Divergent Thinking: Inside John O’Malley

John O’Malley coaches cross country and track at Sandburg High School in the Chicago area. I’ve never coached cross country, so I know John best for the success of his 4×8 teams.

Sandburg’s slowest season-best time in the 4×8 since 2011 was 7:46.89. The slowest.

Sandburg’s average season-best time in the 4×8 since 2011 is 7:43.49. The average.

John O’Malley has coached 15 different quartets to sub 7:50 (32 different quartets to sub 8:00). For some reference here, in Plainfield North school history, only one relay team has broken the 8:00 barrier. Our school record is 7:59.60.

Sandburg set the state record in the 4×8 in 2016 running 7:37.36. The splits in that race were 1:56.9, 1:56.6, 1:50.9, and 1:52.5. They won it again this year.

The Illinois state record-holders (7:37.63), Tom Brennan, Dylan Jacobs, Chris Torpy, Sean Torpy

2013 was the last time we weren’t top 2 (in the state) and that year we finished 3rd. Amazingly, it took a progression of 5th, then 4th, then 3rd, then 2nd before we finally won. Then we repeated and set a state record in 2016, then went 2nd in ’17, and 1st this year. I nearly broke during the process from near-misses. Not that top 5 in state is isn’t a great accomplishment, but when you step out and be bold in your goals you need to fully invest in your belief of your ability to win and if you fall short—if you truly believed in your goal—it’s tough. As I type this I am simultaneously in awe of our record and having a mild form of PTSD of how hard the climb up the mountain was and the number of hugs and I love yous I handed out. I could write a book (that no one would read) on this process. The night before our first 4 x 800 state title (Friday evening after prelims 2015) was probably one of the biggest turning points in my coaching career in deciding to go for it one more time rather than allow the Torpys to do their thing as juniors in individual events. That was emotionally challenging. 

 (Don’t miss the rest of the story of the 2015 4×8 at the end of this article … goosebumps!)

If John O’Malley does not yet have your attention, he coached the 2017 Foot Locker National Cross Country Champion, Dylan Jacobs. He coached Sean Torpy who ran 1:47.9 (800) and 4:03.4 (1600), and Sean’s twin brother, Chris, who ran 1:49.8 and 4:05.4. In addition, John O’Malley coached Lukas Verzbicas who ran a 3:59.71 mile in high school (2011). At the time, only four high school athletes had ever run sub-4 in the mile, Jim Ryan, Tim Danielson, Marty Liquori, and Alan Webb. Verzbicas also won Footlocker Nationals, making him the only coach in the U.S. to coach two Footlocker Nationals Champions.

John O’Malley and I both attended a small liberal arts college (Knox College), in Galesburg, IL. Knox is expensive; the present cost of yearly attendance is over $56K. However, Knox has always given generous grants and student aid. Both John and I paid less to go to Knox than the cost of attending the cheapest state schools in Illinois. We are far from being the most famous Knox grads. Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, John Podesta, was a Knox grad. Podesta became even more famous last year when his email account got hacked by Russians giving Trump the Presidency. The other famous Russian-linked Knox grad was cult-catholic (Opus Dei) Robert Hanssen, who spied for the Russians as he worked for the FBI. Hanssen is currently in prison, serving five life sentences. I graduated from Knox in 1981, John O’Malley 2001.

I’ve known John O’Malley for less than ten years. We’ve exchanged some emails, followed each other on twitter, and attended each other’s clinic presentations. Long overdue, we recently had a chance to sit and really talk.

Our first meeting was at Doc’s Smokehouse in Mokena at 11:30 in the morning on June 27^th. We drank craft beers (“Beer Hates Astronauts” from Half Acre) and sat at the bar for four hours. (Men speak more comfortably when they are not sitting across from each other. I think it goes back to our 35,000 years of evolutionary history when men told stories while staring into a campfire.) I wrote nothing down, recorded nothing. We just talked. We promised to do it again.

