5 Minutes with Brett Gotcher

By Brian Metzler

Brett Gotcher is the talk of the town this week after running a 2:10:36 debut marathon in Houston on Sunday. That’s the fourth-fastest debut in U.S. history and quickly vaults him to the No. 5 spot among active American marathoners, trailing only Ryan Hall (2:06:18), Abdi Abdirahman (2:08:56), Meb Keflezighi (2:09:15) and Dathan Ritzenhein (2:10:00). Gotcher has been soaring since joining up with coach Greg McMillan in Flagstaff, Ariz. After finishing 11th at the U.S. half marathon championships and 17th in the Olympic trials 10,000m in 2008, Gotcher rebounded last year with a third at the U.S. half marathon championships and a win at the U.S. 20K championships. He had a disappointing performance at the IAAF World Half Marathon Championships in Birmingham, England (64th, 1:05:43), but immersed himself in marathon training shortly thereafter and resurfaced with the best American result since Meb’s win in New York City. We caught up with Gotcher as he was recovering in Flagstaff two days after the race.
Running Times: How long did it take to sink in that you ran 2:10 in your first marathon?
Brett Gotcher: It’s starting to finally sink it. I was kind of just in shock for the first day or so. I’m getting back home now and letting it sink it, and it’s a good feeling. We wanted to be aggressive with it, and I went out in 64:30 or something like that, and that was the plan. I figured on a great day, I could run close to 2:09. And on a great, great day, I think I still could have. But things just kind of fell apart late in the race, but I’m still really happy with it. We weren’t really spouting our mouths off too much but we had an idea of what I was ready to run and that’s around the range of what we were looking at.

RT: How was your training leading up to the marathon?
BG: It was kind of weird this winter because I did most of the training by myself. Trent (Briney) did Cal International so he was on this down time when I was really going for it. And Andy Lemoncello wasn’t quite where I was because he’s running London in April. But we had guys coming out and doing parts of workouts with me and that helped because I like working with those guys quite a bit. But most of my training for the marathon was solo. There were some days that were less than ideal for training with the snow and ice that we had in Flagstaff, but I got down to Sedona a couple of times. There was a really nice woman who let me stay in a little house behind her house and she let me stay there for free. I was there in early December for a week and a half and it really helped, because it was tough to run in Flagstaff.

RT: What kind of mileage were you running?
BG: My peak mileage was about 140 miles per week at the end of November and into early December. I was probably averaging mid-130s through that four- to six-week period. My training was good, but it’s probably the most dinged up I’ve ever been. I don’t know if it was from the weather or from the mileage or from the workouts or what, but it seemed like I would get something fixed and something else would pop up. It was kind of a never-ending process. I saw a massage therapist every other week and the other weeks I would go down to Phoenix to see this guy named John Ball, who is a chiropractic and massage therapist. He’s amazing, kind of a miracle worker. I saw him on Thursday right before I flew to Houston and my calf was really, really bugging me and he fixed it. I didn’t feel it at all the entire weekend.

RT: Was there any one workout where you just new you were ready to run well?
BG: Yes, definitely. We did workouts I had never done before. We did a 15-mile tempo run on a one-way winding road at about 7,000 feet at about 5:10 pace, then two weeks later we did an 18-mile tempo run at about 5:15 pace. Then we did one more 15-miler at 5:07 pace about two weeks out. It felt the easiest and it was by far the fastest. I was feeling good and I knew I was ready.

RT: When was the last time you raced?
BG: My last race was the IAAF World Championship Half Marathon in England. It wasn’t one of my best ones, so I wanted to regroup and just focus on the next one and not rush into the next one. As it turns out, I was averaging faster miles for the marathon than I did in that race. We thought about doing a tune-up race in early December, but a couple of those injury dings popped up so we decided training was the most important thing at that point. If everything was going perfectly, maybe I would have done something, maybe like a 10K. But it didn’t work out and in the end, I was kind of happy. I was really into the training and I didn’t want to break it up.

RT: When did you decide you were going to run a marathon?

BG: The whole reason I moved to Flagstaff was my long-term goal to run the marathon and to do it at the 2012 Olympic trials. So we never really had a plan of when I was going to run it, but in the past year I ran well in the half and the half in Houston went well and the 20K U.S. championships went well, and so it was kind of time. It had been on my mind for a long time and I was itching to get the training going, and finally I felt like ‘OK, now I feel like I’m training.’ And I was thinking ‘this is what I came up here to do.’ So I was really fired up the whole time. I think we’re going to try to run some track races this spring and summer, but I’m a marathon runner now. And the fall is when the big ones are, so that’s the next thing on the horizon.”

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