Interview with Matt Gabrielson

By Duncan Larkin

Matt Gabrielson, 29, is a natural athlete who could have perhaps landed a college scholarship playing football or basketball or even golf. He might then have gone on to succeed in any one of those sports. But he chose the path of a collegiate runner. From 1996 to 2000, running scholarship in hand, Gabrielson attended Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. There, he ran cross country and track and was a five-time Missouri Valley Conference champion.

Gabrielson turned professional runner in 2001 and was one of the original members of Team USA Minnesota. An extremely versatile runner, Gabrielson holds impressive PRs ranging from 3:42.41 for the 1500 meters to 2:19:53 for the marathon. The past three years in a row, he was a member of Team USA at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships.

Gabrielson currently lives and trains in Minneapolis, MN, with fellow Team USA Minnesota standouts Chris Lundstrom, Jason Lehmkuhle, and Andrew Carlson, and is coached by. Team USA Minnesota’s Dennis Barker.New York Road Runners caught up with him as he was finishing up training before the 2008 USA Cross Country Championships, to be held on February 16 in San Diego.

New York Road Runners: How’s the winter weather been treating you so far?

Matt Gabrielson: Pretty good; we just got a little bit of snow.

NYRR: Do you like the snow?

MG: Snow’s good. It was getting a little bit dirty around here with the lack of snow. It was pretty warm today—30 degrees.

NYRR: Why do you consider snow good for running? Do you enjoy the resistance workout nature of it?

MG: Today I made up this loop from my house because I wanted to stay on the roads because they were covered in snow. I thought I was running harder than I was. It does give you resistance. In Minnesota, it’s the soft-surface running. You get a little bedding underneath your feet. It’s kind of nice to get that little bit of extra softness to give your legs a break from the pavement and ice.

NYRR: Your most recent race was the USA Half-Marathon Championships in Houston last month. You were one second off your PR there. I saw that you were disappointed in that performance. In your NYRR journal, you wrote that you felt good in the first 10K.

MG: Yeah, that’s correct. I had higher expectations. I kind of knew going in that based on the shape that Jason [Lehmkuhle] was in that maybe I could run with him, but it was clear to me from the start that that wasn’t going to happen. I was a little bit more conservative. Through 10K, I felt phenomenal. For some reason I just lost a little bit of the mental focus that you need in those longer races. It goes with my personality: I sometimes lose focus on what I’m doing. I want to see the result right away. In distance running sometimes it’s a long-term approach. Going into [the race] I was doing all my workouts with Jason and Andrew [Carlson]. They went hard. I felt like things were going to go well, but they didn’t go as expected.

NYRR: You ran a second off your PR, so it couldn’t have been that bad of a race could it?

MG: Yeah. That’s the thing that I remembered after everything was all said and done and I had let things settle. It wasn’t a total disaster. Sometimes you have these high expectations that aren’t met. You forget about all the good stuff that’s going on.

NYRR: I suppose it happens to every elite runner; they just don’t run what they wanted to run and thought they could run and then suddenly, later on, they have a breakthrough race.

MG: You are so right. You never know when it’s going to happen. The reason the race was the most disappointing was I finally had for myself a good track season towards the end of it in Europe [last summer]. I had opted out of the Olympic Marathon Trials. I had a pretty good fall training segment. I was just ready to go and ready to have a breakthrough race.

NYRR: Did you opt out of the Olympic Marathon Trials just to focus your training specific to the Half-Marathon Championships?

MG: No. To be honest with you, I just really didn’t feel like running a marathon and training for it. I had run [the ING] New York [City Marathon] the previous year and really wanted to be more prepared for a 5K/10K-type year rather than throwing a marathon in there. Maybe I should have run it, but I didn’t. I don’t have any regrets about it. It was a great day there that I unfortunately wasn’t a part of, but no, I don’t have any regrets.

NYRR: I’d like to talk now about cross country. You’ve got the USA Cross Country Championships coming up in a few weeks. You have represented the U.S. on every world championship team since 2005. Why do you like to compete in cross country? Is there something special about that event that appeals to you?

