 23. You can tell them all you want and it's just something that just has to be felt. And then they work through that process. What you're trying to do is just prepare them to be aware of that. So, if I can bring an awareness to that of what it's going to feel like to be 1200 meters into a 1500, to be 4000 meters into a 5K, 8000 meters into a 10K, 22 miles into a marathon, then at least it brings them that they're ready for something to change. It opens the door to what their mind is going to have to deal with, so they don't go in totally naïve.

CM: How does the coaching work now at Team Running USA?

TM: For the most part, I roughly took over for what Vigil started. When they came in the door, Vigil brought in people like Deena, Jen and myself. Larsen brought to the table Meb. When Running USA started the program (in 2001), it basically was Vigil with his relationship with Deena and Peter DeLaCerda and some of them and Larsen with his relationship with Meb and some other people he was working with, Phil Price, for example, and it was basically joining parties. Larsen is continuing to do what he's done - worked with Meb. He's got a couple other people here and there. And I've been handed the reins with Deena, with Jen, then I started to recruit all the young kids. It's different, Bob is in his 60s, so I'm doing what I'm supposed to do which is bring out the next generation and Bob is doing what's he's suppose to do which is finish what he started.

CM: Is the group looking to grow?

TM: I would say the group right now, we have eight athletes. We're not looking to expand and we're not looking to decrease, we're looking for the right fit. A year ago, we probably had 13 athletes. That was with my first year out with looking to bring in a lot of people to bring a new spark to the program with a lot of young kinds. I was going through learning curves of what do we need, what works, what doesn't work. We went through that first year process of kind of evolving, of what it's going to be. I definitely started to evolve in what I'm looking for with an athlete, in what an athlete is looking for with a group and how those dynamics fit.

What I think where we are right now, we have a really good group in terms of personalities that get along. People have their own events that they're working toward and I think I'll stick with that model, and when we bring people in it will be to bring them in to fill a niche that they can walk into and be their star in that niche as well as work within the context of the whole group.

Sure, we have room for a couple guys in some various events; we could have room for a girl in various events. I guess the other thing with the nature of the group is that I definitely like to have a mentor rookie relationship and so people like Jen and Deena provide that mentor status, someone like Meb is a huge mentor to Ryan and Ian and one day Ryan and Ian will be mentors to someone else. So I definitely like to work it like that so it's not so much head-to-head competition and fighting all the time. It's like we're working together, even though it is events for individuals.

CM: How much training together do you do? How do you manage the various training arcs for all the people and events in the group?

TM: I think if you look at our training program, it's a very aerobic endurance-based style, philosophy, so to speak. With that in mind 70 to 80% of your training is very aerobic, so in that manner our athletes training together 70 to 80% of the time doing almost exactly the same thing.

CM: Distance runs, tempo stuff?

TM: From milers to marathoners, they're all doing distance runs, recovery runs, even things like short hill sprints we're doing for marathoner and for milers, so we have a lot of that together. And, the same idea, yeah, with threshold work we're doing a lot of the same principles of work we're just doing different volumes for different people. When we get into that more specific phase of racing especially on the track then we're doing hybrid workouts where 10K runners are running with milers for one-third of the workout then drift off. The milers drift off to something different, the 10K runner stays where they are, and the 5K runner does a little bit of both. It's my job just to be creative with the plan that we can get them still working together as a team, and get that help that is very beneficial, yet then be very specific to their own needs when that comes in time.

CM: So it's typically not eight athletes doing eight different workouts on the track?

TM: You have the occasional day when we have eight people doing eight different workouts, but more often than not it's not that, it's eight people doing bits and pieces of certain workouts. And again that's specifically more in the last, probably, six weeks leading up to peak races, that Deena in a marathon phase is doing something totally different than Sara getting ready for an indoor mile. But again, there are four or five days a week where they're doing exactly the same thing. So, it works pretty well.

CM: You've talked before about the things you've learned with Deena that seems to transfer to Ryan. Could you expand on that and, perhaps, tell us how they're different, too?

TM: One of the big things I look at is, you could say, believing there are different personality types you could categorize for various runners. I think certain events lend themselves better to certain personalities and vice versa. So that a natural, you know, "loneliness of a long distance runner," [type] so to speak, tops out in the marathon - someone like a Deena or someone like a Ryan who's evolved into that. From a similarities standpoint, just watching Ryan run for his first year and it was all the little visual cues that I saw that, you know, what were the workouts he succeeded in? I mean they were all the same workouts Deena succeeds in when she's training for the marathon. What were the workouts he doesn't succeed as well, same workouts that Deena doesn't. Even little things like exercises they like to do in the gym and exercises that they don't like to do in the gym. There are so many things like that, the nuances of that, versus what a Jen likes to do out on the roads, in the gym, what they get excited for. So, you definitely see that rise and it's pretty easy to see the similarities.

