Interview with Josh Moen

By Kevin Beck

Josh Moen, 26, has come a long way since high school, when he’d never heard of tabulating weekly mileage. As a freshman at Wartburg College in Iowa, Moen was 125th out of 211 finishers at the NCAA Division III National Cross Country Championship. The next year he dropped out after he was spiked early in the race, but that spelled the end of his troubles on college turf. Moen won the D-III nationals as a junior by an astounding 29 seconds, leading Wartburg to a fifth-place team finish; he successfully defended his title as a senior, winning by 13 seconds. Moen also won three national championships in outdoor track, running off with the 5000-meter crown as a junior and taking both the 5K and the 10K as a senior. When all was said and done,he collected 10 collegiate All-America honors.

Moen joined the Hanson-Brooks Distance Project shortly after graduating three years ago, and has shown steady improvement as a professional athlete. Moen amicably parted ways with the Hansons group last summer, and now trains on his own in Readlyn, IA (population: 800). Moen was eighth at the USA 8K Championships in New York City in March (23:14) and fourth at the USA 10K Championships in Richmond, VA, in April (29:15). On May 4, Moen ran a personal-best 28:31.08 at the Payton Jordan Cardinal Invitational at Stanford University.

The NYRR spoke with Moen about his proximate and ultimate goals as he prepared for the Healthy Kidney 10K road race in New York City on May 17.

New York Road Runners: It’s an Olympic year; are you feeling in good shape for the Trials?

Josh Moen: Ideally I’ll be able to run the 10,000 meters, but right now I think I’m ranked 31st and they only take the top 24, so I have to wait and see who enters and who doesn‘t. If I don’t get in, I’ll run the Peachtree [10K road race on July 4 in Atlanta].

NYRR: This year you’ve raced mainly in the 8K to 10K range, and you’ve not only consistently been a top-10 performer in deep, quality road fields but have also set a PR for 10,000 meters on the track. Do you see the 10K as your event of focus for the next few years?

JM: I’m ready to start moving up. The 10K is definitely my best track distance. I really liked the one half-marathon I did [1:04:37 in Houston in January 2007]. I look forward to moving all the way up to the marathon in the next couple of years.

NYRR: You’ve made some pretty phenomenal performance jumps in your career. Is that the kind of thing you keep in the forefront of your mind when you line up against sub-28 guys?

JM: I realize that they’re not continually in that shape. Everyone is fallible at some point. I’m an opportunist.

NYRR: Are you being coached right now? What about training partners?

JM: Steve Johnson, my college coach, is coaching me. I do some easy runs with the team, but the quality stuff, the fast workouts, I do alone.

NYRR: What are you goals and expectations for this weekend’s race?

JM: I’d like to run about 28:30–for some reason I can usually run as fast on the roads as I can on the track. I’d also like to crack the top three for sure.

NYRR: Your first impact as a pro was probably at the 2006 Steamboat Classic 4-Mile, where you hung with some big names right to the finish and wound up second. Was that experience what you’d call transforming?

JM: Steamboat was just a really good race. You nail one like that and you think right afterward, “Wow, that was unusually good,” but then you sit down, think about what transpired, and realize the result came because you stuck your neck out and gave it your all. I learned that day, “Hey, I can really do this.” You have to put in the work ahead of time, but you also have to take some sensible risks during the race itself.

NYRR: In high school you were injury-prone, with some stress fractures and other problems, despite being a 20-miles-a-week kid. How is it, do you think, that you managed to increase the intensity and volume of your training and put the injury bug behind you at the same time?

JM: I graduated high school in a class of maybe 55 people. We didn’t have a knowledgeable coach—he meant well, but we had no clue what we were doing. Even the concept of keeping track of mileage was foreign until college. I’m not kidding.

When I got to Wartburg, the big thing was that I learned a lot about stretching. I also made sure recovery runs were truly easy.

NYRR: In college, you topped out at 70-80 miles a week. Have you increased that since graduating?

JM: Yeah, I’m at about 85 to 90 now. That’s a whole-year average—a lot are over 100.

NYRR: Assuming getting to the Olympics is a priority for you, do you see 2008 or 2012 as your best shot?

JM: 2012. Definitely.

NYRR: Past interviews suggest that you’ve made good use of what psychology types call “positive self-talk”—encouraging yourself to cast aside doubts and focus on what’s going on right at any particular moment rather than worry about what, or who, might be coming at you.

JM: Yeah, I think it’s a real big positive. I picked it up different from people along the way. Sometimes you get a revelation when you’re running, and you file it away for later. Say there’s a mile to go and a group is still together. Obviously not everyone in the group is feeling good. Maybe no one is, including me. But it’s worth putting in a surge to see who‘s going to race you.

I’m always paying attention to the people around me, and asking things like, are they looking around or back, or spitting a lot, or looking worried, or breathing especially hard. When these things happen. I smell blood and I can tell when they’re out of it. That’s when I try to leave ‘em behind.

NYRR: When you started college, did you figure on making competitive running a priority after graduating? If not, when did this first appear realistic and desirable?

JM: Not at all. Going into my senior year, I had no plans to keep it up, but then I ran the USATF club cross country cationals and came in fifth. I was like, whoa. I sat down with my coach and started looking further ahead, beyond just college.

Basically, my idea is that you live once and if you have a talent for something, you should pursue it. You have your whole life to work. I decided I’d take a few years and run, and it‘s working out for me okay. For now I do some substitute teaching, and I want to both teach and coach someday, and pass on the excitement that I‘ve been lucky to have since high school.

Interview conducted May 13, 2008, and posted May 15, 2008.