Gary Martin is too humble, too down-to-earth to say that he’s now the coolest kid in school. I set him up to say that he is, but he didn’t take the bait. “Track and field doesn’t get you social credit in school,” he told me, but in the same breath said that people at his school can recognize how fast a 3:57 mile is because the mile is such a familiar event. Everybody’s run the mile in gym class.
Even if the kids in school don’t think Gary is cool, I do, and I’d bet all 17 of the fans who were at the gloomy Philadelphia Catholic League meet a few weeks ago do too. A man called Dave Broom was one of the 17 fans, and he took a video of Gary’s recent 3:57.98 mile and uploaded it to YouTube. The new video adds a visual element to what we’ve heard before: The most impressive thing about Gary Martin’s mile is the conditions he ran it in. He had to run it by himself on a mildly cold day on a shitty track with no fans in the stands. But he didn’t care about any of that. He didn’t list the factors that would make a sub-4 more difficult. He just went for it.
The gun fired, and Gary began at his goal pace. Two other runners followed him but only to the 200-meter mark. Then he was really alone. By 400 meters, Gary couldn’t even hear the sound of another runner’s footsteps behind him. No sound of heavy breathing to remind him he’s in a race.
“58 seconds at the quarter,” the announcer said over the loudspeaker, to which the man taking the video, Dave Broome, said, “Yeah, he’s going for it.”
Gary didn’t tell many people he’d be attempting sub-4 at his league meet. He and his coach decided it’s not a bad idea to “strike while the iron is hot.” They decided the weather was fine. Gary knew what he’d have to do.
“I’ve gotten relatively used to running by myself at this point,” Gary told me. “I’m used to hammering hard efforts in practice and that gives me the confidence to do it in a race. If I can do it by myself in practice then I know I’m able to do it in a race too.”
We all had runner icons growing up. We wanted to be like them. Race as fast as them. Become what we saw on Instagram. (Mine was Kyle Merber and he made me want earrings.) Since lockdown, an increasing number of pro runners have hammered the pace because time trials were the only serious option for racing at the time. A bunch of teams would host small meets with just a couple athletes in the field and then would just try to run a fast pace. They’d work together against the clock instead of racing each other, and they ran so fast that it almost became the dominant mode of racing. Maybe 15-year-old Gary dreamt of being like Grant Fisher and Moh Ahmed, like this, or like this.
Gary told me that he likes to lead races even when there are other runners of his caliber in the field. At Brooks PR last year, he led most of the race only to be outkicked by two other guys. In an interview after the race he said he doesn’t regret it. Something similar happened at New Balance Nationals, but Gary came away with the win. The man will always go to the front, always try to go fast.
Gary told me he raced that way even before he was a good runner. His sophomore year in cross country, he led the race of two hundred runners at the mile mark, but, in his words, “was in way over my head” and ultimately finished in 50th place.
You can develop fitness but it’s much more difficult to cultivate a drive to win and the conviction to race hard every time.
Gary said the only pressure he really feels is from his own expectations for himself. If he’d come up short of his sub-4 goal, nobody would’ve known because he didn’t tell anybody. He would’ve run 4:02 at the PCL meet and everybody would have been losing their minds, but Gary would’ve been quietly disappointed. That’s such a strange dissonance. I asked him if he’s had a moment like that, and he said at the Millrose Games this year, he was in a pro field and had his eyes on sub-4. He ran 4:05 which was the top high school time in the country, and everybody was congratulating him and asking him for interviews, but he still felt disappointed.
It makes me think of how a great artist has to think outside of the boundaries of existing art. You can’t create something truly great or pioneering when you conceive of your work within somebody else’s framework, I guess. And something similar is true of being a great distance runner. Gary isn’t concerned with being the top high school miler in the country this year. He’s focused on something much bigger, because he knows he’s capable. He wants to be the best ever.
And by some metric he is the best ever. Gary’s 3:57.98 is the fastest high school mile run in a field of only high school athletes. Jim Ryun, Alan Webb, and Drew Hunter all ran faster but they all ran their best times in a field of pros.
