Brian Sell's fourth place finish at the Crim 10 Mile was the best by an American since 1991

It's good, early in 2005, to be Brian Sell. Good to have finished a 14-mile run on snow-covered dirt roads near Rochester with your mates on the Hansons-Brooks team.

Good to be drinking strong, hot coffee and scarfing up French toast and sausages in Loui's **okay Country Kitchen downtown while a string of waitresses stops by to, in order, share a joke of the day, ask how training is going and say how amazing it is to see the team out running all the time. (When you're running 120 to 140 miles a week, it doesn't seem as if you are out a lot, you are.)

Good to be 26, good to be one of the best runners in the U.S. coming off a breakthrough season; good to be anxiously awaiting your spring wedding to your college fiancee and a move into quieter, much-neater digs of your own; good to stop by now and then at Clint Verran's house and stare at your new Harley in the garage, the one you only put 110 miles on before winter hit and which you can hear calling your name louder as spring approaches; good to be just one hour short of having the time in the air you need for your pilot's license; good to have banished doubts you did the right thing putting off dental school, to no longer wonder if you really and truly are a professional runner and not some pretender.

Of course, things weren't always so good, and no one could have forgiven you for questioning after you woke up in the medical tent at last year's U.S. Olympic Trials and realized the last few miles hadn't been a bad dream after all; that you really had led the race much of the way, running courageously if a tad foolishly, especially into a strong wind the first 10 miles, only to suffer the embarrassment and pain of marathoning's dreaded mixed metaphor - where the bear jumps on your back, the wheels fall off and everything goes to hell.

Meb Keflezighi and Alan Culpepper catch you and fly by. One teammate, Trent Briney, zips past. Another, Verran, goes by too, as you're off at the roadside, stumbling, bent over sideways, shuffling your feet and arms, trying to continue forward as the world tips left.

"Clint said, 'Come on, Brian, let's get going,' and that's the last thing I remembered," Sell says. Somehow, he stumbled, lurched and hobbled to the finish, fading to 13th in the disappointing time of 2:17:18.

"The next thing I knew, I was in a tent with a towel on me."

Sell could be forgiven for thinking, then, as medical folks attended to him, "That's it. My contract's up next September. I'm hanging up these Brooks and going to dental school. Plaque, gingivitis and decay, here I come!"

But that's all getting ahead of the improbable tale of the former football star who thought he might take up college wrestling and ended up, instead, wrestling Kenyans at Crim and marathon bears in Birmingham, Ala.

Sell was an all-round athlete at Northern Bedford County High in Woodbury, Pa. He ran track, where he showed natural speed with a half-mile best of 1:57 and a mile best of 4:26. He wrestled. But most folks there knew him as the wide receiver for one of the finest small-school football teams in the state. Bedford was a state semifinalist during his senior year.

But not many colleges offer scholarships to football players who weigh 140 pounds, so Sell enrolled at Messiah College, a private, Division III school in Harrisburg, Pa.

He concentrated on studies his first year. He was planning to try out for wrestling next year, but had one of those serendipitous moments that come along sometimes and change lives.

Sell's biology lab partner turned out to be captain of the Messiah cross- country team. As it also turned out, his high-school mile time was 15 seconds slower than Sell's best time.

So Sell promptly went out for cross-country, a sport not offered in his high school, and won each of his first eight meets. "That kind of locked it in for me," he says.

Since he was running so well, and since Messiah cost $30,000 a year, Sell's dad, Edwin, suggested he translate his success into a scholarship somewhere. St. Francis was a Division I school just 35 minutes away. Sell drove over, introduced himself to the coaching staff and was offered a half scholarship to transfer.

At St. Francis, Sell was a 2000 cross country All-American and 2001 track All-American in the 10,000 meters. His coach, Kevin Donner, had coached at the University of Detroit-Mercy and was old friends with Kevin and Keith Hanson. He told Sell about this cool, elite post- collegiate team the brothers were trying to get off the ground.

Sell got in touch, kept the Hansons posted on meets his senior year, and in the summer of 2001, while on his way back from a vacation in Wisconsin, stopped by Rochester to check the new program out.

