Sean McGorty Has Been Searching for His Best Event. He May Have Found It.

By Jonathan Gault
May 17, 2021

When Sean McGorty ran 8:20.77 in his 3000-meter steeplechase debut on May 9 at the USATF Golden Games at Mt. SAC — the fastest debut ever by an American — it marked the germination of a seed that had been planted three years earlier. Though the running world only learned of McGorty’s desire to take up the event when the Golden Games start lists were published that week, it is an idea that had been in the works for quite some time, even before McGorty had joined the Bowerman Track Club.

It dates to a conversation at a Palo Alto coffee shop in the spring of 2018. Bowerman TC head coach Jerry Schumacher was in town for the Payton Jordan Invitational and wanted to meet with McGorty, a potential Bowerman recruit then in his fifth and final year at Stanford.

Schumacher believes that every athlete has an ideal distance. And if your ideal distance is 3000 meters, you need to learn how to hurdle.

“He said, ‘I don’t really know what your ideal event would be, but I think you can run a great 3k and I think you’re athletic so it would probably be something that we’d explore,'” McGorty says.

The steeplechase wasn’t something the 6-3, 155-lb McGorty had seriously considered during his time at Stanford, in part because he had been so successful at other distances: he ran 3:53 in the mile and 13:24 in the 5,000, winning the NCAA title at the latter distance in 2018. But when Schumacher broached the topic, it didn’t catch him off-guard. The 3000-meter distance suited McGorty nicely, and he possessed some natural athleticism (his parents were both on the University of North Carolina track team — dad Kevin was a decathlete who later competed at the 1988 and 1992 Olympic Trials, while mom Vicki ran middle distance).

McGorty, now 26, signed with Bowerman that summer, and once he arrived in Portland in the fall, the steeple conversation resurfaced. McGorty began practicing hurdling in the spring of 2019 and had planned on making his debut at the Sunset Tour meet in July.

That never happened. On July 1, McGorty underwent the first of three surgeries for a nasty foot infection that sidelined him for the rest of the summer. Healthy again in 2020, he returned eager to give the steeple another go, only for the COVID-19 pandemic to interrupt. Even once McGorty and his Bowerman teammates returned to competition that summer, the Jesuit High School track they used for races did not have a pit for the water jump, making a steeplechase impossible.

But McGorty, who ran a 5000m pb of 13:11 that summer, was fit, and Schumacher did not want another year to pass without giving the steeple a shot. After Bowerman TC concluded its season with a 2000m elimination race on August 7, most of the athletes left town to begin their offseason break but McGorty remained in Portland for a two-week steeple boot camp with Schumacher and BTC assistant coach Pascal Dobert, a three-time US champion and 2000 steeplechase Olympian.

During the first week, McGorty would head to the Michael Johnson Track on Nike’s Beaverton campus, work out, and work on improving his hurdle form, Dobert offering tweaks as they studied video of his jumps. In the second week, McGorty ran a pair of steeple time trials — first at two kilometers (5:28) and then, three days later, over the full three-kilometer distance. For that one, a number of the BTC athletes still in the area came out to watch, along with Schumacher’s family.

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McGorty and Lopez Lomong last summer (Photo by Talbot Cox)

They witnessed something special. Running alone, with no pacemaker, McGorty soloed an 8:25 in his first 3000m steeple “race” — just three seconds off the Olympic standard and one second faster than Evan Jager‘s debut in 2012 (one caveat: except for the water jump, McGorty used hurdles rather than barriers to reduce the risk of injury should something go wrong).

“I was extremely impressed at how quick he ran in those two distances completely by himself being a newbie to the event,” says Jager, the American record holder in the event, who was on hand to spectate. “After that second time trial, I was pretty sure that he had a good chance of making the Olympic team in the steeple, just from that.”

He wasn’t the only one impressed. Schumacher is not the kind of coach to inflate expectations. If he tells an athlete something, he truly believes it, which makes the moments when he does choose to speak that much more powerful. After McGorty’s 8:25, Schumacher pulled him aside, and though McGorty declines to share exactly what was said, the message was clear: Schumacher believed he had a bright future in the steeple.

“I really appreciated the investment that [Jerry and Pascal] were putting in,” McGorty says. “It’s easy for them — the season was done — to take their time away from the team…The confidence and belief that they thought I could be good in the steeplechase, you really just soak that in.”

***

McGorty looked great in his steeple debut

Based on Sunday’s run at Mt. SAC, Schumacher was right to be confident. After benefiting from a two-kilometer pace job from Jager, McGorty took the lead with 200 meters to go and sprinted away to victory in 8:20.77.

The race could not have gone much better for McGorty. Times can be important in this sport — especially in an Olympic year — and in the past, the stress to hit a certain time has manifested itself in McGorty’s race performance. So ahead of Mt. SAC, Schumacher and teammates Jager and Moh Ahmed told McGorty not to stress about the clock: just let the race come to him and focus on learning the event. That McGorty hit the Olympic standard of 8:22.00 in the process was a nice bonus, but it was not the goal of the race.

Jager, who dropped out as planned at 2k (his training has been delayed this spring due to an Achilles injury; he wanted to give it more time to heal before racing the full distance), was able to watch the final few laps and liked what he saw from McGorty, who clipped the final barrier with his trail leg but otherwise looked strong.

“He got over the water jump really well,” Jager says. “Had a minor little hiccup over the last barrier, but learning what that steeple hurt feels like just takes a little bit of time. I thought he looked really, really good. If there’s one thing he can work on, I think it’s just get more experience being in a pack in the early parts of a race and not let all the bodies around you fluster you going over the barriers.”

