Photo By: Carter Sherline/Frog Prince Studios
"It's all exciting. Everything is wonderful," says Ron Warhurst, standing on the University of Michigan track, a hard rain falling on a 45-degree day in early April. Rain or not, for Warhurst these days, life IS wonderful. Having quit smoking, ended his long nights in local pubs and returned to running five or six days a week, he is in fighting trim and in better shape than any time since he ran for Western Michigan University cross-country teams that won national titles in 1964 and '65. He's been happily married for two years, too, and at 59 is about to become a first-time father; Warhurst will gladly miss the Penn Relays for the first time in 30 years to be home when his wife, Kalli, gives birth. Last but not least, as U-M track and cross-country mentor, Warhurst is coaching some of the fastest, hottest, biggest names in a 29-year career of coaching fast, hot, big names. Running Times magazine did a cover spread on "Warhurst's Warriors" in its May issue, and Runner's World magazine editor Amby Burfoot says his firm will soon ink a deal for a book on Warhurst, his program and star runners. Stars? In recent month, the coterie has included:

* Paul McMullen, last year's top U.S. miler, deemed by Runner's World as the No. 1 American at 2001 world championships in Edmonton, where he made the 1,500-meter finals. * Kevin Sullivan, Canadian record holder in the mile, 1995 and '97 NCAA indoor mile champion, and NCAA outdoor champ in 1995. (McMullen, then a student at Eastern Michigan, finished runnerup that year.) * Alan Webb, the schoolboy phenom who broke four minutes for the mile indoors last winter, then shattered Jim Ryun's 36-year-old outdoor prep record with a 3:53.43 last summer. (Webb went on to shock a lot of folks by winning the Big Ten cross-country crown as a freshman. He followed that by placing 11th at nationals last fall.) * Nate Brannen, another frosh phenom and the second Canadian prepster to run a sub-4:00 mile (Sullivan was the first). Brannen, versatile and fast, ran 800 meters at last year's world-championship track meet. * Tim Broe, a post-collegian and, lately, the hottest runner on U.S. roads or tracks. Broe aims to break Henry Marsh's long-standing U.S. steeplechase record this spring or summer.

Hot? In January, Broe won a $25,000 bonus at the adidas Boston Indoor Games when he broke Steve Scott's 1989 3,000-meter record, posting a 7:39:23. The next day, Broe ran a 3:58 mile at the Armory in New York. On April 6, he won the U.S. 8K championships in Central Park with the fifth-fastest time ever run by an American. Big? Up there with the biggest. On April 9, at the fabled New York Athletic Club, Webb - accompanied by Warhurst - watched figure-skater Michelle Kwan win the James E. Sullivan Award. Webb was one of five finalists for the honor, given the nation's top amateur athlete for 2001. Munching on an apple during a limo ride to airport the next morning, Webb didn't sound the least disappointed: "It was nice to be nominated," the U-M freshman said. Fast, hot and big is getting faster, hotter and bigger. Just after returning from New York, Warhurst announced that Nick Willis of New Zealand, a 4:01 high-school miler, will come to Ann Arbor in June to start training with the others. Willis will join the Wolverine team this fall.

* * * Broe is taking advantage of a rare nice day in early April to shag golf balls at the Lake Forest Golf Club driving range in Ann Arbor. If he shags enough balls, they let him play a free round. His fiancee, pro golfer Vanessa Bell, is on the Future's Tour of the Ladies Professional Golf Association. They met when they were both at the University of Alabama. Broe puts shagging on hold to answer a call about Warhurst, and to explain why he moved from warm Alabama to Michigan to train. Broe credits Warhurst with helping his golf game - not improving his game, but in helping Broe to accept it. "I'm a golf nut, but I suck at it," says Broe. "I used to get mad until Ronnie said, 'You know you suck, so what're you getting mad about?'" Broe graduated from Alabama in 2000, the year he missed making the U.S. Olympic team in steeplechase by less than .1 second. He and Sullivan have the same agent, who suggested that Broe, who was coaching himself, call Warhurst. "I'd never heard of him," says Broe. In early 2001 they set up a meeting. "As soon as I met Ronnie," says Broe, "I knew I was coming to Michigan. He's so excitable. He has so much energy. You just hear it in his voice." Sullivan, who recruited Brannen as a volunteer U-M assistant coach, also remembers hitting it off right away with Warhurst. "We clicked from the start," says Sullivan, who now makes his living from appearance fees, prize money and a shoe sponsorship. "I had complete trust and confidence in his coaching. He was willing to listen to me and what had worked for me in high school. That was important." Broe also was impressed by Warhurst's modesty. He didn't name off the string of All-Americans he'd coached. "He didn't toot his own horn," Broe remembers. "Most coaches would say, 'I coached this guy and I coached that guy.'" Warhurst did allow that he'd trained a guy who'd won a bronze in the steeple at the '84 Olympics: Brian Diemer, a three-time Olympian who captained the U.S. track team during the 1992 Games in Barcelona. Broe came up to Ann Arbor for a couple months on a trial basis last summer, crashing with friends. Within a month, he set a 7:48 PR at 3,000 meters, then won the U.S. 4K cross-country championship. Neither, says Broe, was a coincidence. Warhurst gave him the confidence to train harder, and Broe's ability to do workouts gave him the confidence to race harder.