I sent John a 15-question email and two weeks later, we met up again. This time John came to Plainfield. (The Tap House; we drank “Gumballhead” from 3 Floyds). His assistant coach, Tom Novak, accompanied John. Tom is my age and provided interesting perspective and kept John and I from going too deep into the metaphysical rabbit hole of high performance. We sat at an outdoor table and talked about track and music for five hours.

Tom Novak made the observation that John and I were incredibly different. John is insanely detail-oriented. I’m a half-baked essentialist. Tom had a hard time picturing John O’Malley being a photographer (like me) at the state track meet. John O’Malley is hands-on, I’m hands-off.

I told Tom Novak that John and I resembled a Venn diagram, with huge areas of overlap. First of all, we both went to Knox College because of the magnetism of one man, Harley Knosher (AD and basketball coach). We both show reverence to music. We are both classroom teachers and outspoken critics of today’s force-fed mandated curricula. We are both advocates for kids. We both donated to the Bernie Sanders campaign. We both “Feed the Cats” (more on this later, question #15 below). Oh yeah, and between us, our kids won half of the running events at the 2018 IHSA State Track Meet (4×1, 4×2, 4×8, 100, 200, 1600).

In addition, I once coached like John O’Malley. I coached like John before I figured out coaching at a track meet didn’t matter much and fell in love with photography. Back in the 90s I was told I coached track “like a basketball coach” (which makes sense because I was more of a basketball coach than a track coach). John also coaches like a basketball coach. Intense. Animated. Ultra-competitive. (Disclaimer: distance coaching and sprint coaching are not quite the same. Distance running has a cerebral element to it. Sprinters are “neuro” but not cerebral. Thinking and max speed don’t go together.)

The credit for the rest of the article will go to John. It took four hours and a couple of “Beer Hates Astronauts” to come up with these 15 questions. I had a hunch that John O’Malley, being an English teacher, might be a pretty damn good writer. My hunch was right.

1. What’s your response when you hear people say, “Trust the Process”?

I don’t know. I haven’t given it a lot of thought. I certainly don’t trust processes. The Electoral College, the American Dream, standardized education.  If I hear that, I generally think there is a lack of trust.

“Trust people, not processes.” – John O’Malley

Athletes trust coaches; coaches trust athletes. That’s people. Not the process. Beyond that, if practice has great substance then you aren’t trying to sell the process. Having said that, I do fully understand the concept of getting kids to see that this is not an instant gratification activity.

2. Sometimes I talk about my program as “how to cook” vs “what’s the recipe”. I think both are important but recipes don’t work unless you know how to cook. Any thoughts?

Yeah, this is good stuff. I like this analogy. Getting the recipe right is hard. Or, figuring out what recipe to follow is difficult in itself. But the craft of it comes in the cooking. If everyone could just follow the recipe then everyone would be a gourmet chef. I’m probably a smoking meat sort of cook—all ingredients present from the beginning and low doses of heat until the ingredients are fully physically absorbed. Grilling a steak and adding salt and pepper right at the end…no, that’s not good cooking or training. My friend and coach of Mountain Vista H.S. in Colorado and amazing smoker of meat, Jonathon Dalby says, “You can make a cheap piece of meat taste like a million bucks and you can make an expensive piece of meat taste like garbage if you cook it wrong.” I think this Dalby quote is applicable to training. I take my guys and slow cook them. That way, they’ll be in a state to fully absorb the training I’m giving them. They need to be in a state where they can actually benefit from the stimulus.

3. You seem to be more “bold” than other distance coaches. Do you consider yourself bold? More bold than the typical distance coach? How?

Yes. Being bold is a part of our oxygen. I need to breath the same air I want my athletes to breath. I have lost the fear of failure. I used to have it. I really don’t fear failure any more. I am bored if there isn’t a threat of failure. With this mentality, I am willing to take risks and also experiment. We just got back from our team trip and I have a new mantra: We’re never going to be afraid to do things we’re afraid of. I just came up with that and I really like it. Note: for more on this, see the answer to #11.  