Jager says that’s something that took him a few years to become comfortable with when he began steepling, mainly because there is no way to practice it in workouts.

“You kind of have to get the race experience,” Jager says.

***

McGorty is not the first Bowerman athlete to take up the steeple upon joining the group. Jager, of course, is the most famous example: after making the World Championship team at 5,000 meters as a 20-year-old in 2009, Jager switched to the steeple in 2012 and hasn’t looked back, winning seven straight national titles from 2012-18 and earning medals at the 2016 Olympics and 2017 Worlds. In 2014, Andy Bayer, an NCAA 1500 champion at Indiana, followed suit. Bayer, who left BTC after the 2016 season, would go on to finish in the top 4 at USAs five years in a row from 2015-19 and finish 12th in the 2019 World Championship final; his pb of 8:12.47 ranks seventh in US history (Jager is #1 at 8:00.45).

While Jager and Bayer’s transition to barriers went smoothly, Josh Thompson did not cope quite as well. Thompson had run one steeple while in college at Oklahoma State, taking 2nd at Big 12s in 2017 in 8:50, and dropped his pb to 8:32 shortly after graduation. But Thompson couldn’t run faster than 8:30 in four steeples in 2018, failing to qualify for the USA final.

After struggling with his hurdle form and running a disastrous 9:02 in his first steeple of 2019, Thompson abandoned the event for the 1500, in which he has run 3:34 and won the 2020 US indoor title.

“I don’t want to put words in Josh’s mouth, I think [the steeple] might have just been a little bit long of an event for him,” Jager says. “You look at the success he’s having now in the 1500, he’s obviously way more comfortable. I think it just wasn’t his event.”

All four men in the table above had the speed and athleticism to make Schumacher think they would find success in the steeple. But the links between Jager and McGorty go deeper than that. McGorty has long admired Jager, and fondly remembers watching him win an Olympic silver medal from his Virginia living room in 2016.

“I think that [race] really romanticized the idea of the steeplechase,” McGorty says.

Flash forward to 2021, and McGorty made his debut at Mt. SAC — the same (albeit rebuilt) venue where Jager ran his first steeple nine years earlier — and had Jager with him for his pre-race warmup and the first 2k of the race. They even share the same birthday, March 8.

“It was super special that he was able to play a part in my debut,” McGorty says.

Jager has enjoyed working with McGorty and is impressed by what he’s seen (Photo by Talbot Cox)

Jager was happy to oblige. In the last few years, Bayer and Matt Hughes have left Bowerman and Dan Huling has retired, leaving Jager as the only steepler in the group. After grinding through most of his steeple workouts alone from 2016-18, Jager was elated when he heard he might have a new training partner. After the initial excitement, however, another thought crossed his mind.

“Part of me was a little worried about how good Sean was gonna be,” Jager says. “Because I was obviously injured all of 2019. And Sean, he’s such a strong runner that there was part of me that was a little nervous that I was just going to be completely overtaken since while I was on the sidelines.”

But Jager worked quickly to push that thought from his head. Yes, McGorty in the steeple would mean one more guy he’d have to beat in the US. But Jager was also excited by the opportunity to teach McGorty about the event, just as Huling did during the early years of Jager’s own steeple career.

“Him being in the steeple, it’s going to be more of a benefit to me than it’s going to be a detriment,” Jager says. “Just having someone else to share the burden of doing all the extra steeple work, getting through those steeple workouts, he’s such a strong runner that I know that he’s gonna push me more than I would have been able to push myself.”

McGorty wants to be clear, however: he is still undecided about which event he will pursue at next month’s US Olympic Trials. He has the Olympic standard in the steeple, but he also has it in the 5,000m and is open to running either event in Eugene. Even if he does opt for the steeple, McGorty doesn’t want to be known as a steepler exclusively.

“Just because you do the steeple doesn’t mean you can’t accomplish some of the other goals you have in the other events,” McGorty says. “I’ve talked to Evan about this — I don’t want to be pigeonholed into just one event. He has had the same approach throughout his career. He has made a 5k team — although that was when he was younger — but I think every year, he thought if Jerry had told him that year, You’re gonna do the 5k, [he] still thought he was one of the best guys in the US in [the 5k].”

(It’s worth noting here that Jager finished third in the 2016 Diamond League 5,000m final).

That is the attitude McGorty wants to bring to his own burgeoning steeple career, though choosing steeple at the Trials would also solve a math problem. Among the serious contenders for a spot on the US Olympic men’s 5k team, four of them represent Bowerman: reigning US champ Lopez Lomong (12:58 pb), Woody Kincaid (12:58 pb), 2021 US leader Grant Fisher (13:02 pb), and McGorty (13:06 pb). Yet there are only three Olympic berths per event. Even in a dream scenario where BTC sweeps 1-2-3, one man will go home devastated.

“I say this completely respecting all three of them, I see exactly what they’re capable of, but I definitely believe that if we decided to go to the 5k, that I would be shoulder-to-shoulder to them competing to make the team,” McGorty says. “Does it maybe help team dynamics if we have Evan and I in the steeple and then we only have three guys in the 5k? I’m sure. But I don’t think it was a move based on being scared of not being able to make the 5k team.”

McGorty’s decision ultimately harkens back to that conversation he had with Schumacher three years ago at the Starbucks in Palo Alto. It is about finding the event in which he can maximize his potential.

“I don’t think anyone would not have this dream — you want to compete for global medals,” McGorty says. “That’s why I wanted to join Bowerman. Jerry has created a team that’s constantly competing to do that…Whatever event I choose to do, I don’t really see it as the easy way to get on the team. I think it’s that, okay, this is the event that Jerry thinks I can be my absolute best in.”