Week 3

Wednesday, October 3

The Hansons’s Blue-Collar Star

Brian Sell could barely keep his eyes open. With the birth of his and wife Sarah’s first child, Lily Grace, in May, his training load of 160 miles per week, and a 20-hour work week at Home Depot, he was all but sleep-walking.

Chuckling, he slumped on a weight bench in a pair of rumpled blue jeans and red Hanson’s t-shirt and munched on McDonald’s fries. “A lot of people are coming up and saying, not the best timing," he said. But sometimes you can’t plan these things. Besides, if you said you could make the Olympic team, but you couldn’t have your daughter, there is no way I’d trade.”

But 28-year-old Sell of the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project in Rochester Hills, MI, is not looking for an either-or. He wants both. And as the fifth seed in the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Men’s Marathon, he knows he’s close. Nobody is stronger, nobody has logged more miles.

But several are faster. He’s up against the strongest field in Olympic marathon trials history. All three men who made the team in 2004 are returning and showing form. Three other sub-2:09 men who didn’t race in Birmingham, AL, four years ago are also on the start list.

“The goal is to be an Olympian,” said Keith Hanson, co-founder with brother Kevin of the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project. “If he can just take care of himself, and not look at other people, our plan is to go out and run the race we know we can run, and let the chips fall where they may.”

Olympic Flyer
Sell has been training with the Hanson brothers since 2001, a year after graduating from St. Francis University in his native Pennsylvania. Brian’s college coach, Kevin Donner, knew Kevin Hanson, and suggested Brian take a look at the fledgling program taking form in the northern suburbs of Detroit.

The tightly structured Hansons group training dynamic suited Sell’s rural Pennsylvania work ethic perfectly, and though he never planned on staying this long, the Hansons have helped Sell become a strong contender for the 2008 Olympic squad. 

In an odd way, it was the disappointment of the 2004 Olympic Trials that now brings Sell to the edge of the 2008 team. Off a debut 2:19:57 in Chicago 2003, Sell arrived at the 2004 Trials in Birmingham, AL, thinking he had to run 2:12 by himself to make the squad.  

So when the opening miles went out at a crawl, Sell felt his chances slipping away. Kevin and Keith Hanson had trained him for a 5:02 per mile pace. Birmingham’s weather turned nasty the week of the Trials. Change in plans, they told him. Now with the cold and wind it will be important, they said, to run the last 10 miles at sub-50:00, not the first 10. Sell broke free of the pack at seven miles, strung together a series of sub-4:55 miles, added some five-flats for good measure, and constructed as much as a 90-second lead.

While the eventual Olympic team of Alan Culpepper, Meb Keflezighi, and Dan Browne remained in the pack shielded from the elements, Sell drained his tank by 21 miles. As Sell was being formally introduced to the marathon wall, Culpepper, Keflezighi, and Browne whistled by. By the time the entire wall had tumbled onto him Sell had been passed by another nine men. He finished humbled in 13th place. Teammates Trent Briney and Clint Verran finished fourth and fifth, running the race Sell might have hoped for. 

Still, his 2:17:20 was a two-minute personal best, though it would take a while for Sell to see it as a positive. In fact, he almost quit the sport entirely and went to dental school. Instead, his coaches convinced him that the `04 Trials was his post-graduate work in marathoning.

“That’s why I was so proud of him in Helsinki,” remarked Kevin Hanson, speaking of Sell’s performance at the following year’s IAAF World Championships in Finland. “Because he learned. He finished in ninth place with a second half in 1:07 after a 1:06 first half. The field in front faded. Sell moved from 50th to ninth.”

More or Less
Twice in 2006, Sell ran 2:10 marathons, a fourth place in Boston in the spring and sixth place in Chicago last October. But progress in running isn’t linear. And when you know your competition is strong, and your margin for error miniscule, anything, even a personal best, can rattle your psyche.