MG: I think just being in Minnesota, it fits in where we are at with our training. Our coach, Dennis, has that as a major focus. To be honest with you, I never ran cross country in high school, I played football. I was introduced to it in college and ran it in college. I think now as I’m a little bit older and can reflect on racing cross country here in the U.S. and at the World Cross Country Championships, I find that it’s a race where you get a mix of runners: milers and 1500-meter runners, marathoners, and 10K runners. There are also the challenges of different terrain and how fast or how slow the race goes out. It’s a little bit clichéd to say this, but it’s the sport in its purest form. For me that’s kind of cool. You are out there on the land that nature has designed and running across it seeing who’s fastest.

It shows who can handle the different kinds of conditions the best. I remember this picture I saw of the 2006 IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. We started into a really strong headwind. There was Max King; he was on the U.S. team. He was up there in the lead with [Kenenisa] Bekele and all those guys. That kind of shows you how important it is to play the conditions. The race went out slow because of the headwind and there’s Max [King] out there in the front. It paints a neat picture of how each race is different on a cross country course. It’s the same on the track, but a little less predictable. That’s the thing about cross country.

NYRR: So it’s more of an equalizer?

MG: Yeah. Equalizer would be a good way to put it.

NYRR: Along those lines, you talked about how Minnesota training favors your cross country training. Yet last year you ran the IAAF World Cross Country Championships, in Mombassa, Kenya, in sweltering conditions. Do you feel that the race was even more difficult because of the difference in conditions?

MG: Well, that was brutal—that was a brutal week trying to run in that stuff. Even if I had trained in those conditions present in Mombassa, it still would have been a terribly rough experience. At first, I was wondering why the British guys were beating us by so much. Most of them didn’t have faster PRs than ours. But it turns out that they spent three weeks in South Africa training for that race. They were better acclimated for it. At the same time, it was so hot and so humid. I don’t know how much of a difference it would have made for me. Training in Minnesota, you are running on snow—on uneven, icy surfaces—using all those stabilizing muscles. It really does prepare you for the rough conditions of cross country. But with Mombassa, even if you put on multiple layers and run on a treadmill in a sauna, nothing could emulate that day.

NYRR: Assuming you make the U.S. cross country team this year, the race is in Edinburgh, Scotland. Does that make you more excited because it’s closer to Minnesotan conditions?

MG: Yeah. I’m sure it will be muddy and windy. To tell you the truth, I’m really just trying to focus my effort on San Diego, because that’s going to be one hard team to make. My only focus is to make the top nine there.

NYRR: You’ve called Minnesota the training Mecca. You’ve written about the tight bond that exists among you and your fellow Team USA Minnesota runners. One can conclude that you guys have that Boulder or Flagstaff element going on up there. Still, what makes it the training Mecca that it is; what makes it that special place for you?

MG: You know, that’s a very good question. I’ve trained in Albuquerque. I’ve trained in Flagstaff. I’ve trained in Charlottesville, Virginia—that’s a great town that many people don’t know about. The thing about Minnesota is that so many people run here, whether they are at the level that Katie McGregor is at, or just beginning to run, people just like to do it here for some reason. When there’s no snow on the ground and it’s nice, there are so many great trails and parks. People are just outdoorsy types; it’s the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Also, for an urban setting, a place like Twin Cities, there are so many bike trails—that type of thing. It’s like a subculture really. As far as our team goes, we are very, very close; we are just like a family basically. Bringing that kind of energy and that kind of attitude, positive and sometimes negative (a good negative, like people telling each other that they need to get it going).

NYRR: Tough love?

MG: Yeah, tough love. The people and the terrain and just the overall atmosphere—how people respect the sport. It’s got a storied past, all the great runners that have come through here: people like Dick Beardsley and Bob Kempainen. It’s transcended generations. The high school distance runners last year, it was unbelievable how many kids were running 9 minutes and under [for the 2-mile race]. It’s the attitude and atmosphere up here that make it great.