4. Speaking of bold, can you re-tell the story of your first date with your wife?

After being “friends” who constantly flirted and dated other people and attended separate colleges, enough was enough. I called her and told her we were going to U2 and she was going to be on stage. I was totally bullshitting. I didn’t even have tickets yet. I had dozens of guys on computers waiting for ticket sales to go live. Everyone had my credit card number (asshole banks gave credit cards to everyone in college in the late 90s/early 2000s). We got in and got “general admission” tickets—the Holy Grail. We went down to Lexington, Kentucky to the Rupp Arena. I still didn’t know how I’d get her on stage but she was thrilled to be going to the concert so I wasn’t too worried about it. After some recon, I had a strategy in place to get front row seats. Two good friends from Knox came down, too, and we had the whole operation scouted out. We showed up at 8:00 a.m. for a 7:00 p.m. show and hung out all morning outside the Rupp Arena. We were among the first to enter the show and were front row.

“As luck would have it, Bono picked out Heather from the crowd and brought her on stage and sang her a song. I was like, “Shit, I told you I had this under control.” That was a good night. I proposed to her a few years later at a U2 concert.” – John O’Malley

Heather and Bono

5. Didn’t you make a trip to Butler to visit or observe Brad Stevens? What were your takeaways? Powerful?

This was phenomenal. One of the most important professional development moments of my coaching and teaching career. I am kind of proud that I identified that guy as a world-class coach before the NBA did. Anyway, I was watching the NCAA tournament and was watching this guy on the sidelines as they advanced to the final four. I was blown away by his poise and his players’ composure. I thought to myself, “This guy is a stud. I need to get access to him.” I called down. I wrote a letter. The letter was answered and I was invited down. I took a few of my staff down and invited John Sipple from Downers Grove North as well. Spent 3-4 hours with him. He answered anything I threw at him. He was willing to talk even more. The guy was amazing.

Takeaways—I have so many, but the biggest ones:

♦ Your team will reflect your emotional discipline, or lack of it.

♦ Set up standards, or pillars, before the season starts. When stuff gets messy, go back to the pillars. Pillars are more important than goals because they are what lead to goals.

♦ Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off. He stopped recruiting kids who didn’t love Hinkle Fieldhouse—the old beautiful building where Hoosiers was filmed. It’s old and not “state of the art.” If kids didn’t love that they were in the wrong place.

♦ Focus on relationships.

♦ Pressure filled moments/weeks need to be met with normalcy. You create normalcy by making the Final Four week normal before Final Four week. Go back to your pillars.

♦ Have fun and enjoy the moment (he once spent an entire halftime against Texas Tech listening with his players to Bobby Knight yell at his team through the adjoining wall. They just enjoyed it. And then beat them).

♦ Control the controllables better than anyone. Don’t worry about the uncontrollable.

I do all of those things as a coach now.

6. Whether or not you see yourself as unique or different, you seem that way to me. If you agree, what in your past made you different? 

I’m not 100% sure. The 4^th of 6 children forces you to collaborate and observe and evaluate. Being younger and smaller, physical force wouldn’t work. I had to constantly read the room from the day I was born. Perhaps that created a desire to stand out, too.

And I am 100% confident I have already read more than double the amount of books than 99% of the literate population will read in their entire lifetime. That’s not even something I’m proud of…I’m just kind of relentless. See the wife story. I don’t know. Being relentless can be a seriously double-edged sword at times, too.

7. Did you ever read a book that changed you as a coach? More than one? Why?

Not one. I typically give myself a five to six book “conversation”. I read 5-6 books on a similar topic simultaneously. But probably The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway. There is a passage in there that he reads,

“He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fisherman thought they were at a hundred.”

I don’t know how Cliff or Spark interprets those lines, but I always feel that Hemingway is talking about writing (i.e. his craft) here. He had achieved complex simplicity. Others do complexity and only reach shallow depths. For me, being sophisticated and expressing it simplistically goes deeper. Beyond that, the old man never was understood–even mocked– by his village but he got up every day and fished anyway. And when he loses the marlin after three days of battle he goes home to sleep and has the same dream he had before the three day battle. I just connected to that so much.

