Interview with Jon Rankin

by Jean Cann

John Rankin, a 2005 UCLA graduate, will run the Continental Airlines Fifth Avenue Mile on Saturday, September 29. He is finishing his 2007racing season with near-personal best times despite a rocky start to the year after a long injury. His 3:35.72 1500-meter race in Rieti, Italy, on September 9 came within half a second of his best time (3:35.26), set during a stellar 2005 season. In July, he won an 800-meter race in Sweden, clocking 1:47.65—just over half a second off his best of 1:47.11. He earned a personal best of 3:54.24 for the mile in Manchester, England, in August.

Rankin, 25, runs for Nike and trains at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, CA. Joaquim Cruz, the 1984 800-meter gold medalist, has been coaching Rankin since December 2006.

Rankin earned NCAA All-American honors in cross country and with his distance medley relay team while at UCLA, but seven stress fractures over three years hampered his training and racing. A broken metatarsal suffered at the 2006 AT&T USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships kept him away from racing for almost a year. Though eager at the start of his first race back from injury in March, he finished last and in a dishearteningly slow time. He waited until June to race again. After a few races in Canada, he raced the 800 meters at the AT&T USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships, but failed to advance to the final. Though he was ready to hang up his shoes, he heeded Cruz’s advice and headed to Europe.

MensRacing.com caught up with Rankin by telephone in Stockholm at the end of his European track season before he headed back to the United States to run the Continental Airlines Fifth Avenue Mile.

Editor's Update Rankin ran an impressive race, finishing in third with a time of 3:53.3.

MensRacing.com: Let’s start off with the Continental Airlines Fifth Avenue Mile, since it’s coming right up. Why did you choose to include it in your racing schedule?

Jon Rankin: I got a slow start to my season after coming back from my injury—I had broken my fifth metatarsal at the U.S. Championships in 2006 and missed a lot of time. I decided to extend my track season all the way until around this time of the year and the Fifth Avenue Mile happens to be at this time. My coach and I figured it would be great to shoot for if I was still feeling good. It’s a great event and I haven’t done it yet; I’m so excited to give it a try.

MR: Will this be your first road mile?

JR: Yeah, yeah [laughs].

MR: Do you see any difference in the strategy you’ll employ for a road mile as opposed to running on the track?

JR: Honestly [laughs], it’s hard to figure out how to approach it. It’s so different from the track. It will be kind of hard to gauge where to make moves and what moves people are going to try to take. You don’t have markers in the same way that you do on the track— say you’re used to making a move at 500 meters, for example, and you know what 500 meters is because you’re so used to racing on the track. Here, they have it maybe marked on the roads, but it’s not going to be the same feeling, so executing on the roads is definitely going to be a new experience for me. I’ll have to learn as I go, I guess.

MR: Will that be the end of your season?

JR: Yes

MR: Backtracking a little bit, since college you had a few ups and downs. Can you just take us through a brief summary of your races and a couple of the highlights?

JR: Right after graduating, the summer of 2005 was a great experience. I was able to continue the really good college track season that I was having and extend that over to the European track season all the way up to the middle of August and was able to continue to run personal bests in both the 800 meters, the 1500, and the mile. That was a wonderful experience to be able to graduate and begin competing internationally and already begin to have success. Following that, the 2006 year was pretty tough for me. I guess reality kind of sank in. Things were just a lot different not being able to be with your teammates, not training with them anymore, doing a lot of things on your own. The adjustment was tough for me—the transition from being a collegiate athlete to understanding what it meant to be a professional runner and kind of adjust to that new life, that new lifestyle. By the end of the season, I was actually running pretty well going into the U.S Championships and at the U.S. Championships prior to breaking my foot. When that happened, that ended my season in 2006.

That pretty much brings it up to this year. I didn’t race that much since that injury. Officially, my first race was in March of 2007, but that was a pretty terrible experience. I hadn’t really been on the track yet, and I was so eager to finally try to start competing and I ran a terrible time in the 1500 meters. I finished dead last and I was really devastated. I didn’t know if I could do it any more at that point of this year. I didn’t race again until the beginning of June when I went up to Canada for two weeks and raced in a series of races in Victoria and Vancouver. Those were my first real races and I just tried to use that as a way of preparing for the U.S. Championships at the end of June, but unfortunately I didn’t make it out of the first round of the 800 meters and that ended my chances of making the U.S. team for the World Championships this year.