Where Ryan and Deena are different, there's not that much difference, it's just age and experience. They both have that shoot for the moon, "I want to win an Olympic gold medal," where Ryan is that he's just learning the things that Deena learned four or five years ago - there are these fifty great people in the world, how the heck am I going to be up with them? So it's that maturation process of dealing with how do I get from Point A to Point B. Whereas Deena's at Point B and it's, "How do I stay there." Personalities are fairly similar. They both have similar drives to pursue human potential for them. For Ryan, it comes out in his Christian faith. For Deena, it comes out in the spiritual sense she has to her, it's not any orthodox religion, she's just driven to push the envelope of what a human body can do. And I don't think it's that much different than Ryan's faith. They're getting to the same point from two different directions. So, you could say that's a difference, but it's also a similarity.

CM: One of the impressive things about Deena, I think, has been her continued improvement - going from very good, to even better, to even better than that. What separates her from those who reach a high level, but then seem to just stay at one level?

TM: Deena has an insatiable desire to rewrite the record books and rewrite what people think of as possible. I believe that as long as she has other people out there in the world who are with her or a step ahead of her she's always going to have that desire. Now, she's been renewed on the track with the likes of Shalane Flanagan and these women running so fast in the 10K throughout the world, that where she thought she'd topped out on the track, now she sees some of the young kids come up, and they're getting close to her record in the 10K, have run faster than her in the 5K, and now have almost reinvented her brain, "Wow, maybe I can run faster in the 5K. Before I thought I was done, that's why I went to the marathon." As long a she continues to find those sparks, she's going to continue to improve.

CM: What's a typical training week look like say, in the middle of things, not the final tune-up, but in the heart of that aerobic development you spoke of?

TM: Monday is a recovery run day, typically two runs. The afternoon run will usually finish up with some short hill sprints, max speed uphills with a lot of recovery, just to kind of wake up their nervous system. They'll do their gym work in the afternoon.

Tuesday is generally our lactate threshold day, border-line lactate anaerobic threshold intervals. That's kind of our decent volume block of intervals.

Wednesday will be either two runs again or one medium-long run for our 10K-marathon people or even our milers in the fall. That's generally another aerobic endurance day.

Thursday, in general, we do a combination of a shorter tempo run - somewhere in the 4-6 mile range and follow it up with some VO2-speed intervals, not a lot of volume of the intervals, maybe 2 miles, 3 miles tops. But the idea is to fatigue their body a bit with the tempo run and come back with some pace work. For two purposes: it keeps them from running the intervals too fast and it teaches them to run pace when they're tired, which is good for the latter stages of the race. So that's Thursday, they do another run and some gym work.

Friday, it's two runs again, sometimes they'll finish up with maybe another set of hill sprints or strides depends on where they are.

Saturday is generally what we'd call our aerobic threshold tempo runs. We look at those as getting in volume - a minimum of 10K up to, for the marathoners, up to 25K of volume. Marathon-pace, plus or minus.

Sunday will be a long run - a real easy aerobic run. We'll fix that to the types of course they'll be dealing with for people who are running a road race or a marathon. We usually get in some hills, it will be rolling terrain, but we, for the most part, emphasis a pretty easy pace on those. At different phases we'll do change of pace in the long run, where they'll start easy, maybe throw in 20 minute tempo later in the run. They wouldn't do that if they worked out the day before. Or they'll do runs where they do surges - 30 second to a minute pick-ups - same idea, just to lengthen their stride so they don't get into a long run shuffle.

We're always trying to be economical. You can run slow and easy as long as your stride mechanics are good. Once the stride mechanics start to suffer you've got to change it up. You either have to stop or you throw in those intervals to try to open it up again.

CM: I've heard you say you like to put "space" into the training at times, tell me what you mean by that?

