Q&A: Mark Coogan on New Balance Boston’s Big Year and Coaching Parker Valby

2024 was a banner year for New Balance Boston and coach Mark Coogan. In February, Elle St. Pierre lowered her own American indoor record in the mile to 4:16.41 at the Millrose Games. At the World Indoor Championships in March, Emily Mackay claimed a bronze in the 1500 while St. Pierre became the first American woman ever to win the 3,000 meters at World Indoors, setting an American record of 8:20.87 in the process. At the US Olympic Trials in June, St. Pierre and Mackay both qualified for the Olympics, marking the second straight Olympiad that New Balance Boston put two women on the US Olympic 1500 team (St. Pierre also won the 5,000 but chose not to run that event in Paris). Mackay (3:55.90) and St. Pierre (3:55.99) now rank #3 and #4 on the all-time US list in the women’s 1500.

Then last week came the news that New Balance Boston had signed University of Florida superstar Parker Valby. Valby, 22, put together one of the greatest campaigns in the history of collegiate distance running in 2023-24, winning an unprecedented five NCAA titles (cross country, indoor 3,000/5,000, outdoor 5,000/10,000) and smashing collegiate records in the 5,000 (14:52.18) and 10,000 (30:50.43). Valby concluded her campaign by finishing 11th in the Olympic 10,000-meter final in Paris in August.

Last week, I spoke to Coogan on the phone where we discussed his team’s big year, why he believes St. Pierre’s World Indoor win is one of the greatest runs ever by an American woman, and his plans for Valby now that she has moved to Boston and begun training with his team.

Coogan, here with Mackay at World Indoors, had plenty to celebrate in 2024 (Kevin Morris photo)

How do you feel 2024 went for your team?

I think it was a tremendous year. I thought the team as a whole did super well. It started out really well with Elle setting the American record in the mile and then winning World Indoors. And Emily Mackay getting better and better, coming in 2nd at the US Indoor champs to Nikki [Hiltz] and then getting 3rd at the World Indoor champs but running aggressively and not being intimidated or scared of other people. Couldn’t ask for a better indoors.

The only thing that went badly at the Olympic Trials outdoors was Heather [MacLean] was recovering from an injury. We really wanted to go 1-2-3 at the Olympic Trials in the 1500 and we just missed. And Nikki is really good and tough as nails, but I still think we could have possibly gone 1-2-3 if the race played out a little bit differently. 

That Olympic 1500 final in Paris was really fast, especially the first lap, which Gudaf Tsegay ran in 59.3. I remember speaking to Elle after the race in the mixed zone and she said your advice had been to stay with the top group so that she got in position early. Do you regret that strategy now given how fast that first lap was, or do you still think that was the best way for her to put herself in position and earn a medal?

No, I think the strategy was right. We said be aware of where Faith [Kipyegon] is and Jess [Hull] is and be right behind them. And she got out hard and she was hoping to be behind them and also wanted to be down in lane 1 and close to the rail. She didn’t want to run 1550m, she wanted to run 1501m. She just somehow found herself right behind Tsegay in 2nd. And when she got to 300 and then 400, in her head she was like oh my god, I’m in 2nd, now I’ve committed.

If she did it again, she wanted to be up there and be competitive, but she wishes she was in 5th or 6th and right behind those guys instead of being [44.1] seconds at 300 and 59.x at the quarter.

But it’s just the way it happened. I guess the only thing she could have done is slow down a little, let a little gap form and have a couple of people go around her and then be in 5th that way. And she was just like, I’m committed. Because she’s tough as nails. She made it until 200 to go and just ran into the wall.

It’s a bummer because I know in my heart she’s good enough to get a medal. I think Jess Hull and her are very similar as athletes. And it is what it is. It’s a little bit harder to be an American with the Trials, the Trials were tough (St. Pierre ran five races in 10 days, doubling in the 1500 and 5,000) and then coming back with the Olympics six weeks later.

Her win at World Indoors was thrilling. Where does that rank for you in terms of coaching moments you’ve experienced?

