SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — For decades, tourists have come to this south Orange County town each March to celebrate the return of the swallows to Mission San Juan Capistrano, the nearly 250-year-old stone church that is the birds’ landing spot after a 6,000-mile flight from Goya in northern Argentina.
In recent years, March has seen another migratory pattern to San Juan Capistrano that has also attracted global attention.
America’s best distance runners and world-class athletes from around the planet flock to The Ten, a high-performance distance carnival at J Serra High School, less than five minutes up via Camino Capistrano from the Mission, and the promise of ideal race conditions to reach Olympic Games, Olympic Trials or World Championships qualifying standards in the 5,000-, 1,500- and especially 10,000-meter runs.
The star of Fast Times at J Serra High has been Grant Fisher, American distance running’s leading man.
At The Ten in 2022, the former NCAA champion at Stanford shattered the American record at 10,000 with a 26-minute, 33.84-second clocking, the fastest time ever run by a man born outside of Africa. In his slipstream that night, runners from Canada, Australia and Scotland also broke their national 10,000 records.
Fisher again headlines The Ten on Saturday night, the fastest seed in a field of 36 runners from 16 countries that includes nine Olympians, 10 World Championships participants and Northern Arizona’s Nico Young, the former Newbury Park High star who last week swept the NCAA indoor 3,000 and 5,000 titles.
Fisher has set six American records at four distances since February 2022. But as Fisher, 26, enters this Olympic season in the prime of his career, he is not focused on the clock.
“It’s not about chasing time,” he said. “It’s about chasing medals.”
As in medals in the 10,000 and/or 5,000 at the Olympic Games in Paris later this summer.
A generation ago, Fisher’s comments would have been considered laughable, given the U.S. men’s nearly 50-year absence from the Olympic medal stand in the 5,000 or 10,000 between 1964 and 2012. But with a résumé that includes a fifth-place finish in the Olympic Games 10,000 in Tokyo, fourth place in the 10,000 at the 2022 World Championships in Eugene, Oregon, and an 8:03.62 2 mile at the Millrose Games last month, the third-fastest time ever recorded indoors, few if any would dispute Fisher’s status as bona fide medal contender at 5,000 and 10,000 in Paris.
“I’ve been really close to getting a medal but have never got one,” Fisher said referring to the Olympic Games and World Championships. “The margin is so small” between fourth or fifth and medaling “that you have to optimize everything you can to get to that level.”
Big move
Closing that gap, Fisher said, is what ultimately led to his decision in October to leave the Bowerman Track Club, the Nike-funded, Eugene-based high-performance training group that had been his home since he turned pro in June 2019, a move that shocked U.S. track.
“I’m sure to some people on the outside it looked like a risky decision,” Fisher said. “And to some people it might have looked like a risky decision if I had decided to stay.”
Fisher’s departure is but one in a series of high-profile exits from BTC in recent months, leaving the U.S. sport transfixed and raising questions about the future of the most successful American training group this decade. Courtney Frerichs, the Olympic silver medalist in the 3,000 steeplechase, Elise Cranny, the American record-holder at 5,000 indoors, and rising star Cooper Teare have also recently left the group.
Earlier, Matthew Centrowitz, the 2016 Olympic 1,500 champion, and Olympians Gabriela DeBues-Stafford, Woody Kincaid and Marc Scott left BTC.
DeBues-Stafford, a Canadian, left the club in April complaining about the continued connection of Shelby Houlihan, the American record-holder in the 1,500 and 5,000, with BTC despite being banned for doping. Houlihan was banned for four years in June 2021 after testing positive for a banned anabolic steroid.
“Last summer, a fellow athlete received an anti-doping ban, and this event was deeply upsetting,” DeBues-Stafford wrote on social media. “I have said this publicly before that learning this news in mid-June almost derailed my Olympics. It was a small miracle that I showed up in Tokyo in shape to run sub 4 twice in 48 hours and place 5th. Going into the fall, I did my best to put this event behind me, and focus on all of the positives this group has to offer, as I truly did and do love this team. However this event and its ongoing aftermath continued to be a major distraction and stress for me. For the sake of my athletic performance and mental health, I needed to move on.”
Other BTC members were upset with Nike’s decision to move the group from the company’s world headquarters in Beaverton to Eugene so BTC head coach Jerry Schumacher could also coach the University of Oregon’s cross-country and track teams. Some BTC members complained about having to relocate from the affluent Portland suburbs to a small college town or that Schumacher, now coaching two teams, wasn’t able to devote as much time to the pro group as he had before the move.
“It was a very hard decision. I had a lot of success there,” Fisher said of BTC. “I’m friends with all the guys there still. It was a difficult decision leaving friends behind.
“Things had been working great.”
Coming up short
A medal was within reach July 30, 2021, with 200 meters to go in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics 10,000 final, but Fisher couldn’t respond when Ethiopia’s Selemon Barega, the eventual winner, broke the race open around the final curve. Still, Fisher’s fifth-place finish seemed to promise even bigger things.
He became the first American to break 13 minutes for the 5,000 indoors the following winter, taking nearly eight seconds off Galen Rupp’s previous standard with a 12:53.73 race in Boston. A few weeks later, Fisher running in The Ten knocked nearly 11 seconds off Rupp’s eight-year old American record at 10,000 to become, at 26:33.84, the seventh-fastest man in history.