"At first I thought, 'There's no way I can do this,'" Broe remembers. "Then you do, and you think that anything is possible." In January 2002, Broe and Bell returned to Ann Arbor: this time to stay. Late in March, Broe did his first official "Michigan," Warhurst's workout of champions, on a cold, windy day. "It was nasty," says Broe. "It was also one of the best workouts I have done. Before you do it, it's like, 'This sucks!' But afterward, it's like, 'My running is going great!'" A few days later, on April 6, Broe won the U.S. 8K title race, beating a deep field in New York City's Central Park. Never a kicker before, Broe ran 59.2 for his last 400 meters to pull away from Dan Browne, Anthony Famiglietti and pre-race favorite Abdi Abdirahman. His time of 22:26 was the fifth fastest ever by an American, achieved despite a windy, "slow-running" day.

* * *

The "Michigan." It'll make you or break you. Or, make you AND break you. Break your spirits ahead of time, thinking about it if you're faint of heart. Make you a powerhouse, or at least let you think you are, once you are done. If you want to find out what your limits are - how good you could have been - U-M is the place to go. Warhurst runs kids hard. He believes in running hard to race hard. No one ends a career there wondering "What if ..." When it works, he ends up with Greg Meyers, Brian Diemers and John Scherers (three-time Big Ten champ, class of 1989). But the line between kicking butt and breaking it can be thin. Sullivan is one of the success stories, and one of the best in the world. He also spent more than a month this winter running in a pool, though it was bumping and stumbling during an indoor meet in England in February, not grueling workouts, that caused his piriformis injury. Brannen ran the eighth-fastest mile during qualifying heats at the NCAA indoor championships, but missed the start of the outdoor season with a stress fracture in his foot. He joined Sullivan in the pool. Webb missed the indoor campaign and start of the outdoor season with Achilles tendinitis. ("Nate's got the broken foot, Sully's got the broken butt, and I've got the broken head," jokes Warhurst.) And Broe beat his own expectations and everyone he saw on the roads or track. What's the "Michigan"? Try this someday: It is hard, fast intervals of 1,600 meters, 1,200 meters, 800 meters and 400 meters. But instead of a recovery jog, you go out between intervals and run a mile at 10K race pace. That's 4,000 meters of speed work interspersed with three miles at race pace. Then there's the "Harvard," named not for the school but for a dead-end street not far from the U-M track. Warhurst loves to get kids out on the road or into nearby parks. Harvard Street is 300 meters long; very, very steep. Six or eight repeats there are a nice set-up for a return to the track, for 10 or 12 fast quarters. Another signature workout is the Arb Hill in Ann Arbor's Nichols Arboretum, adjacent to campus. The hill in question is 1,000 meters of steep, twisting dirt-road incline up from the Huron River to a gate at the other end of the park. Monday is often Arb Hill Repeat Day. In nearly three decades of time trials on that brutal hill, with hundreds of runners doing it tens of thousands of times, Sullivan held the all-time Michigan Arb Hill record of 3:16.

When Webb came to Michigan and began working out with Sullivan and McMullen, both grown men hardened by years of training and competition, people feared the boy might not be able to keep up. As it turned out, the boy wasn't ... a boy, that is. And no one need have worried about whether Alan Webb could keep up. Warhurst says he will never forget the day last fall when Webb did four Arb Hill repeats in 3:15, 3:13, 3:14 and 3:09. He'd broken Sullivan's record four times in one day. "He's a piece of work," Warhurst says. As McMullen later told Running Times: "Right now, it's inconceivable for Sullivan or I to even attempt to do a workout with (Webb) ... I've watched him for a month and a half, and all I've seen is his intensity go up." (These days, McMullen won't be found with Warhurst's Warriors. He is taking a hiatus from running to cross-train with a new love: kamikaze bike riding. Warhurst says their relationship "was a ball" and hopes McMullen returns. "He's a good kid. Very coachable. You tell him something and his mind locks it in.")