TM: We'll do two week blocks at times. We can kind of stack lactate threshold and aerobic threshold volume fairly close together, because it's not that taxing. But when we deal with a week when we're getting anaerobic, then I like to have a little space between the workouts. If there's a week where Tuesday's going to be more of an anaerobic workout, then we're going to wait until Friday to work out again and take two recovery days. Friday may be a good workout and then Saturday's easy, and then Sunday's long and maybe that's when we throw in some of those surges. I'm looking to try to get in once to twice a week of VO2 speed work, I throw in a lot of lactate threshold, and at least every week of aerobic threshold. We're hitting VO2 speed, lactate threshold, aerobic threshold in a cycle every two weeks. With certain people then it just comes to fitting in how they can handle it. As the volume goes up on those particular days is where we need the space.

What I've found with Ryan, is when we're doing a 15 mile tempo run, lets say, we've got to give that one some space in terms of the recovery side of it. It's not that he couldn't do it; it's just that you worry about the long-term fatigue.

CM: Geographically where are you guys? How much time do you spend in Mammoth? In Chula Vista at the Olympic Training Center? Somewhere else?

TM: We like to be in Mammoth as much as we can. We're big believes in altitude, but we particularly like to come down three to four weeks prior to big competitions. Three to four weeks before a marathon. For U.S. nationals, we've been down for about a month (in Chula Vista), from altitude, getting ready for this meet. We'll try to come down maybe for two weeks like Sara Hall before indoor nationals just to get recovered more than anything.

It's not even so much to get faster its just to recover. We run plenty fast up at altitude. All you're looking at sea level - is when those workouts are at sea level - they don't take as much out of us. We don't come down and ramp up the pace at sea level, we just recover fast. We're doing the same amount of work at altitude as at sea level - the same or more intensity at altitude -and when we come to sea level it's do that same workload but now you'll be a little bit fresher because you recover just a little bit better.

CM: So what do you think is the biggest thing people don't understand or know about Team Running USA?

TM: Everyone gets really curious about the training groups. It looks very intimidating on paper. We have big goals. We have a group with a mission statement: "finalists at the World Championships, finalists at the Olympics, potential for medals, etc., etc."

CM: Shooting for the moon...

TM: Right! And that can be very intimidating to a kid in college, coming out of college. You know, "Is this something I want to buy into?" Because when you buy into it you've got to go 100%. And it's interesting that with us out there you would think there'd be a lot of people knocking on the door, but there's not. I think in some sense there's a little bit of intimidation, worry from the part of the outside, "Is it possible to get there?"

CM: What's the hard thing for them to buy into? The training?

TM: Coach Vigil has always said that people are afraid to train. Look at what Deena does, what Meb does, when you look at that on paper as a high school kid, as a college kid, it's hugely intimidating. What they don't see, and I think where people forget, is that it took Deena ten years to get to that point, and she didn't start out any different from your average good college runner. Meb was the same thing, Meb won several NCAA titles, but he wasn't "The Man" in college. He was very good and had potential but...

CM: Same with Deena...

TM: Deena was like even below. Deena didn't win any NCAA titles, I believe. What they forget is all those intermediate steps. Deena bought in and said in eight years I'm going to be good. Getting stuck on the short-term gratification is our problem. And we have to show people that, "Yeah, Deena is great and you read about her everyday and she's on the cover of all the magazines, but you didn't know about her for six years before she got good." Ryan is younger, but he had like four years of anonymity at Stanford and was very good in high school, but he put in eight years of work - four in high school, four in college - creating a big base of volume that he can now, after a year into our program, start to handle that type of workload. It's what people don't understand.

It's not like we're throwing them to the wolves saying you're going to run 120 miles a week. We have people come in running 60 miles a week, 70, but they're working up and they're working up on all levels. You take them where they are and you gradually, bit by bit, adapt them to new stress. I think people forget that when your body deals with stimulus, once you keep doing it over and over again, it's no longer a stimulus. So we need a new stimulus and there's a limited amount of new stimuli for us. Altitude is a stimulus. You're lifting more weights, you're lifting it faster. You're doing more volume, because you have to keep challenging the body or, like you say, it stagnates and you stay at the same level. If we have athletes who want to continue to go higher and higher, we have to find new stimuli.

But the workouts that they do nowdays, if Deena tried to do that eight years ago, she'd break something. So that's the lack of information out there about the depth of the program and what it's trying to do.

NOTE: Since 2001, Team Running USA athletes have won two Olympic medals, 12 World Cross Country Championship medals and two major marathons, set one world road record, 21 national records and numerous personal records, earned 55 national titles and three USARC Grand Prix titles and added to world and U.S. all-time lists. In short, they are the most accomplished training group in the United States.

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