NYRR: You’ve written about Lebanon Hills before—how it’s a special place for you to train. What makes it so special?

MG: It is a special place. It’s a Dakota County park out in the Eagan/Apple Valley area. I used to live a mile from the trailhead out there when I owned a house with my brother. There are equestrian trails, hiking trails, mountain biking trails; it’s just hilly and rolling. There are so many lakes out there. There are 20 miles’ worth of trails; they maintain them and groom them for snow skiing. It’s so great to be in the middle of this huge metropolitan area and just go back in these woods and hammer out miles. That’s where I did 80 percent of my running when I was training for my first marathon

NYRR: Did you have some sort of markings out there? How did you do marathon pace-type workouts out there?

MG: I never did any marathon-specific training there. Basically, I did my regular runs out there. I just compared things off effort and using checkpoints along the way—how I felt.

NYRR: Where are you at on the technology scale? Are you a guy that runs with a heart rate monitor or other gadgets?

MG: It depends on the time of the year. I do use a heart rate monitor per Dennis. He is a believer in the monitor and that’s transcended to me. Usually on the longer runs and our threshold work that we do, we have them on. That can be one or two times a week. Technology is great, but it takes away from the purity of the sport. I just go usually by time on my watch on my loops that I have. Sometimes it’s nice to go to mapmyrun.com to see my route and how fast it took me.

NYRR: In a 2006 interview, you mentioned that you were struggling with your energy levels. You recalled a story on how you were in Belgium and were chatting to Ryan Hall about your problem. He told you to look into taking vitamin B-12 with iron. You went on to write that you took his advice and that it made a big difference in your performance. A lot of runners deal with anemia-like symptoms such as this. Before you started taking iron, did you have your levels screened by a doctor or did you just start taking iron without medical testing?

MG: That’s a good question. I knew how I was feeling. I knew something was wrong. Luckily, when I was talking with Ryan, he said he was dealing with the same thing. He said to try it and I tried it. Definitely, I would not recommend doing what I did. I would recommend going to a doctor—a sports doctor who’s a runner—who knows about ferritin levels. Make sure the doctor knows how much intense running you are doing. Definitely get that stuff tested before ingesting a lot of iron in your body. You can also have too much iron in your body. Me knowing my body, I just knew something needed to be supplemented.

NYRR: Since then, have you had your ferritin levels checked? Are you sill taking iron?

MG: I try to take a supplement with B-12 and vitamin C two times a week. I try to eat iron-rich foods. I did have my iron levels tested last spring after Kenya. When I got back from Kenya, I felt horrible. That trip did me in. By the time the USATF Outdoor Championships rolled around, I was starting to feel okay. Then when I got to Europe, I was running well.

NYRR: I’m going to close the interview with the following quote of yours regarding the prospects for 2008: “I’m talking about myself and my teammates. Something extraordinary is going to happen in 2008. I’m not sure what it is, but I have a feeling that whatever happens will send a shock wave throughout the running world.” Do you have any specific predictions or updates to that quote?

MG: Jason [Lehmkuhle] kind of got the ball rolling for our team. He placed fifth at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Men’s Marathon in New York. You know, between the guys and gals on our team, there are a number of people who can make the Olympic team, go to Beijing, and represent the United States. I just think that you never can count anyone out on a given day. People can have the race of their lives on a certain day and make that team—especially with the depth that there is in this country now in distance running. You can never count anyone out. I don’t want to make any predictions. I’m not really that type of person. Every runner on our team who runs in the Olympic Team Trials will be racing fast and trying to get on it to the best of their ability. I don’t know what the shockwave will be, but we will represent Minnesota and out country to the best of our ability. I don’t know whom it’s going to be, but whoever it is from Minnesota will run with the utmost integrity. It will be an interesting June and July in Eugene.

Interview conducted February 4, 2008, and posted February 12, 2008.