Running with the Buffaloes: A Season Inside with Mark Wetmore, Adam Goucher, and the University of Colorado Men's Cross-Country Team

by Chris Lear

Running the Lydiard Way

Look up

Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1972.

Research

(Wetmore claims "the best thing would be to live there and train down here"), Wetmore's

Live at elevation

"'The right stuff' on this level," he says, "is some combination of these four qualities: talent, durability, determination, and courage.

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Goucher never eats lunch. If he is hungry, he will have a granola bar or another light snack. The guys, especially Reese, kid him that he does not eat enough. He used to eat more. Standing 5'9" to Y l 0", he weighs in at just under 140 pounds. At the Olympic Trials in Atlanta in 1996, he weighed 145. After the 5000-meter final, where he finished a disappointing fourteenth, Wetmore told him he was fat. Goucher was livid. When he calmed down he realized Wetmore was right, and he has made a conscious effort to lose any excess weight since then. He feels the difference. "My chest was bigger, my arms were bigger. Losing the five pounds has helped me thin out, and it's cut me more. It's made a big difference."

Figure out your meals

It is a survival tactic at this elevation since it is next to impossible to recover once in oxygen debt.

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"No one liked it because it was so ridiculous, but I loved it because I am a fan of all things ridiculous."

Hard training works, not only for the walk-ons, but for all his athletes.

The better you are, the harder it is to realize that."

That's America, though. Over-analyzed and under-trained.

these are incredible people with the incredible and audacious agenda to discover their own talents.

I think that we will look back as withered elderly men upon these times as some of the most profound of our lives.And if I don't, that's even better, because it would take a hell of a life to cloud over the shining, glistening days of collegiate cross country.