MR: But it seems to have picked up since then.

JR: Yeah, it was interesting, because honestly at that point I wasn’t too sure if I was going to keep running. It didn’t look like things were going to turn around. . . . It had been over 12 months since the injury and at that point, right after the injury occurred I decided to move back to San Diego. I was originally living in LA to continue working with my college coach but I decided after the injury that I wanted to move back home. That made it hard to maintain a working relationship with my college coach, and so I had to change coaches. Moving was tough. Having a new coach was tough. Everything was changing all at once and I still had to deal with what athletes go through with such a severe injury as a broken foot. All those things combined, it was really hard trying to get back, and by June I was worn out mentally and emotionally, thinking, “I don’t know if I can do this.”

My coach now officially is Joaquim Cruz, and by that point we’d been working together about six months. He told me, “You’re going to Europe no matter what.” And I said, “But I’m feeling terrible.” And he said, “You need to go. You need to race. You need to find yourself again. The only way you’re going to feel confident is not if you train hard, but if you race, regardless of the results.” Honestly, this is why he is the coach. He was a genius. He was right. I just needed to get out here and I just needed to get going. I started having fun with it again. When your coach has confidence enough to say, “Look, just go run,” it makes you feel good enough to just get into a race and say, “If I finish last it doesn’t really matter right now. I’m going through growing pains,” and that’s how we looked at it. It was just kind of nice that I was able to grow up pretty fast during the summer. From there just every race has been really good.

MR: How did you originally establish a relationship with Cruz?

JR: I guess it’s kind of two-fold. I had initially contacted Steve Scott. I had told him that I was considering moving back to San Diego and that I might need a new coach and I actually asked him if he would be my coach. We spent the next couple of months following my injury in 2006. We pretty much had a working relationship in terms of him being a guide and a mentor and somebody for me to talk at any point—every day if I wanted to, weekly, monthly, it didn’t matter. He said call as often as I wanted, so I began working with him.

Then I was actually granted a place at the Olympic Training Center down in Chula Vista to live and that’s when I was introduced to coach Cruz and began establishing a relationship with him. After a couple of weeks we decided maybe it would be best that I work with him, because I wasn’t able to see Steve Scott as often. He was all the way up in northern San Diego and I’m in southern San Diego and that’s about a 45-minute drive. It wasn’t really going to be possible for him to see me all the time, and so it makes it hard for him to coach me especially because he didn’t know me. He suggested that maybe I work with Coach Cruz and I talked to him about it and he said he would. It’s been great ever since.

MR: It must be pretty neat having a gold medalist in your event coach you.

JR: It’s pretty neat that two of the greatest runners of all time have my best interest at heart and are helping me out. If it wasn’t for Steve I probably wouldn’t be working with coach Cruz, and I’m really grateful for that.

MR: Do you have a group that you train with regularly?

JR: I actually train with Alice Schmidt. She’s another athlete of coach Cruz’s and I also have a friend of mine from Bermuda here—his name is Michael Donawa and he’s also my training partner.

MR: Would you say you’re more focused on the 1500 meters or the 800 meters?

JR My focus has been and will be the 800 meters for next year’s Olympics, but I haven’t really gotten to test myself at 800 meters. I’ve raced it on and off. I aspire to be able to do the double at some point, so that’s why I’m taking my time and just kind of getting some experience in the event. I do at some point imagine myself racing both events hopefully at a high level.

MR: What’s a typical week like for you in terms of training—maybe one during a base week and one during the peak racing season?

JR: I guess you’d have more of a base week during the fall. Pretty much under coach Cruz, we focus quite a bit on quality versus quantity. I’ve never been a high-mileage guy. Right now our focus is to slowly build up my ability to run more intense long runs and tempo runs, while building up my mileage over the next couple of years. Right now what we do basically is a couple of tempo runs—maybe a three- or four-mile tempo run maybe two or three times a week. During the fall we do maybe one long run of 15 miles or so on Sunday and the rest of the week is usually just between 45 to 60 minutes at whatever pace I feel most comfortable at. During the track season, a typical week is a couple of workouts, maybe two or three interval sessions on the track, and the rest of the week is pretty much a focus on running for time, not necessarily mileage. I run 45 to 50 minutes on the days between those interval sessions. I try to take at least one day off a week.

MR: What might be a track session you would do?