Driving through Detroit on I-75, Sell had doubts. "I was looking around thinking, 'Where are we going to run? At least I can get some fartleks in by running away from the gangs.'"

Soon, though, he was in Rochester. As he toured Stoney Creek, Bloomer State Park and other havens, Sell was sold. "It was better running terrain than I had at home," he says. He joined the team in September.

"What caught my eye was they were doing high-mileage training. I liked the idea of getting a couple guys with the same mindset doing 120 to 140 miles a week and saying, 'We're going to get results.'

"I did three 100-mile weeks in college my senior year and thought I'd never be able to do more than that," Sell remembers. "But a lot of that was by myself. When you're running with people, it's a lot easier. That 14-miler we did this morning will be a lot easier than the six-miler I'm going to do by myself this afternoon."

The mileage began to pay off. Sell set his 5K PR of 13:59 in January 2002, his 3,000-meter best of 8:07 that March, and 10K PR of 28:36 in April. In 2003, he notched an 8K road PR of 22:57.7 and a half- marathon PR of 1:03:53.

That fall, despite another of those mixed-metaphor fades in Chicago - "I pretty much walked over that last bridge" - he ran 2:19:59 in his first marathon to qualify, by one second, for an all-expenses-paid trip to the U.S. Trials.

In Birmingham, Sell ran one of the most-courageous races any American has every run - a tad dumb, he might admit in retrospect, but performed with the kind of fearlessness that had his coaches cheering. He took off into a fierce wind into town and just kept going, building up a big lead before hitting the three loops in town.

When he went by his parents after a loop and a half, his dad hollered,

"You can win this!" Sell figured that, "Meb and Culpepper (who eventually finished 1-2) would catch me, but I didn't think they'd go by me like they were on rails." They did.

When Briney passed him moments later at mile 22 en route to fourth place and a nine-minute PR of 2:12:35, "the wheels fell off," says Sell. Miles of 5:05 turned into 5:50, 6:00, 7:00, who knows what?

The result was encouraging and shattering. So close, so crashed.

The Hansons' program is high mileage, high expectation, high turnover. It's not designed to offer free housing, a part-time job and coaching to guys who just want to hang with their buddies and enjoy the sport. It's designed to see which successful collegians are ready to make the commitment - and, much more important, the improvement - needed to compete at the national and international level. To compete for spots on Olympic teams. To go to world championships.

Sell's February run in Birmingham told him 2004 might mark his last full year of professional running. Maybe, like others who'd left the program before him, he just wasn't good enough.

His runs the rest of the year told him otherwise. In August, Sell shocked himself and nearly everyone else by finishing fourth at Flint's Crim 10- miler, the first top-five performance by an American there since 1991. Until he got to the finish line, he figured he had to be sixth or seventh, that he must have lost track of a couple Kenyans who had gotten way out ahead of him. No way he could be fourth, not against those guys with those PRs. But he was.

Then came the October Chicago Marathon, where despite another late fade, Sell finished in a very respectable 2:13:18. "I still think I have a 2:10 in me,' he says. "That'll be my breakthrough."

Other goals this year include a 1:02 half-marathon, a top-three finish at the Fifth Third River Bank 25K in May, and another top five at Crim.

Sell says his upcoming marriage will help keep his running on track. He hasn't talked about it with the Hansons yet, but the success he had in 2004 combined with the fact that his wife-to-be, Sarah Eshelman, an intensive-care nurse, is moving here in May, will make signing up for another year in September a no-brainer.

Nothing wrong with the guys he's sharing the Bloomer house with - Josh Eberly, Jacob Frey and Nick Allen - but Sell says he's ready for a change in environment. Thanks to teammate Verran, he'll be able to stay in Rochester. Verran, the investor type, is buying houses in the area. He's agreed to give Sell a break on rent; Sell's agreed to help Verran fix up the dwelling in his spare time.

If there's any time left over after the 140-mile weeks, weekend races, new wife, Harley riding, plane flying and new puppy he's set his heart on.

Yeah, it's good to be 26 and Brian Sell. MR