Even more related to coaching is the movie and Lauren Hillenbrand book Seabiscuit. I actually watched the film first. The book is great, too. That horse had more newspaper headline space in the 1930s than anything, even Hitler. Crazy. It came out in 2003—I know that because that was my first year coaching and I was just trying to figure it out. As I watched I thought: the team surrounding Seabiscuit is how you need to coach. You’ve got the idealistic, ever-optimistic owner who sees opportunity everywhere, picks his guys and believes in them. You got the trainer who is so detail oriented that he practiced starts with the exact same bell that would be used for the big race. You got the horse itself who was abused through over training and being whipped endlessly and who was virtually given away but just starts running like a natural horse again and starts breaking records. The horse loved to compete. I wanted athletes like that; I wanted to train them and coach them with that combination. It’s also narrated by my favorite narrative historian, David McCullough.

I have to add Heart of a Champion by Bob Richards. I literally grabbed that book as I ran out of my burning house when I was 18. There is that cliched question people ask, “what would you grab if your house was burning down?” When I was 18, I grabbed a book.

8. You said you see workouts in time, not linear distances. Accurate?

Yes. I will translate the time to distance sometimes. If Dylan Jacobs or Sean Torpy or Lukas Verzbicas runs 1,000 meter intervals in 2:45 and I have kids on the team who have a PR in the 800 of 2:45, should they both be doing intervals of the same distance? No. Our energy systems don’t log miles. They respond to a stimulus of stress and time and recovery. I keep max sprints to :08 or less and do so on a hill and on the track. Late in the season I extend that to :10 (distance runners suck at acceleration and don’t need to be good at it). Runs are measured in time, not miles. This accounts for all the factors that play in to a run: weather, current fitness, current recovery, current stress levels. If it’s 90 degrees and more challenging (plenty of research on the benefits of heat training being equal to altitude training), why would you run the same mileage? Time translates every complicated factor that leads to a runner’s perceived effort.

9. The Charlie Francis quote, something like “Never be far from a state of performance.” ???

“Never be too far away from competition readiness.” This is huge for me. We get better as the season goes on—that’s a statistical fact. But this made a lot of sense. The traditional distance model essentially requested runners to do nothing specific to racing for three months. That’s so dumb. What possible rationale could that be? There is the poetic notion of distance runners being like H.D. Thoreau doing a secluded extended stay away from society…going away for an extended period of time and building “a base” then coming back and “sharpening” into competitive readiness. Poetic and stupid. And I love HDT. Why would you give up an extended period of time of specific skill development during your season? Then people wonder why they get so many injuries. Nothing should be new. It should be stressed and emphasized in different ways. We get exceptionally few injuries on my team. In the last 7 years we’ve had a grand total of two stress fracture incidents. One of the reasons is because we keep ourselves close to a state of competitive readiness at all times.

When I started coaching, probably the biggest criticism a distance coach could hear was, “You peaked too early.” I hate that so much. So some coaches withhold specific training for months and then the kid either gets injured or PRs because he’s just getting into a semblance of competitive fitness right at the end of the season. Then you pat yourself on the back for “peaking correctly.” I did this. Little did I know that we may have been hitting a PR but it wasn’t what they were actually capable of achieving. I see many coaches continue to make that mistake I used to make.

At the state cross country meet this year Craig Virgin commented in the stands that “Dylan Jacobs peaked too early. No one can run 13:57 in September (Dylan had run that time on the last day of September).” He had a knowing smile about it. Of course, he didn’t know Dylan was barely able to run at state due to a viral infection and actually ran his best race ever in December when he won Footlocker…peaked too early in September? You can see the old school distance mentality at play with the Craig Virgin comment.

10. Why is “Bad” your favorite U2 song? I literally had no recollection of it. Listened to it. Read the words. I first thought it was a song about an addictive relationship, then read it was about heroin. Had no idea it was an anthem of theirs. Amazing black and white YouTube video. 

It’s an amazing anthem. The pattern of the song is the perfect rhythm of a class or a season. That rhythm rings in my head during classes. It builds. It promises something early and it builds. By the end we are totally bought in and feeling powerful.

