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| Ben Blankenship winning a preliminary heat of the 1500 at the 2013 USATF Outdoor Track Championships. Photo by Gene Niemi |
"There was a lot of pressure going into indoors," Blankenship says. "I haven't run well for two years now." He'd won some road miles, run a fast time to win one of them, the 2013 Minnesota Mile in Duluth, but the road success didn't spill over onto the track. The "silver lining," however, was the fact that he'd strung together a year of injury free, high intensity training. He'd found a compatible training partner in Nike Oregon TC Elite teammate Ciaran O'Lionard.
The duo has different strengths, Blankenship's being endurance and O'Lionard's speed. More importantly, however, the pair's strengths were not so superior to the other's so that their workouts became opportunities to improve their weaknesses rather than being more like a race than training. As he has gotten older and wiser, Blankenship said, he'd begun to understand the difference. Racing was to win. Training was to develop the tools to make winning possible.
Blankenship, like most to elite athletes, would be categorized as off the charts in competitiveness, which is often necessary for racing, not so much in training. Blankenship's training partners had most often been too fast or too strong, thus each training session was more intense than necessary. Fatigue and, eventually, injury followed. Blankenship and his coach, Mark Rowland, an Olympic medallist in the steeplechase, have put together a more collaborative training plan of late.
Rowland is "open to ideas in training," and "this is the first year I've taken the reigns more," said Blankenship. "I have a great support system." In addition to O'Lionard and Rowland, Blankenship credits the environment in Flagstaff, AZ, where an increasing number of top middle distance runners are migrating for altitude training, with being equally accommodating and helpful in his progress this season.
The facilities in Flagstaff are available to run indoors if snow and ice storms make outdoor workouts difficult at best. Plus there are other like-minded and talented athletes to train with occasionally, bounce ideas off of, or just hang out with during the build up to each season. The indoor season this year was a chance to post some good times, build confidence, and, most importantly, be in a position to win races, not just be along for the ride.
Blankenship says he had a "pretty good indoor season," but he would have liked to have had a few more wins. His biggest disappointment was the USATF Championships 2-mile, he said, because he thought he had a real shot at winning. Tactical mistakes cost him his chance. Going into the last lap "I allowed Ryan Hill to get two steps (ahead) and, at this level right now, we have a lot of Americans who are running really well so you can't let that happen if you want to be in position to win. There was no time to catch up."
His goal in each of the races at USATF was to being positioned to win at the end of the race. In retrospect he knows that he wasn't as sharp as he expects to be outdoors and for the races that really count at the end of the season, so it wasn't surprising that he didn't close like he wanted to. He learned valuable tactical lessons, but wasn't yet strong enough or quick enough to be in position and prevail in the usual end of race battles to get to the finish line first.
Even so, in his worst place finish of the indoor season at the Birmingham GP meet 1500(4th in 3:35.28), he set a PR and was less than a second out of first place in a high-caliber, international field. The goal for the year and the outdoor season is to make the US team for the IAAF World Championships in Beijing. But Blankenship doesn't just want to make the team. He wants to be competitive in Beijing. That would be the culmination of a real break out season.
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