Right there. That’s as good as it gets. As good as Abbey [Cooper] winning some of the NCAAs when it wasn’t expected at the beginning or Heather making the [Olympic] team for Tokyo. We thought she could make it but we didn’t know for sure, that was such a cool feeling.

I’ve talked to a lot of other coaches and people, and that 8:20 she ran in Glasgow, they think that’s one of the best races ever by an American woman. It’s too bad that it wasn’t on an outdoor track or at the Olympics or something. Because the people she beat and the drive that she had in that race was just tremendous.

You coach three of America’s top female milers. Two of them made the team this year, and Heather MacLean just missed out. It’s nearly impossible to bat 1.000 in this situation – I know you wanted to – so how do you and they manage those dynamics going into the Olympic Trials and at the Trials themselves knowing they’re all going for those same three spots?

That’s a good question. We talk about it, because we know it’s hard. Everybody knows it’s hard to go 1-2-3. The whole team knew it was going to be hard to go 1-2-3, but we talked about it and we thought we could do it. I knew Heather was just coming back but just rolling at the right time. She ran 1:58 at Adrian Martinez and EMac ran 1:57, so we knew they were there. I figured Heather could run 3:57 or 3:58 [at the Trials].

We decided that Elle was going to push the pace and make it a hard race for everybody. We wanted to get rid of Nikki’s kick if we could and have Heather move into the top three over the last lap. And I think Heather maybe went a teeny bit too early. If you rewatch the race, she ran a little bit too hard from 1100m to 1400m. She ran the fastest lap of anybody in the field that lap, and I think she just cooked herself a teeny bit.

But the bad part about it was we all felt so badly for Heather not making the team that it was hard to celebrate Elle and Emily’s getting on it. We were all worried about Heather because she wanted it so badly too. Honestly, it’s tough. The team really cares about each other and they look out for each other. Katrina [Coogan] and Millie [Paladino], they went to find Heather first before they went to celebrate with and congratulate Elle and Emily. And then Heather was just a great sport, a great teammate. We went out that night, everybody had a couple drinks and Heather was right there celebrating with Elle and Emily, even though she was heartbroken.

Congrats on signing Parker Valby. When did she move to Boston? How long has she been training with you and what have you seen so far?

She has been here just two weeks. Everybody on the team really likes her. She just turned 22 years old a couple weeks ago, so she’s still a kid. She’s bringing some young, new excitement to the team, which is funny. She gives people the business. She takes her running seriously, but we already can goof on her and tease her and stuff and she laughs and seems to be fitting in well.

Obviously you coach some of America’s best distance runners, but none of them were as accomplished or as hyped in college as Parker was. Do you feel any pressure becoming the coach of someone who commands so much attention?

No. I think Abbey won more NCAA championships than she did (Cooper won seven, Valby six). Abbey might not have broken records, but Abbey didn’t have the super shoes, either, when she was at Dartmouth. But Abbey won NCAA cross, a couple of indoor NCAAs, outdoor NCAAs. Parker has definitely run faster, but I would say a similar type of college career. I mean, you know as well as I do. (Editor’s note: From 2010-13, Gault was on the Dartmouth men’s track/XC team while Cooper was on the women’s team). 

I think Parker’s hype is a lot different than Abbey’s, just because Abbey is quieter, a little bit more reserved. Social media wasn’t a big thing in 2014. I didn’t have Instagram in 2014 or X or whatever. I didn’t even know what they were, I wouldn’t know what a hashtag was when I was at Dartmouth. So that’s the big difference. 

But she’s a person, you know. So I’m not too worried about it. I can only do the best I can do…I think [Will] Palmer did a good job with Parker at Florida and they figured out what they were doing with her running and her cross training and being ready to go at big meets.

So I feel like I just have to do a lot of the same stuff that Palmer did, because he did so well with her. And she’s going to get better just by getting older and incorporating a few other things like altitude, more strides – we do a lot of strides on my team. Maybe getting into the gym a bit more and running a little bit more. But she’s already pretty good, you know?

Parker shared some of her college training with you before signing. What struck you from looking through that?