11. Can you list things you do in your program that most people would see as unique? 

 ♦ We are insanely attentive to detail.

♦ We don’t stay in Peoria the night before state for cross country. Saturday’s race is at 2:00. That’s a stupid amount of anxiety time in a hotel room. I want my runners sleeping on their own pillows. I’d rather they be excited driving home from Peoria than driving to Peoria.

♦ I know every split of every top-five 4 x 800 runner from every school for the past ten years. I look for patterns. “Observe like Darwin” is a mantra of mine. The patterns turn me into a chef, not just someone reading a recipe.

“Above all else, my teenagers have the very unique experience of being taken seriously.” – John O’Malley

♦ I constantly create what’s called intermediate disturbances (environmental biology term). I make them adaptable by giving them stuff to be adaptable with. They grow diverse skills as a result.

♦ We have a disrespect for the record books. Why? Records are limitations. We don’t respect limitations. Teenagers especially are hammered with all sorts of social and emotional limitations. What they can and cannot do. What’s cool or uncool. What’s worthy of attention. What toughness looks like. We reject that narrative on our team. That’s not where we live.

♦ We sprint from week one to the final week. This is very important. The prototypical view of distance training is that you need to get fit and strong before you start running fast. But I discovered that you need to sprint to get fit and strong! Listen, in the grand experiment that is Illinois track (125 years old), I coached the single fastest 800 meter runner. You know what? That 800 meter runner also finished 3^rd in state in cross country and ran 14:24 for 3 miles. What does this prove?? Max speed sprinting improves performance for every distance.

♦ I actually set up the psychological momentum and get the assistant coaches on the same page. There are not random stories and speeches.

♦ Lots and lots of dialogue and involvement with assistance coaches. Lots of planning and evaluation. The Sandburg Coaching Team is amazing.

♦ No logs. No mileage counts.

♦ I’m not big on cooldowns. I’m not big on crappy biomechanics. I am too attentive to making sure their fitness progression doesn’t ruin their speed. So I constantly have them fire neurologically even when fatigued.

♦ No static stretching ever. Not even after the workout.

“We focus so much of our program on love. I’m not a huge fan of this whole “grit” movement in education. Grit is not the answer. If you love something or someone, grit will never be an issue. If there is ever a “grit” problem, it’s really a “love” problem.” – John O’Malley

12. Can you list things you DON’T DO in your programs that most programs cling to?

Haha. I love this:

♦ Count miles

♦ Training logs (That’s my job. Do your worthless homework or go to sleep or talk to your parents, don’t log the training your coach is in charge of. That’s my job). Teenagers have an absolutely absurd schedule.

♦ “Taper” and “Peak”…dumb terms. Not in our vocabulary.

♦ “The hay’s in the barn.” No. We are in continual progression. Race readiness involves muscle tension, neuromuscular connectivity, and psychological heightening. Hay is in the barn is such a bad phrase related to those elements.

♦ “Our job is to take the pressure off. (i.e. state meet)” No. Our job is to make them self-aware. They can learn from pressure and become self-aware. It’s not a coaching manipulation process. Coaches need to avoid Disney coaching movies to get this message (except Seabiscuit!) I’d prefer them to be ready for their job interviews, their challenges ahead, etc. So we’ll have some honest conversations about the pressure ahead.

“I believe that anyone who thinks they need to avoid stress is a loser. I tell that to my runners and students and they love that. Once again, they are being taken seriously.” – John O’Malley

♦ “You can handle this stress. We love stress” And then we talk about it. I’ve only been given advice to do the opposite., so I’m guessing not many coaches take this approach. Instead they are coming up with creative ways to “relax” them. Take them seriously and, more important than the state meet, help them grow.

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Let me interject here. As I’ve been writing this article, I’ve been simultaneously reading “Go Wild” by John Ratey and Richard Manning. The premise: Living more like our pre-domesticated ancestors would improve our health and well-being. The following excerpt goes right along with John O’Malley’s take, “Anyone who thinks they need to avoid stress is a loser.”