That summer, Fisher was fourth at the Worlds 10,000 and then appeared headed for a medal in the Worlds 5,000 final until he got tangled up with BTC training partner Mohammed Ahmed of Canada with 120 meters remaining, nearly tripping and then, having lost his momentum, fading to sixth place. Before the season was over, Fisher added the outdoor 3,000 (7:28.48) and 5,000 (12:46.96) to his American record collection.
But Fisher struggled to a fourth-place finish in the U.S. Championships 10,000 in July. An MRI taken after the race revealed a stress injury to his femur.
“The injury took out a really important chunk of the season,” he said. “I was very dejected. The MRI was right after the 10K, so I had to pull out of the 5K. The doctors I talked to said, ‘Yeah, your season is over.’”
Yet despite being limited to cross training for several weeks, Fisher broke his American record at 3,000, running 7:25.47 for third place at the Prefontaine Classic, the Diamond League final in Eugene in September, finishing ahead of Olympic 10,000 gold medalist Barega.
“It showed myself that even missing out on a [chunk] of training I could still compete with those guys,” Fisher said. “It was encouraging, proving to myself that I was still ready to compete with the big guys.”
His determination to find the little things that would enable him to beat the big guys was the tipping point in his decision to leave BTC a month later.
“It was a very, very hard decision,” Fisher said. “It’s tough to say. When you speak to each individual about why they made the change, I think they would all have a slightly different explanation. Some wanted freedom in living where they wanted. Some wanted freedom in training.
“For me I wanted a little more control over my training, when I go to altitude, when I race.”
Chasing a dream
Fisher relocated to Park City, Utah, and it’s 7,000-foot elevation, although much of his training build-up in recent weeks has taken place in Flagstaff with track workouts in Cottonwood, Arizona. Fisher has resumed training with Mike Scannell, his coach at Michigan’s Grand Blanc High School. Cottonwood is roughly halfway between Flagstaff and Phoenix, where Scannell now lives.
“It’s definitely been an adjustment,” Fisher said. “Still I think it’s worked out quite well.”
Fisher opened his Olympic season Feb. 11 at New York’s Millrose Games, out front, driving the pace in the two-mile in a relentless style reminiscent of the late Steve Prefontaine, not yielding to Josh Kerr, the reigning World 1,500 champion from Great Britain and Scotland, until the final 300 meters. Fisher held on long enough behind Kerr’s world-record 8:00.67 to become the third-fastest man ever at the distance, just missing dipping under the previous world record of 8:03.40 set by Mo Farah, the only man this century to win the Olympic 5,000 and 10,000 titles in back-to-back Games.
Five days later, Fisher narrowly missed reclaiming the American indoor 5,000 record from Kincaid with a 12:51.84 victory in Boston.
“I was really happy with that race,” Fisher said referring to the two-mile. “I was really happy with the indoor season as a whole. It’s good to rub shoulders with Josh, who’s a really strong, powerful guy. But both of us have our sights set on bigger things later in the summer.”
To put Fisher’s two-mile into further perspective, consider who now sits beneath him on the all-time list: Ethiopia’s Kenesia Bekele (8:04.35), the three-time Olympic and five-time World champion; Haile Gebrselassie (8:04.69), a two-time Olympic champion and four-time World champion; Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj (8:06.61), holder of the world 1,500 and mile records for the past quarter-century; and Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge (8:07.39), the two-time Olympic marathon gold medalist.
Fisher’s performance was one of the highlights in an indoor season that further established the U.S. middle- and long-distance as global force. Until Rupp claimed the silver medal behind training partner Farah in the 2012 Olympic 10,000 in London, the American men had not won a medal in the 5,000 and 10,000 since 1964 and hadn’t even placed in the top eight in an Olympic 10,000 in eight consecutive Games. Four years later in Rio de Janeiro, Centrowitz became the first American to win the Olympic 1,500 title in 108 years.
“Growing up,” Fisher said “you we’re told Americans can’t compete with the East Africans.”
But U.S. middle- and long-distance running has continued to build momentum and depth in recent years. On Running’s Yared Nuguse ran the fourth-fastest mile in history in September, his 3:43.97 coming within less than a second of El Guerrouj’s world record. At the World Indoor Championships earlier this month in Glasgow, American’s Bryce Hoppel won the 800 and Elle St. Pierre the 3,000 and Team USA finished with seven medals, two more than Ethiopia and Kenya combined.
“The U.S. has raised its level in men’s and women’s middle- and long-distance running,” Fisher said. “Looking back, there might have been one or two guys between the mile and 10,000 who could compete on the world stage.
“Now anyone who makes the (U.S.) team is going to be competitive on the world stage.”
But just being competitive is no longer enough for Fisher. It’s not why he left BTC, not why he fought back to not only salvage but thrive at the end of a season most thought was lost, and not why he stepped out of his comfort zone of the longer distances to take on Kerr last month.
No, the question is whether Fisher can take those final steps to center stage with the whole world watching. Can he not only rub shoulders with the world’s best but beat them? Can he not only share the same page in the record books with the sport’s all-time greats but follow their path to the Olympic medal stand?
Can he do in Paris in August what he’s done in San Juan Capistrano in March, lead a flock of some of the world’s finest all the way across the finish-line home?
For more info on the meet: https://www.soundrunning.run/ten