JR: One track session that we did quite a bit this year was repeat 300s. We might do three sets of three 300s at maybe 40 to 41 second pace and we would rest two minutes and maybe four minutes between the sets. That was always a challenging workout for me, but one that we did quite a bit because it was really effective. It really worked quite well.

MR: What would you say is the highlight from this year so far in your racing season?

JR: The highlight for me was racing my first Golden League meet last Friday in Brussels. That was pretty fun. It was an amazing experience racing against some of the best guys in the world in front of 40,000-plus fans. I couldn’t believe it; it was great.

MR: Did you find it intimidating at all, or was it more inspiring?

JR: It was more inspiring, because that’s where I aspire to be. I aspire to be the kind of athlete that competes at that level every year.

MR: I saw one interview that said you’ve been based in Sweden with a college teammate. Can you tell me a little about your support network from your former college teammates and your family and how it’s affected your running?

JR: That’s a great question. Honestly, without my college teammates, if it weren’t for their love, support, and friendship, I wouldn’t be running right now. I was injured. I had six, seven stress fractures in college. I know that I’m not the only one who has ever had multiple stress fractures, but I had quite a few of them and it lasted over three years where I wasn’t racing that much and I was spending a lot of time in the pool. Without the support and encouragement of my teammates, man, I wouldn’t have survived that experience at all and I wouldn’t have come out on the other side doing what I’m doing now.

Without a home in Sweden with my former teammate Erik Emilsson, I wouldn’t be able to have as much success in Europe as I’ve had. I can train with him, which is always nice because you get to train with someone that you know very well and that you’ve trained with before and you work really well with. All of his teammates out here in Sweden are unbelievably kind and receptive and encouraging. To get that away from home is invaluable--you can’t put a price tag on that. It’s so hard when you’re out here and you don’t really know anybody and you don’t have any friends, but I feel like this is my second home. This year I’ve stayed out here for three months straight—since June 26. I have a great support network back at home as well, it’s nice being able to call home and speak with my Mom, Dad, brother, and sister. They are amazing. They believe in me and in my dreams. Even through all the hard times, they’ve never wavered in their support or their belief in my dreams and my ability to hopefully one day achieve those dreams. I have great support. I can’t say enough about that, that’s for sure.

MR: Any other runners in the family?

JR: My brother, actually. We ran together in high school and that was so much fun. He ran a little bit for Cal State-Fullerton. He’s now studying pre-law undergraduate at the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle now. He still runs. He’s not really a competitive runner. I think right now he’s more recreationally running, but I can tell that he still very much would like to be racing competitively. He’s the only other runner in the family.

MR: What are your plans coming up in terms of racing indoors and next year? For 2008, I assume Bejing and qualifying the team is the focus?

JR: I’m going to actually focus on cross country and focus on putting in a strong base. I love cross country. I feel it’s going to be quite a great experience. We have so much depth in the United States in terms of the quality of runners over every distance especially in cross country, the marathon, and road racing. I’m going to have some fun and still try to keep the competitive juices flowing by running some road races during the fall and wintertime and also doing some competitive cross country races. I’m not too sure if I’ll go overseas and race any international competitive cross country races, but that’s definitely a consideration. I actually have to go over this stuff with Coach Cruz, but that’s where the mindset is right now. We definitely are not going to put any emphasis on indoors. I may run one or two one-mile races just to get one or two in, but it will probably be somewhere local like Seattle, because I live on the West Coast and it’s a nice track--it’s flat and you can definitely run fast there. But there’s no real emphasis on indoors this coming year.

Of course, preparation for the Olympic Games and the Olympic Trials—the goal is to not just make the team, but hopefully to have an impact at the Olympic Games. You’ve got to dream big. I dream of trying to get a medal next year. I want to be on the medal stand. That’s the ultimate goal we have right now.

MR: Any time goals in mind or are you just going to let that happen with the races?

JR: I aspire to break a few records next year, let’s just say that!

MR: That should wrap it up. Are you heading straight to Fifth Avenue or do you have something in between?

JR: No, that’s the last thing we have on the agenda. Today I actually had an 800-meter time trial, which went really well in practice. That was my last big workout of the track season. Now it’s just maintaining the level of fitness I have by resting and relaxing, and just traveling safe once I leave Sweden and head to New York. There’s not too much going on between now and then—just trying to get ready for that one and hopefully having a very successful run there.

MR: Thank you, and good luck at Fifth Avenue and beyond.

JR: Thanks a lot.

Interview conducted September 21, 2007, and posted September 25, 2007.