All of this is to say that our pleasure circuits are attuned to awareness and unexpected rewards, and stress is in this mix—not chronic unremitting stress that characterizes day-to-day life for many of us, but the ups and downs that flow from normal life. The pleasurable life is not stress-free, and Sapolsky argues that this realization provides a precise analogue for meditation: People think that you secrete stress hormones when there is stress, and when there is no stress, you don’t secrete them or secrete just a little bit. You are at baseline.

It was a long-standing tradition in the field to consider the baseline to be extremely boring. What’s now clear instead is that the baseline is a very active, focused, metaphorically muscular process of preparation for stress. The jargon used in the field is that it has permissible effect, allowing the stress response to be as optimal as possible. That’s a wonderful endocrine analogue to the notion of meditation. A state of peace is not the absence of challenge. It is not the absence of alertness and energetic expenditure. If anything, it is a focusing of alertness in preparation. It absolutely matches the endocrine picture.

We think “alertness in preparation” is an exact summary of the hunter-gatherer state of mind, and now it appears that evolution has wired us to be rewarded by achieving it. Of course it has. The ideal state is not noise or absence of noise, stressed or relaxed, feast or famine, awake or asleep. This is more the case of defining one more edge between two states and then noting how our bodies are attuned to walking that line.

13. I believe that, many times, with many coaches, distance, reps, and recovery are random. I think in my early days they were 100% random. That percentage is much lower now. I can now explain distance, reps, and recovery. You?

Wow. This one is complicated. Depends on the task. Man. I need an hour to explain this. Neurons are either firing or they are not. If they don’t have the recovery to fire then you are wasting your time.

Max speed requires full recovery.

The obvious answer is that the more aerobic something is, the less recovery there is. But this is a complicated topic…I evaluate the physical and emotional abilities of my athletes to help determine this and combine that with the purpose of the workout.

For the 800/1600, when they are fit enough, I do move to more specificity and goal pace with short recovery between intervals followed by large recovery for sets (neurons are firing or they are not). For example: two weeks before state, Chris Torpy did 300 at goal 800 pace, :45 jog recovery, 200 in goal race pace. 10 minute recovery. Repeat. He went :39-:27. He would run 1:49/4:05 within two weeks.

14. What’s your take on college coaching?

Ha!

Well, first of all, I’ve had exactly two college coaches review my training program before making decisions on my athletes who were going to the next level. Mario Andretti shows up to your driveway with his racecar and says, “This is all yours. I’m willing to spend as much time with you as you want to explain how to drive this car. Want to go for a ride and go over some things?” And they say, “No, I got it. Give me the keys. I’m a very good driver”

In all seriousness, I think there is a dramatic need for two things with college coaches:

1. Dialogue with their high school coaches. This is a no brainer. How dumb do you have to be to not access this resource?

2. Focus more on culture. Most college coaches are focused on their training program and recruiting. Part of this is the culture of college athletics. They need to move on and up. They don’t have time to develop culture. Consequently, they often don’t know how to…and/or roll their eyes when such a topic is brought up. Sometimes I hear the excuse that they are older and more independently minded athletes. Ok. Joe Maddon. Gregg Popovich. Brad Stevens…they spend a lot of energy on culture and they coach professional adults.

15. Are there any examples of how you “feed the cats” in a distance program?

♦ Think divergently.

♦ I don’t ever want getting fit and strong to get in the way of being fast.

♦ Speed is neurological/electrical. Keep that wired.

♦ I strive to improve max-speed sprinting and explosion. Speed reserve can be translated to any event, in my opinion.

♦ Happy and healthy.

♦ Compete. (Your 4 x 100 was my favorite thing to watch throughout the season. Faced #1 H-F. Beat them. Huntley. Beat them. H-F broke the state record in prelims. Finals: your guys won. Competition was something your athletes were comfortable with. They were competing the final week of the season. I enjoyed seeing them go through the ringer and were comfortable with it. THEY WEREN’T AFRAID OF STRESS!)