* * * It's a late-March day: the first nice one in months, it seems. Mid-40s, bright sun, cobalt-blue sky. As usual, Webb is the first one on the track. All track runners do butt kicks, leg lifts, stride outs - a variety of drills before they begin their running. Webb does a wider variety, for far longer, than anyone on the team. "He's meticulous," says Warhurst. Webb is grim-faced, very serious. He's rounding into shape after tendinitis, but still a month away from competing. "He thought he'd go straight from 3:53 to 3:46. It doesn't work that way," says Warhurst of the three-steps-forward, one-or-two-back that typifies trying to run at world-class level. Webb is renowned for the intensity of his workouts. He says he put Michigan on his short list of possible schools - he also made visits to Stanford and William & Mary - then made it the winner because of Warhurst's success with middle-distance runners, and the reputation of HIS workouts. It also helped that Webb was born in Ann Arbor and lived three years there. His mom, Katherine, worked at U-M as a speech therapist, and his dad, Steven - now a World Bank senior economist - taught economics at the school. Every day, when Webb warms up on the roads near the U-M track, he runs by the house at Granger and White that he used to live in. "It makes for a nice story," he says. Webb didn't come here for sentiment or nice stories; he came here to run hard, and cannot abide a bad, or merely average, workout. It bugs him that his recent Arb Hill runs haven't matched last fall's. "He's frustrated he can't do the Arb Hill in 3:09," says Warhurst. "When you're 18 or 19, you don't realize there will be setbacks. Then you get a chink in your armor and it starts to rust." Today, Webb and Broe will head out with a handful of others for a brisk-paced 10 miles on the road, then return to the track for drills. The likes of Webb, Brannen and Willis get full-ride scholarships. But with only 12 such awards to give out over four years, and 43 kids on the men's team, a lot of U-M runners are walk-ons, or getting very-partial scholarships. Warhurst will keep half or three-quarters of a scholarship in reserve to reward a walk-on senior for his time and effort. With Sullivan and Brannen in the pool and Broe and Webb on the road, Warhurst can focus on lesser lights, "lesser" in this case being relative. He's got three other freshmen - Tarn Leach of East Jordan, Sean Moore of Saline, and Rondell Ruff of Detroit Mumford - who all ran 4:15 in high school. "That's a pretty good recruiting class, but they've been overshadowed by Nathan and Alan," says Warhurst. "Keep it controlled! Keep it controlled!" he hollers to someone on the other side of the track. A moment later, to someone else as he goes by, "Pump your arms and relax. There you go." And, "Don't reach. Keep your shoulders down." Jason Stover, a tall, thin freshman from Warhurst continues on p. 26. Williamston, finishes his workout and comes over. "Can I do more?" he asks. Warhurst tells him he can do four more quarters, and times Stover while being interviewed, hollering splits at the end of each quarter. A week and a half later, the sun is a distant memory. A steady cold rain is falling and has been all day. A group of seven or eight go out to run repeats on Harvard Street, followed by 10 quarters indoors. Most of the team runs indoors today. Not Webb. He's coming off a 70-mile week, very high for him, and today is his first serious speed work since tendinitis. The plan is to run four 400s in 61 seconds each, with a 100 jog/walk recovery; then run four 400s in 60 seconds with a 200 recovery, then finish with four 400s in 59 seconds with 300 recoveries. The quarters start in different parts of the track; Warhurst trots across the wet infield to holler out splits and encouragement during the workout. 60.7 "Way to go Webb-ster." 61.5 "Looking smooth." 61. "Rhythm. Rhythm. Nice, nice." Coming down the last 100 of a 59.8 "Give it lift. Get a lift. Nice. VERY NICE!" And, finally, 59.44 "Excellent. WHOOEY!" Webb comes over, grouses about the workout not being to his liking, too hard, too slow. They take his pulse, then head indoors, both soaked. The next day, they'll fly to New York to find out if Webb was the nation's best amateur athlete in 2001. (He was, but voters voted for Kwan instead.)

* * * More than a thread of continuity runs through Warhurst's 29 years at Michigan. The fabric of his life is deeply woven in continuity. Mike McGuire, his first All American, winner of the 1981 Free Press marathon, is the women's distance coach at Michigan. Greg Meyer, another of Warhurst's All-Americans who went on to win the Boston Marathon, is back in Ann Arbor, working for the university in fund-raising and community relations. Meyer and his wife invited Ron and Kalli for a quiet dinner at their house the day after Broe won the 8K championship. It turned out to be anything but quiet - it was a surprise baby shower. Among the celebrants was Red Simmons, the legendary U-M track coach who preceded Warhurst and still runs races now in his 90s. Simmons founded the also-legendary Michigammes track club for Ann Arbor-area girls in the '60s, before Title IX, before young women had opportunities to compete. His first runner, Francie Kraker, ended up a two-time Olympian. Another runner was Kalli, Warhurst's wife. "I figure I've got 10 to 11 years left to coach," says Warhurst. "I figure I'll get out when the kids tell me it's time. The NCAA rules and administrators give me gray hair. The kids give me joy." "With that baby coming, he won't be able to quit till he's 80," Sullivan declares. MR