With one lap to go, it was anybody’s race. But it wasn’t just any race: it was the race to be the 2022 NCAA Division 1 men’s 5,000m champion. Olin Hacker knew this and it’s why he talked strategy with his coach over and over again, why he was never too far back in the pack, why he stuck to the rail until it was time to go. He wasn’t going to let this race get away from him, not without a good fight. He’d waited seven years for this.
I watched Hacker win from the stands in the new (okay, not so new anymore, but new to me) Oregon stadium that looks truthfully like something NASA would build. I was standing, because like I said, it was anyone’s race with a lap to go and it was too exciting, too heated, to sit still. I was closer to the 300m mark of the track than I was to the finish line and so I had to watch the very end on the big screen. But maybe this turned out even better because it meant I got to see Hacker’s face when he finished on that big screen. I hope you didn’t miss his jaw hanging wide open and his eyebrows almost up to his hairline as he crossed the line. I hope you didn’t miss his arms going to his head and then shooting out, as if to say, “What? Me? That was me?” It was shock and disbelief and relief and joy. In the post-race interview with ESPN, he said, “This is what I wanted. This is what I dreamed about.”
I’ll be honest: I hadn’t heard of Olin Hacker until this year. I was listening to an episode of the Coffee Club podcast while they were at Penn Relays and Hacker joined on with his old teammates for a bit. They mentioned he’d been injured a few times over his college career, got the corresponding redshirts for it, and there he was, a seventh year at Wisconsin. They were really proud of him and couldn’t wait to see what the rest of the spring had in store for him. At the time of listening to that podcast, I wasn’t running. I was getting used to the rashes under my armpits from crutches, nurturing yet another stress fracture in my femur. A stress fracture that ended my sixth year of collegiate running––the kind of injury that had ended most of my college track seasons. “Seven years is a long time,” I thought, headphones in as I washed dishes, balancing on my good leg. Staying even six years was tough for me.
Tougher than people think, I’d say. If you transfer schools for your fifth and sixth years like I did, you end up being some weird version of a very old freshman. You watch your teammates, roommates, best friends graduate and move on with their lives (so why can’t you?). You get called grandma and you make the joke back that it’s just not easy, raising the children. Younger girls do TikTok dances you don’t know how to do and they also rarely want your good advice. You watch people go out and achieve the goals you wanted to achieve at the age you wanted to achieve them. You wonder who cursed you and made this college running thing so dang difficult for you. Sometimes you really aren’t sure why you’re still there.
But there’s something to staying. That I’ve always understood. There’s something to entering college with visions you have of yourself and leaving having fulfilled it––at keeping your word. There’s something about doing that in a jersey that really matters to you, for and with people who have seen you through a lot. (If you don’t believe me, go back and look at this.) There’s a reason it’s hard to let go, because if you do move on, maybe you’re not seeing yourself and your hard work all the way through. Maybe you’ll miss a chance. In Hacker’s case, he might’ve missed the chance.
In Hacker’s win as a seventh year, I saw something in my sixth-year self. Something along the lines of, “That’s exactly the reason why we stayed, isn’t it?” I heard reverberations of my coach’s voice telling me how rare it was to get that fairytale ending. Hacker had done it and I wanted to ask him about it. And it turns out, 5k champions answer their Instagram DMs. We spoke over Zoom, him back in Wisconsin and me back in my childhood bedroom in California. He said he was all caught up on his DMs. He was exhausted, said he hadn’t slept much from the excitement and that it still hadn’t quite sunk in, this winning nationals part.
No one enters college thinking they’ll stay as long as Hacker did. Not even Hacker himself. I’m thinking most athletes have a fifth year in mind and that’s it. When I was a freshman, I got kind of good for the mid-major school I was at. After that year, I saw nothing but an uphill trajectory for myself. I would only get better and better. I would make unbelievably huge leaps in fitness, and end up, surely, at nationals by year four. Oh, to be young and in love.
I told Hacker how I never imagined having a sixth year. I barely even knew that was possible until my fifth year. He agreed. He faced the frustrating timeline shift early: he came into college hurt, and redshirted his whole freshman year. He said at the time he was pretty upset about it. He wanted to be racing, and contributing to his team, right away. Just as he was finding momentum his sophomore year, he was sidelined with injury another whole year, his junior year. Then, like everyone else in the NCAA in 2020 (and 2021), another few seasons of his got shut down from COVID. That’s when he applied for a medical redshirt. “I felt a little bit similar to you. Well, number one, I just wanted to keep running. I was enjoying it, and enjoying the team. But I felt like I hadn’t quite run to the best of my potential yet and I felt like I still had unaccomplished goals. I felt like I could be better. It was really like, I had goals that I hadn’t accomplished, but if I got the chance to, I could,” he told me. “And at some point, I, too, was like, ‘They might not ever happen.’ I had to some extent made my peace with that, but I still wanted to try.”
Did more of us see this win coming? Because Hacker has been on a roll. He was the Big 10 indoor champion in both the 3000m and the 5000m. He was fourth in the 3000m at indoor nationals. To open his outdoor season, he won Oregon Relays on the same Hayward magic track, running a PR of 13:19.34. I asked him when winning nationals became a real goal. Many more of us go into college with this goal than can actually be crowned champion, but I wanted to know when he could say, with confidence, “I want to win nationals.” He said when he came into college, he had his sights set on winning a Big 10 title. “I feel like I don’t always set big goals. That kind of scares me. I felt like winning a Big 10 title was a big enough goal in itself. So I didn’t really think it was realistic until after indoor nationals in the 3k. And then from there, the outdoor season, I feel like I really focused a lot more on the thought of winning and how that was possible. To think that, it’s scary, because you in some ways set yourself up for failure. Only one person can win and that’s very hard. And then if you don’t, it almost feels like so much more of a failure.”
This deserves to be repeated, I think: seven years of running in the NCAA and it’s still scary to say you really want the thing. To say you really want to win. Whether you achieve it (like Hacker), or you don’t (like me), it’s scary either way. So you might as well start saying it.
Hacker had a regular redshirt, a medical redshirt, and a COVID year that all added up to seven years. I had a medical redshirt and a COVID year for six, but I also had proper documentation to apply for a second medical redshirt, which would have granted me a seventh year, too. I like to tell myself there’s no way I was ever taking that. It’s just such a long time. Another year for a chance at glory––or to fail miserably. The line is thin. But I can’t be sure that if given the chance, I would’ve turned it down. In the end we’re all just dreamers.
