I'm sorry to report that on Friday, Janurary 17, 2020, Matt Liebal passed away. Matt was a 2007 graduate of Dickinson College, where he was an All-American cross country runner. He graduated from Montville High School in Montville, Connecticut, in 2003, where he was an all-state athlete.
In September 2019, Matt was inducted into the Dickinson Athletics Hall of Fame. He was recently inducted into the Montville Athletic Hall of Fame.
I met Matt in high school when we ran against each other for competing schools in the Eastern Connecticut Conference, Matt for Montville High School, and me for New London High School. From the beginning, his reputation preceded him. He was a fast runner and a unique competitor. Sometimes, at the starting line of races, he would point to the back of his running shorts and tell the other runners that that's all they were going to see during the race. This turned off some other runners, and I could see where they were coming from, but I kind of liked the balls on the guy. The audacity to tell everyone that he was the baddest mofo out there. It was a swagger and a confidence that I lacked as a runner.
He was a fierce competitor, and became faster and fiercer as the years progressed. We stayed in touch during college, where Matt was thriving as a runner and Army ROTC cadet at Dickinson College and I was struggling at Annapolis. I didn't have the fierceness, or the drive that he did. He would tell me his workouts and races, not to gloat, but to share. Maybe, in his eyes, he was providing for me an example of how I could be fierce and fast like him. He would talk about how he would try to break runners from Haverford during a track 10k, or about how he took out a cross country race at a blistering pace, also to break his competitors. It wasn't personal, strictly business.
When he shared these stories with me, I wondered at times, if he was embellishing, if not his times, then how the races had gone down. That he was more outspoken in the retelling.
But then, in the summer before my senior year of Annapolis, I went to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico for three weeks as part of my summer training to be a backcountry ranger. When of the other rangers mentioned that he ran cross country for a D3 school I knew was a competing school in the same division as Dickinson, the college Matt ran for, I mentioned to the guy, if he, by chance, knew Matt.
"Oh, I know Matt Liebal," he said.
I laughed. Turns out Matt was up to his same tricks.
And you know what? They kind of worked. He was the fastest runner on his team in high school and the fastest runner on his team in college. He did it on his own because he had to. And for Matt, maybe that's what it took for him to do it on his own. To tell others that he was badass so that he could tell himself. So that he could be badass. Because he was.
When I entered the fleet, I was stationed in Oklahoma City, and Matt was stationed in Fort Hood, Texas, where he was a member of 1st Cavalry Division, a combined arms division and is one of the most decorated combat divisions of the United States Army. He would come up to Oklahoma or I would go down to Texas and we would drink, play video games, and share war stories about our time on deployment and/or internet dating sites. During my tour in DC, where I studied Japanese, Matt visited, and told me not get so worked up about small sh*t, that it would be okay, that Japanese is hard, but that I could handle it.
When I came back from Japan and left active duty, I drove from the east coast through Arkansas, where Matt was stationed as an Army ROTC instructor. I was tired from my trip and stressed about my transition and about my forthcoming time in grad school. Matt took the wheel and drove the rest of the trip from Arkansas to Colorado, if even that meant him making fun of the lack of power of my aging Ford Escape (he had an expensive BMW, the one luxury he allowed himself). He came to Fort Collins that first Thanksgiving, my first Thanksgiving in Fort Collins. Next Thanksgiving, I came down to Arkansas.
When he met Jill, he insisted that I be friends with her and be a part of what they shared together. I was Matt's best man during his wedding to his wife, Jill, in May 2018.
Once you knew Matt, he was a hard guy not to love. It was even harder for him not to love you back. He devoted himself to caring and serving those in his life. He will be forever missed and loved. I will never have a friend like him again.
Please share your memories and stories of Matt below, both running and non-running.
And please Consider donating to his GoFundMe Page below to support his wife and son.