There is probably even more than that, but that is a major set of influences. Wow.

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Wow is right!

When I received this email from John, I returned a two-word reply, “Pure Gold”.

With the 15 questions answered, I had the start of a great book (or a very long article). However, I was missing something. I was missing something about the soul of John O’Malley’s program. By “soul”, I’m referring to the intangible spirit of John’s program. Not the performances, not the records, not the trophies, not the people. No, the soul of the John O’Malley’s program is something immaterial and immortal.

I remember giving a presentation at a Track Football Consortium (TFC-3) and ending my presentation with a story of John O’Malley’s team and how they didn’t wear their state medals for the team picture. I remember getting choked up telling the story, but I didn’t remember the exact details. (Interesting that our mind often remembers how we “felt” about something more than the details themselves.)

“Trophies gather dust; decency and caring for others grows richer with time.” – John O’Malley

In 2015, our state cross country team didn’t wear the medals–the first time a state championship team didn’t have medals around their necks for the photo. The kids walked on the stage, got the medal, walked off the stage and gave it to someone who inspired them (namely, their parents) and walked back up for the photo. I am a 100% believer that there needs to be a “soul” to your effort. It’s like the grit stuff. Why are we being gritty toward this goal? It better mean something.

For state track 2015, our first 4 x 8 state title, the Torpys left the infield before the awards and we replaced them with two kids who ran the prelim (giving Torpys one less race over 48 hours). In the prelim, I substituted two young kids (who could run 1:58) for the Torpys. It was a ballsy move, but I had done my homework and I bet on my kids and they qualified for finals. In the finals, the Torpys subbed back in for the young kids.

I told the Torpys that when we won, I wanted them marching off the infield so those two kids could go up on the award stand and get recognition. I said, “Only you can give them that recognition now. It is selfless what those two kids did and they want to be racing. Instead, they will be watching. Let’s get them on top of the stand.”

If you watch the 2015 state 4 x 800, the Torpys fought harder than you will ever see anyone ever fight. They killed themselves out there. You will never find athletes like the Torpys anywhere. First state title. When we won the 4×8, I grabbed the young alternates from the stands and sent them into the infield to stand at the top the podium. We had a freshman who had run the prelim and had been replaced by a Torpy. That freshman, barely 98 pounds, proudly stood atop the Eastern Illinois podium. His name? Dylan Jacobs.

And you wonder why Dylan chose the 4×8 last month instead of going for the 1600 record? He was making sure he was going to get his teammates on top of that same podium.

Goosebumps. 

Flashback:

The night before our first 4 x 800 state title (Friday evening after prelims 2015) was probably one of the biggest turning points in my coaching career in deciding to go for it one more time rather than allow the Torpys to do their thing as juniors in individual events.

The following is an excerpt from John O’Malley’s 2015 4 x 800 Champions Manual. The passage speaks of vulnerability, heartbreak, and having the audacity to take a leap of faith. If anyone thinks it’s easy to substitute relay members from Sectional to State or prelims to finals, you’ve never been there.

For years my wife and I had chosen not to have children. We’d always loved kids, always thought it was a great choice, but we were going to do different things with our lives. “The world doesn’t need my child,” I’d always argue. On some level, I realize now that I didn’t think I was really worth replicating.

It was a safer choice not to have children too. Children make you vulnerable. You can tolerate things happening to you but you can’t tolerate pain for your children. I didn’t need kids to know this. I felt it at meets and practices. I felt it with nieces and nephews.  Yet, somehow we arrived at the decision in 2014 to create. Create a life. And we did. However, one day along the way, we lost our unborn child. I found out moments before a cross country practice. The feeling hadn’t left me as I sat there in the Charleston hotel room. Going all in, taking a leap of faith and then it being snatched from our grasp. It still hurt.

 So the decision not to go all in on the track felt good on many levels for me. (The decision had been made to run the Torpys in their individual events and NOT sub them into the 4×8.) 