Dave Broom’s iPhone video uploaded to YouTube dramatizes that fact. There’s no camera crew, no media. There are barely any fans. Nobody knew what Gary was trying to do. The other three, alternatively, ran their times at the Pre Classic and the Millrose Games. This weekend, Colin Sahlman will try to beat Gary’s time at the Pre Classic in the Bowerman Mile, but he’ll have a whole crew of professional runners to help him do it, including Olympic champions and World champions. There will be high-quality video footage. (High-quality enough that you’ll be able to count the number of whiskers on his chin or pimples on his forehead.)
Sahlman’s record attempt at Pre will be a fundamentally different race and probably will increase the chances of going very fast. In that vein, something about Gary’s race feels noble to me. He didn’t ditch the usual high school progression of postseason meets for a tour of pro races across the country. He stayed at home and helped his team score points. The next weekend he ran his District meet, and this weekend he’ll run the PA state meet. I’m sure he’ll win. We’ll have to wait and see how fast.
There’s another wild fold to Gary’s story. He came back just a few hours later and won the 800 in 1:51.29. Gary told me he was actually more nervous for the 800 than the mile because he had real competition in the 800. Quinn Worrell, the athlete who finished about a second behind Gary, had split 1:52 in the 4×800 earlier in the day and that worried Gary a bit.
“I still had a lot of adrenaline from the mile,” Gary told me. “My stomach was bothering me a little bit but my legs felt pretty good. The race started and it hit me a little bit. I was able to rally enough but [Quinn] was with me the whole way. It was a good race.”
Then he split a 49 on the 4×400.
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Somebody should make Gary a fan cam to this club banger. I’m trying to string together sentences on the page, but I’ve been hypnotized by Lil Jon saying, “You can do it all by yourself.”
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I asked Gary if he gets excited to race and he didn’t give a straightforward answer. I felt that. Of course racing is exciting and we love it after the race is over, but that feeling of dread and loathing that you get on the warm-up sucks so bad sometimes. Gary said he’s been thinking about that feeling lately because he’s reading a sports psychology book called How Bad Do You Want It?
He said, “I look at all these top runners like they’re invincible. You think they don’t deal with any of this. All the nerves you feel, these top guys don’t feel it. I thought if I’m gonna be that good, I need to stop having these nerves. But now I’m at a high level of running and I still have those nerves. Everybody gets nervous and has that anxiety and it’s about finding ways to cope with it and channel it.”
Gary recounts being at the Millrose Games this winter waiting to begin his warm-up, sitting near Cooper Teare and Cole Hocker. (Of course I was touched when he had a story that involves my training partners.)
“I got to warm up in the pro warm up area during Millrose and I was next to Cole Hocker and Cooper Teare and they were just sitting there with earbuds on, scrolling twitter. That’s what I do too! But when you see them on TV they feel like giant figures. What they’re doing is so incredible that you forget they’re just like everybody else.”
I’ve written before about how the three-time U.S. champion and 3:31 1500-meter runner Cole Hocker gets nervous before races. Yeah duh! Because we all do.
Gary will keep getting nervous before running fast when he attends UVA in the fall. Gary said academics are important to him, and he really clicked with Vin Lananna during the recruiting process. “I think I might study psychology,” he told me, and then we kind of got into this mode where I was an older guy who’d been through it. I changed my mind a bunch of times in undergrad, I told him. I went in thinking I was going to do neuroscience but then switched to public policy but by the end was studying creative writing, I told him. You’ve got to try out a bunch of different stuff Gary, I said. Take advantage of what the liberal arts school can offer you Gary, I said.
That moment made me think Gary Martin is just like me, which is the sentiment Kyle Merber evoked in his coverage of Gary’s quick rise.
As I wrapped up my questions for Gary, I asked him if there’s anything else I need to know to tell his story, and without thinking he said, “I couldn’t have done it without my coach or my family or my friends.” When I think of the coolest kid in school, I think of Trip Fontaine (mean), Heather Chandler (mean), or like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused (stupid and kinda mean). Gary Martin is too humble, too nice to be the coolest kid in school. He’s the fastest kid in school instead.
Photo credit: Ryan McGinley