She runs. She’s doing her long runs, she’s doing her hard intervals, she’s doing two good sessions a week. She’ll cross train but it’s in the afternoon after she did an hour run in the morning or something…where someone on my team might go out for an easy 30 minutes. So maybe she’s actually training a little bit harder than some of the women in my group by getting on the Arc Trainer in the afternoon.

She’s doing good long tempo runs, hard intervals, hilly long runs on dirt roads in Florida. She trains.

She spends a lot of time cross training and only runs three or four days a week. The running mileage may only be 25-40 miles per week. Or did you see more than that?

She runs more than 25 miles a week, for sure. I’m not sure exactly, I didn’t add it up when I was looking at it. But say she runs a 14-mile long run on Sundays, an eight-mile tempo run with two-mile warmup and two-mile cooldown, there’s 12 on Friday. Six times a mile with a lap jog and three miles up, three miles down, there’s some running.

Do you think it’s sustainable for an elite distance runner to only be running three or four days a week and substitute a lot of the easy runs with cross training? Or do you think she would eventually need to run more on solid ground to reach her full potential?

Yeah, she’ll eventually be running five days a week. Ed Eyestone’s people run six days a week. They take a day off. There’s a lot of cross training. I want her to be running most days at least once a day. But there’s more acceptance to cross training now. Part of me thinks that if you’re on the Arc Trainer for an hour in the afternoon and your heart rate’s up there, your body doesn’t know if you’re running or not. It just knows it’s working hard and getting fitter aerobically.

I’m sure we’re going to tinker with it, but we’re not going to change anything dramatically the first few weeks she’s here because she’s healthy as anything. She hasn’t been injured [since the spring of 2023]. 

I feel like we have seen an uptick recently in terms of what athletes are able to do off of a cross training-heavy diet. I remember Grant Fisher in the summer of 2023 ends up setting the American record in the 3k after doing some cross training. Elliot Giles, a lot of his stuff is cross training. And what Parker was doing in college. Do you feel like the landscape is shifting in that respect?

It might be. The key is to be healthy, right? So if you can do something to make sure that you are healthy, it could be changing. I don’t know what everybody else is doing. I do think that between now and when you were running or even 20 years before that, I think people are taking a little bit better care of their body. I think they’re eating a little bit better now. The new shoes might allow you to train a little bit harder because you don’t get as much muscle damage. I think the bicarbonate stuff is making a difference in people’s 800s or 1500s or steeplechases. I think there’s other stuff, too that’s allowing people to train a little bit harder and smarter.

Do your women use the bicarb?

They don’t, but we’re going to have to start using it, I think. Part of me is philosophically against it. I never said you can do it or you can’t do it. But we’ve been seeing everyone do it now like crazy. Lea [Meyer, a German steepler who trains under Coogan], did it in the steeplechase at the Olympics and she felt pretty good trying it. We see a lot of guys who have gone from 1:43 to 1:41 because they’re using it. Or we hear coaches saying it’s a game-changer. I think we’re going to have to experiment with it. But Elle has never tried it.

Do you have an Arc Trainer at The TRACK at New Balance?

We have a gym that has like four of them at New Balance. But I just ordered one for the office for our private team area. We have a private team area at The TRACK – we have an AlterG, a couple of treadmills, some bikes, hot and cold tubs, things like that. It’s coming at the end of October/beginning of November. So will [Parker] have her own private one? It will be the team’s, it won’t be hers.

That’s a wise investment. What events do you see Parker focusing on as a pro?

5k/10k for now. She told me she really wants to do well in the LA Olympics in the 10,000, be battling for a medal. Doesn’t mean you’re going to get a medal, she’s not saying she’s going to win or anything like that, but [she] wants to be in the race battling for a medal. And I think that’s all you can ask and the correct attitude. Be there at the bell lap and see what happens.

That’s how I’ve always coached the women, like Abbey or Elle or anything: you just want to be there with a lap to go and give yourself a shot. Because there’s no defense in track. You can’t call timeout, you can’t really do much to affect your opponent. So you want to be there and give yourself the opportunity for a medal, for the win. If you do that, no matter what place you came in, you can be satisfied.

