On the night before the national championship our team had been building toward for five years, there was only one thing left to do.
Buy a tent.
It was December 3, 2021. The boys of California’s Newbury Park High School cross country squad, the top-ranked high school cross country team in the United States, were eating a carb-loading dinner at an Airbnb in Huntsville, Alabama. The next morning, at a park in the city, was the RunningLane Cross Country Championships. Months earlier, when a meet in Oregon that had long determined the best team of distance runners in the United States had been canceled over COVID-19 concerns, coaches such as me had scrambled to find another race to settle who was the nation’s best. The best teams agreed that RunningLane would be this season’s new de facto title stage.
The runners, their parents, and I arrived in Huntsville two days before the race, and since we’d left Newbury Park, our Los Angeles suburb, I’d gone through a mental checklist to make sure we had everything we’d need on race day.
We had experience.
This national meet would not be our first.
We had speed.
Any one of our top four runners — senior Colin Sahlman, who had a laid-back surfer personality and an explosive closing kick; his younger brother Aaron, a junior with huge potential but inconsistent; and twin juniors Lex and Leo Young, the younger brothers of a national champion, who had become stars on and off the track because of their speed and social media presence — could have been the best runner on any other team in the country.
We had the attention of the running world.
Our state titles, national records, and unprecedented times had been written about by every track and field magazine and website. Our accomplishments were celebrated and argued over. Judging by what you read in online running forums, I was either the greatest or worst thing to happen to high school running. Our runners’ social media accounts were followed by thousands because our runners ran times so fast that they changed expectations for how fast teenagers could be. Only a few weeks earlier, in November, while running in the most competitive division in the most competitive state in the country, we had achieved statistical perfection. Even people who had no idea about running were taking notice.
I went down my checklist again. We had everything we needed — with one exception. And so, as the boys ate dinner at the house with their parents, I left with my wife, Tanya, to shop for a pair of pop-up tents.
When Newbury Park’s cross country teams showed up to meets during my first year at the school, in 2016, we might as well have been anonymous. And for good reason. Five decades after our school opened its doors just off Highway 101 northwest of L.A., it had produced almost zero success in distance running.
Over the next five years, things changed. A lot.
When our runners arrived at meets, fans mobbed them for selfies. Even their competitors asked them for autographs — before races.
The need for a tent, then, was partly practical. Our athletes not only needed a dry place to store their gear but also a space in which to retreat and focus before the starting gun, away from the autograph- and selfie-seekers and the spotlight their success had created. But never before had we faced the kind of attention we would the next morning, December 4, in Huntsville’s John Hunt Park.
The day before, the boys began the warm-up that was our custom before every race. We started with the rope-assisted stretching I’d learned from my unorthodox journey observing top coaches. Then the boys ran the course— the first mile very slowly, the second mile a little faster, and the last mile not at true race pace, but at a good tempo. They finished drills to practice running form, then ran 800-meter strides, their legs turning over with the speed they would need to burst off the starting line and beat hundreds of other runners to the front of the pack. Conditions were perfect — blue skies, temperatures approaching the seventies, the brown grass under our feet feeling firm and fast. I ran half of the 5,000-meter, or 3.1-mile, course with them and they did the rest.
When the season began earlier in the fall, I thought our top five runners could average a time of 14 minutes, 30 seconds, a pace of 4:40 per mile. But as the season went on and Newbury Park broke records left and right, I realized that wasn’t fast enough. In the history of high school cross country, the 5K record was 14:10. It had stood for twenty years. If things played out like I believed they could, I thought our top four could all break that national record, and the times of our top five could average under 14:20.
Our strategy had two parts, because we weren’t only racing the other hundreds of runners in the race but the runners whose records were still on the books from decades earlier. I wanted our team to run the first mile in 4:30 and keep pushing in the second mile to drop as many competitors as possible. Then they needed to go all out over the last mile to chase down records. Over the years, I have been asked many times about the secrets behind Newbury Park’s success, how we’d gone from being just another high school team to pulling off accomplishments no other school had. Running fast is not just about knowing when to program a workout of seven repeats of one kilometer. Anyone can figure out how to schedule an easy day, a long run, and an interval. But no one believed they could run fast quite like Newbury Park’s runners.
This success wasn’t just the result of two fast families, as many coaches and critics claimed. Our speed went deep down the roster because, slowly but eventually, our runners had bought into the philosophy that our fastest could always be faster. It wouldn’t have happened without the right environment. During our months of training, that meant creating an atmosphere around our team in which we believed anything was possible. So it didn’t matter what was being said about us by outside voices, because inside our literal and figurative tent, we believed.
It was why one of the first things I did that Friday morning, one day before the RunningLane championships, was stake out a good location within John Hunt Park for our tent. This was a relatively new meet and didn’t have an area roped off for competitors only; if we wanted to pull off the kind of performance I thought we could, we would need our own space, where the boys could focus beforehand, away from distractions. At a big-box store in town, Tanya and I found a pair of tents that were each eight by ten feet. We’d push them together the next morning to create a mini-compound.
The tents were brown, not the black and gold that everyone had come to know Newbury Park by. But the tents had what was most important to me —zippered-on walls that would keep our biggest fans, biggest critics, and selfie-seekers out. We didn’t need anyone from the outside interrupting plans that were years in the making. I knew something big was going to happen on race day. We’d gotten this far because of the extreme belief that we could always run faster — and harder. Why stop now? The question wasn’t whether we could win a national championship. It was whether we could do something no one had ever seen.
Copyright © 2025 by Sean Brosnan, Andrew Greif, and Chris Lear. From Beyond Fast by Sean Brosnan, Andrew Greif, and Chris Lear, published by Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