Sell ran a nearly three-minute PR at the 2006 Boston Marathon in April, a 2:10:55. Six months later in Chicago he moved his expectations up another notch. “I felt like I wanted to see something in line with my earlier progression,” he said.

“If he can run 2:09 on his own here,” said coach Kevin Hanson in Chicago, “then with an improvement curve, he can run a 2:08-quality race at the Olympic Trials in New York in 2007.”

But when he came to the finish line in Chicago the clock stopped at 2:10:47. Though it was an eight-second personal-best, it wasn’t the benchmark he had hoped for. Up ahead in fourth place sat one of his main Olympic Trials competitors, Abdi Abdirahman of Arizona at 2:08:56, nearly two minutes faster. 

“Yeah, it was really tough after Chicago,” Sell admitted. “And I fell behind a little afterwards into early this year. I thought I just gotta get tough and run harder, but there are a lot more elements that come into play in distance running.” 

More, in fact, can quickly become less. A hard lesson Sell may have finally accepted.

“We went to Aruba the week after Chicago,” remembered Sarah Sell, who met Brian when both were students at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. “And instead of just enjoying the trip, he was out running five to ten miles a day. Maybe he didn’t let his body recover enough at that point, but eventually he turns it around every time, and comes back stronger than ever.”

The best he ever felt for a marathon was in Helsinki for the 2005 World Championships. There he was doing 145-150 miles a week.  Coach Hanson says Brian’s volume needs to be lowered, and intensity increased. “Going into Boston (`06) he was slightly over-trained,” Kevin Hanson now believes. "If it says 160 miles on the log, he probably did 175. Brian’s 10-mile loop is everyone else’s 11½ to 12-miler.  He was also a little over-trained in Chicago. We scheduled 145 to 150, but he had himself up to 160. Which is now the goal for pre-Trials, because he can handle the 160 now that he’s become acclimated to it.”

“He’s aggressive, competitive, and tough,” says Verran. “You play any game with him, and he just wants to kill you. And he takes it personally if you beat him. Running is an aggressive sport, and you need to be out there thinking aggressively. Brian maintains that tenacity in training every day. He might not be the fastest guy over a quarter-mile, but he can take a pounding like I’ve never seen.”

Sell has been pounding with the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project for six long years. Sarah has supported him throughout, though at times her feelings can swing, too.

“Sometimes I think this is ridiculous, let’s just go home,” she says, hoping one day to return to a farm in rural Pennsylvania with Brian and Lily Grace. “Other times I say he’s put in six hard years of training, and he deserves the chance to do this. I have a great job. We have a great home. So we’re here ‘till he’s ready to go. I want him to be able to achieve his dream.”

A New Day With the Old Way
Sell improved his 25K PR in Grand Rapids in May, running 30 seconds faster than in 2005 when he used the race as his final tune- up for his World Championships top-ten placing.   

The Sells and Hanson brothers know Brian’s chances in New York will require a perfect race. But they also know that the marathon is an event that doesn’t always play to expectations. 

“If he can go out and run a 2:09-level marathon,” says Keith Hanson, “whatever time that converts to on the Trials course, I don’t think there will be three runners who can better that.” With the kind of speed he’ll have to contend with, Sell seems to have little choice tactically.

“I’m gonna have to go out and keep it honest," he says, "because there isn’t a single guy in the field I am going to outkick over the last mile. Hopefully, I’ll get them tired all the way, and try to minimize the kick.”

“He’s the guy who would like it to get to 20 miles, and have everyone’s legs burning like they don’t know if they can lift them again,” says Kevin Hanson with diabolical glint. “As long as they are all feeling it the same, at that point I’m betting on Brian.”

Maybe it’s fitting that Brian Sell works at Home Depot. Sell is the dirt-under-the-fingernails candidate, the man whose tools are strength, work ethic, and resilience. No runner will be more willful November 3 than the man from rural Pennsylvania. And that will give everyone of the faster men something to chew on.