Graham Blanks Describes the Workout That Told Him He Could Win NCAA XC (Again)

Harvard University cross country coach Alex Gibby likes to keep things consistent from year to year.

“Typically I can wake up on a workout day, open my Garmin app, look at a year ago today and I’ll already know what the workout is assigned for that day,” said Harvard star Graham Blanks.

As a result, Blanks spent the 2024 cross country season like a Mario Kart driver, trying to beat his Garmin ghost around the same courses. Such an approach offers both risk and reward. Beating the ghost can instill confidence: it is tangible proof that you are faster than a year ago. But it cuts both ways. What if you have to dig too deep to beat the ghost? What if you don’t beat the ghost at all? There is a reason why some coaches like to change up their workouts.

Chasing the ghost of 2023 Graham Blanks — a guy that won the NCAA cross country title and set a collegiate record of 13:03 in the 5,000 meters — was a daunting task.

“I was pretty scared of myself from a year ago today, trying to beat that guy in training,” Blanks said on the eve of last month’s NCAA cross country championships in Madison, Wis.

In particular, one workout loomed over him as Blanks entered the championship portion of the 2024 season. It was the workout that, one year earlier, had convinced him he was ready to win the NCAA cross country title. And, when the 2024 version was over, it was the one that had convinced him he was ready to retain it.

On Saturday, Blanks will run in what is likely to be his final race for Harvard, the Sharon Colyear-Danville Season Opener at Boston University, where he will attempt to run under the 13:01.00 World Championship standard in the 5,000m. Before the race, Blanks told LetsRun about the best workout of his life that put him on his way to a second straight NCAA cross country championship.

Blanks first told this story on the LetsRun.com Track Talk Podcast. You can find LetsRun Track Talk on all major podcast platforms; subscribe for interviews with the world’s best runners and weekly discussion of the biggest stories in elite running. To receive a bonus podcast every week, access to premium articles, a LetsRun.com t-shirt, and discounts on running gear, join the LetsRun.com Supporters Club today.

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To appreciate the 2024 workout, we have to start with its equivalent from 2023. The two sessions were not identically structured, but the aim of each was the same: to replicate the experience of racing at the NCAA cross country championships. With 255 runners on the start line, NCAA XC is one of the world’s deepest, most chaotic races, typically featuring a mad dash to establish early position (in 2023, the leaders ran the first kilometer in 2:29), a relaxation of pace in the middle, and a long, hard push at the end. Blanks refers to these simulator workouts, each of which took place 15 days before NCAAs, as “buffering sessions.”

“We’ll just go all-out, like really hard for a couple reps in the beginning, then do some tempo stuff, and then finish hard again,” Blanks said.

This is how Blanks describes the 2023 workout (you can view the details here on Strava):

Last year we did one where we ran like some 800s in the beginning on grass and we’re running close to 2:00. We drive all the way out to these nice soccer fields in Wellesley, Massachusetts, near Gibby’s house, which is probably why we go there. And you get there and then Gibby makes the course go through the freaking brush in the woods, right next to these pristine fields. So it’s always super hard running there. 

So we’re running, like 2:00s on the grass and it’s just like your legs are just completely full of lactic and you’re sprinting. And then we went onto this road loop with one hill on it. That’s about it, and we did some two-mile reps. This is back when Acer Iverson (7:47/13:26 pbs, 2022 Heps cross country champion) was still on the team. And he’s an absolute psychopath. I mean, he has no foresight. Like he has this part missing from his brain in terms of racing and training where he doesn’t think about how hard stuff’s going to hurt at the end.

And it’s an amazing asset to have as a runner. A lot of times when I race the worst, when I overthink stuff, think about the pain I might feel, Acer doesn’t have that. So we did these 800s on the grass all-out and then went on this road loop and did like some two-mile reps and Acer basically led all of them. We basically went like 9:15 and then 9:00 and then the last one, Acer took it out so hard and I ended up running 8:36 in the two-mile on this loop that’s like kind of a hill. That was crazy to me because I spent my whole high school career trying to break 9:00 and I never did, and I was able to do it at the end of the workout (Blanks’ high school pb was 9:04 for 3200m). And at that point I was like, this is where I think I can win the national championship now. This is after I won Nuttycombe too, so that was a big confidence booster.

Fast forward 12 months. For much of the 2024 cross country season, Blanks felt as if he was unable to catch his ghost. Part of it was because he got a late start on his cross country campaign — racing at the Olympic Games in August will do that. But part of it was because the goal he was chasing, NCAA cross country champion, was one he had already accomplished.

“The motivation I had [in 2023] was essentially endless because I just wanted to win so bad,” Blanks said.

As this year’s buffering session approached, Blanks was worried. He knew how well it had gone the year before. And this time around, he would not have Iverson to push him.

“I’m like, how am I going to beat this workout?” Blanks said.

There’s one other thing to know. Gibby does not tell his athletes the day’s workout until it is about to begin. And even then, he won’t tell them the entire workout. Instead, he will unspool it piecemeal as the workout unfolds. So while Blanks had an idea of what sort of session to expect given Gibby’s history, he did not know the specifics of the session until it was over.

It took some time for Blanks to get used to this structure. After graduating high school in 2020, Blanks took a gap year during which he trained at altitude with his future Harvard teammates. Gibby would send them a document with workouts listed out well in advance and Blanks, being somewhat obsessive, would spend weeks hyping himself up for specific sessions. The training went well — Blanks would end up running a personal best of 13:27 for 5,000m at the end of that gap year — but he prefers the current system.

“The way Gibby does it [now], it makes a lot more sense,” Blanks said. “Because [if you know the workouts in advance], you can overthink stuff. You can turn the training into something that it shouldn’t be…It’s something that’s really worked for me. It gives me the ability to test myself and build confidence and he doesn’t allow me to overthink stuff.”

With that as preamble, here is how Blanks describes the 2024 version of the workout, which he later described as “probably the best workout I’ve had so far in my career” (Strava details here):

I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to hit these same workouts without Acer, because he’s such a great training partner and I spent a lot of time this fall training by myself because I was on a slightly different plan [coming back from the Olympics]. A lot of the guys on the team were already doing way longer stuff than me, way more reps. So I was kind of working my way back in. But we did like a workout in Wellesley again, and we did some K’s in the beginning. So we started off with a hard K and I ran 2:31 on the grass and that freaking hurt. I did not expect that to hurt that bad. And then we just did some K’s. We did four K’s, I did them at like 2:50 on the grass with a minute rest. And then we went on the loop and did a 3k and I ran a 7:57.

And that was without Acer. So that was the best workout I probably had. And then I went back and ran a cutdown mile and ran a 4:14. But the 3k, that was the hard rep. After the K’s, everyone kind of knew what was coming up. Everyone’s like, all right he’s about to give us something where we just need to run hard. The guys on the team ran that [rep] fast too. I’m pretty sure most, if not half, ran sub-9:00 pace for the 3200 — that’s my American brain, basically pins everything back to the 3200.

But yeah, that was probably my best workout this fall. And that was one where I kind of got my confidence back a little because for most of the season, I was working behind where I was the previous year.

Talk about Blanks’ workout on the world-famous LetsRun.com messageboard:

MB: Graham Blanks REVEALS the KILLER workout that let him know he was ready to repeat at NCAA XC champ.