Long-term, what do you think about the marathon for Parker? Surely she would have to increase her volume pretty significantly if she were ever to move to that event.

She definitely would. I mean, she just turned 22. The world record was just set by a 30-year-old. That’s eight years. That’s a long ways away. Let’s just let Parker have her first year out of college. She could still be at Florida competing this year. She had a full year left and is not taking it.

What do you think about her mechanics? Will you try to alter them at all?

A little bit. I think she’s going to end up running a little bit more eventually and I think she’ll settle into what works best. I don’t know if you’ve ever run with her, she’s super athletic. She’s not a skinny little toothpick. She looks like the other women on my team. They all look like if they weren’t running 80 miles a week or 60 miles a week, they could be playing Division III soccer. They’re all very good athletes and she fits into that mold exactly. 

She’s very athletic, very strong, and she hasn’t spent much time in the gym, but we’re going to work on her core and the little things. We’ll talk about biomechanics and things like that but I’m not a biomechanic. I don’t have a degree in it. We have the lab across the hallway [at New Balance] and they can help us. She can get in one pair of shoes and get tested and then get in another pair and get tested and see which one her running economy is better in. 

So we’ll do that type of stuff, but I’m not going to put her in a horse collar-type thing like Mary Cain was in [under] Alberto [Salazar]. That’s not my MO…I’ll work with the lab and see what they say and exercise physiologists that we have on campus, I’ll take their advice.

How much do you expect her to train with milers like Elle, Heather, and Emily?

I think quite a bit, because we train like 5k runners. She won’t do everything with them, but at least one session a week, for sure. Hopefully in the fall or the winter, two a week. We do a threshold-type session once a week and we longer intervals the other time. It’s not like we’re going down to the track and running 8 x 400 in 58 off of two minutes’ rest. We don’t do that very often. We’re more like, let’s do 6-8 x 1000 at 3:00 off of 90 [seconds’ rest]. We do more of that than 4 x 800 in 2:05.

Have you talked to her about altitude training? How does she feel about that?

She’s pumped. She can’t wait to get to Flagstaff. We’ll go to Flagstaff somewhere around January 1 and we’ll stay there all the way until the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix [on February 2]. And then we’ll run a couple of indoor races. We’ll run the Grand Prix, Millrose, maybe US indoors, I don’t know, we haven’t figured it out. If someone makes World Indoors or wants to run World Indoors, I’ll be all for it. It’s a little bit later (March 21-23), but I’d be all for it because the US [outdoor] championships aren’t until, basically, August 1. So we’ve got an extra five or six weeks in the spring.

And then we’ll go back up to Flagstaff in April-May again, and if people want to run in Europe before the US champs, we’ll probably get a place in St. Moritz and base out of there, do a couple races, and come back here for the US champs.

I saw in the Runner’s World story that [New Balance head of sports marketing] Pete Riley and Kyle Valby (Parker’s father and agent), they’re both saying that Parker’s contract with New Balance is unorthodox, that it’s not a typical running contract and is “disruptive” and “historic.” Kyle has promised a couple of big surprises. Do you know what they’re talking about? What can we expect here?

No, honestly, I don’t. I have zero to do with the contracts. And New Balance wants it that way. They want me to be advocates for all of people on the team. They don’t want me to be involved in negotiating all of that stuff. 

I would talk to her on the phone, something like that, but I’m not out there going crazy recruiting anybody. I want people that want to be part of New Balance Boston, and then I’ll be more open and tell them how we operate. And Parker really wanted to be part of this and she seemed super excited. She really seems super excited. 

Honest to god, I don’t know anything about her contract at all, except I’m sure it’s pretty good.

Mark, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Anything else important to know about Parker or the team?

I think we’re really lucky to have her and we’re excited and I know New Balance as a whole, the company is excited, and hopefully she keeps getting better and better and represents the US well, New Balance well, and herself really well. Now we should try to get the other Parker. I want the other Parker now, Parker Wolfe.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.