Yet something didn’t sit well.  I sought out silence in my hotel room in order to find my thoughts. This wasn’t our style. And I realized we were operating on fear. So, the night before the 2015 state track meet, I explained to the boys my personal feelings. I explained to them too that Mrs. Coach was pregnant again and that taking that leap of faith again does make you vulnerable to potentially being hurt again. But we choose to be vulnerable because that’s where we find our greatness. That is where we create.

So, we went all in. The Torpys would be inserted into the 4×8 lineup, the two other best times from prelims—Brennan and Lukas—would race with them.

+++

When talking politics with John, I once referenced Springsteen’s “Waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets”, and told him he should run for President and I would be his campaign manager. He thought I was joking.

John O’Malley was not a world-class runner. John O’Malley has never been to Hayward Field at the University of Oregon. Coaching is only 10% of John’s job as an educator. He teaches English five times a day. He reads and reads and reads. John O’Malley has two preschool kids at home and a wife who was a theater major and U2 fan in college.

Where does this otherworldly wisdom come from?

I spent as much time trying to find a title to this piece as I did writing the thing. I first considered referencing our Knox connection. You see, Knox has a one word Latin motto, Veritas (truth). Knox is a liberal arts college. Most people don’t know what the hell that means. A liberal arts education includes core classes in many areas of study, like math, science, literature, and even fine arts. Back at Knox in 1980, I took a course on Thyallophytes (algae, fungi, bacteria, and lichen). During that same trimester, I studied Buddhism. John O’Malley once took “The Biography of Martin Luther King” and John Lewis was a guest speaker. Stephen Colbert was the Knox commencement speaker in 2006. Barack Obama spoke the year before, Bill Clinton the year after.

 “I’m a huge fan of the liberal arts approach of teaching you to think, analyze, and communicate, then sending you out into the world to cause trouble.” – Hilary Mason

Seems to me Knox College served us well. The title of this project was almost, “The Value of a Liberal Arts Education: Inside John O’Malley”.

I also considered using a line from my favorite song, “Windfall” (by Son Volt). “Never Seem to Get Far Enough, Staying In-Between the Lines.” Maybe too wordy, but I wanted a title that described John’s divergent thinking and his ultra-competitive nature.

“I’m bored if there’s not a threat of failure.” – John O’Malley.

I told John and his assistant, Tom Novak, about the possibility of the Windfall title. Tom, being a music connoisseur from the golden age of music, loved it. Tom said (and I may be paraphrasing here), “If you stay between the lines, it’s always crowded. There’s always a traffic jam in front of you.” Yep, there you go. It might be safer to stay between the lines, but you may not get far enough. You can be like conventional coaches and keep repeating “trust the process”, cover your locker-room walls with motivational posters about “the grind”, and lecture kids on “grit”. You can play it safe and run a copycat program. You can then blame failure on the athlete. Divergent thinking is a bold, creative, risky process. Getting outside the mainstream may be scary as hell, but you may never get far enough staying in-between the lines.

For the title, I settled for the simplicity of “Divergent Thinking: Inside John O’Malley”.

I’ve spent at least 100 hours on this project. I’ve immersed myself in all things O’Malley. Part of me thinks I’ve sold this project short. It should have been my first book.

I recently read about Heath Ledger’s preparation for playing The Joker (after playing pretty-boy roles in previous films). Heath Ledger locked himself in a hotel room, isolated himself from the outside world (including his own family) took prescription drugs by the bucket load and descended into a complete personal hell in order to really encapsulate the anarchy that comes with playing The Joker.

In writing this article, I didn’t go to the extremes of Heath Ledger. However, I did start every morning run since June 27th listening to the Rattle and Hum version of “Bad” by U2 (John O’Malley’s favorite U2 song). I’ve turned the song into a musical time trial for me. Every morning I’ve attempted to complete my first mile before the song ends at 7:54. It took me 18 days but I finally ran a “U2 Bad” mile.

There’s something poetic about a 59-year-old cat running a “U2-Bad-Mile”.

THINK DIVERGENTLY!

Tony Holler
Head Track Coach
Plainfield North H.S.
tony.holler@yahoo.com
Twitter: @pntrack