Cole Hocker adds endurance to 1,500 kick
U.S. Olympian aims for top three in Paris after record-breaking Trials performance
Instead of waiting until the final 100 meters of the 1,500-meter race in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials last month, Cole Hocker boldly charged into the lead with 250 meters left.
Hocker’s decision to move earlier than usual reflected a newfound confidence in his endurance strength — built over the past two seasons — and his win over a talented field in a fast-paced race propelled him from a potential top-six pick in the Olympic Games in Paris to a definitive medal contender.
For the 23-year-old native of Indianapolis, his performance confirmed the view he’s had for some time. He’s seen himself as a top three in the world for three years now, but injuries interfered with his progression.
“This is the first year since 2021 that there have been no interruptions, so I am super motivated,” he said in a telephone interview earlier this month. “I pretty much know my value and how good I am. I just need to execute.”
Hocker’s execution in the 1,500 was surgically precise and efficient in the Trials meet that was contested at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. He ran in fourth place for most of the first 1,200 meters of the race, moved into third behind Yared Nuguse and Hobbs Kessler heading down the backstretch, and then surged into the lead 50 meters later.
Nuguse made a valiant effort to catch Hocker, but the former NCAA champion for the University of Oregon crossed the finish line in a personal best of 3 minutes 30.59 seconds that left him clear of Nuguse in 3:30.86 and third-place Kessler in 3:31.53. The race was exceptionally deep as the top eight finishers bettered the previous meet record of 3:34.09, and seven of them lowered their career bests.
Although accurate splits were unavailable on the meet website for Hocker’s final three 100-meter segments of the race, he ran his last lap in 52.63 seconds, his final 600 meters in 1:20.80, and his last 800 in 1:49.45.
For comparison’s sake, Josh Kerr of Great Britain had run his last lap in 52.77, his final 600 in 1:21.01, and his last 800 in 1:49.23 when he came from behind to defeat favored Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway in a time of 3:29.38 in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary, last August.
After his victory in the Trials, Hocker told Lewis Johnson of NBC Sports that he was “just ready for anything today. I know I’m the strongest I’ve ever been. In 2021 I was able to depend on my kick. Today it was going to take a little bit more than just a kick and that was absolutely true. I just know that once I made a decision, commit to it, and that’s what I did.”
Hocker, who will run in the second of three first-round heats of the men’s 1,500 at approximately 5:20 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, on Friday, has set personal bests at four distances this year.
In addition to his career best of 3:30.59 in the 1,500, he has run 1:45.63 in the 800, 8:05.70 for two miles indoors, and 12:58.82 in the 5,000. For good measure, he also ran his fastest ever indoor time in the 1,500 when he clocked 3:36.69 to win the silver medal in the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, in March.
Hocker appeared to have that race won when he passed first-place Kessler in the home straightaway, but Geordie Beamish of New Zealand, who had been in sixth place with a lap to go and in fifth with 100 meters left, rushed past both Americans while running in lane three.
“It did feel like a missed opportunity,” said Ben Thomas, Hocker’s coach and the head track and field coach at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. “But it also made him realize, I’m closer than I was a year ago. So if I can put it together between here and Paris, maybe I’ll have a chance at putting myself in position when everybody’s there.”
Hocker said his No. 1 goal this year has always been to win a medal in Paris, and not just limit himself to a bronze one while finishing behind defending Olympic champion Ingebrigtsen and Kerr, or Kerr and Ingebrigtsen, depending on how one looks at things.
“I know what I’m capable of, but a lot of things had to unfold in order for that to happen,” he said. “Stay healthy. Execute at [the Olympic Trials]. So now after doing those things, it’s becoming more realistic. I’m checking the boxes as we go and it’s changed my outlook.”
Hocker had run a then-personal best of 3:30.70 to place seventh in the 1,500 in the World Championships last year, but he and Thomas figured he could run significantly faster in the future as a stress reaction in a lower leg had upended his 2022 season. The injury became evident three weeks before the start of the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships and contributed greatly to him being eliminated in a first-round heat of the meet that served as the qualifying competition for the World Championships that were held at Hayward Field the following month.
Like the Olympic Games this year, that meet had been at the top of his priority list for that season, his first as a professional.
Hocker had signed a professional contract with Nike following a break-out 2021 campaign in which he lowered his best in the indoor mile from 3:58.20 to 3:50.55, and won NCAA titles for Oregon in the indoor mile — in 3:53.71 — and in the 1,500 meters outdoors — in 3:35.35. He also ran a then-personal best of 13:18.95 to place fourth in the 5,000 in the NCAA championships in a race in which Duck teammate Cooper Teare set a meet record of 13:12.27.
Hocker had developed a well-deserved reputation as a kicker during the indoor and outdoor collegiate seasons in 2021 and that asset was on full display in the final of the 1,500 in that year’s Olympic Trials.
Hocker first spurted from fifth place to second with about 130 meters left in a race that had been run at a modest pace for the first kilometer and he then set out in pursuit of defending Olympic champion Matthew Centrowitz Jr.
Centro, as he is affectionately known, had a three- to four-meter lead on Hocker entering the home straightaway, but the upstart runner who had turned 20 three weeks earlier drew even with the 31-year-old veteran with about 30 meters to go and edged away from him while recording a 3:35.28 to 3:35.34 victory. In a sign of how excited he was, Hocker put his right index finger to his lips just before crossing the finish line.
“I think I was ready for whatever that day, but it definitely played into my hands… being a slower paced race,” Hocker said. “It was fast enough to keep some people out of it, but slow enough for it to come down to that last 150.”
Although Hocker’s winning time fell short of the automatic qualifying standard of 3:35.00 for the Olympic Games in Tokyo, he advanced to the quadrennial meet based on his place in rankings maintained by World Athletics.
He then performed extremely well in the meet that was held in the Japanese capital in a stadium that was nearly empty due to safety restrictions in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He clocked 3:36.16 in his qualifying heat, a personal best of 3:33.87 in his semifinal, and then another best of 3:31.40 to place sixth in the final that was won by fellow 20-year-old Ingebrigtsen in an Olympic and European record of 3:28.32.
Although he used his kick to move from ninth place to sixth on the last lap, Hocker was well back of the leaders with 400 meters to go.
“That was by far the fastest race I had ever been in up to that point in my life,” he said. “So I was kind of holding on for dear life.”
A little more than a month later, Hocker signed a contract with Nike while looking forward to the 2022 season would mark the first time that the World outdoor championships would be held in the United States. And though the stress reaction kept him from having a legitimate chance at making the U.S. national team that competed in that meet, Thomas felt like he learned a valuable lesson..
“He went from the highs of 2021 to the trials of 2022, which was one of the most crushing setbacks he had ever faced in running,” Thomas said. “I think it taught him this sport can be cruel. And to his credit, his approach didn’t change. He stuck with it, stuck with consistency, stuck with me. A lot of kids might have said, ‘I got hurt. I must be doing something wrong.’ He just got back to work.”
Hocker has been coached by Thomas since his freshman cross country season at Oregon in 2019 and his trust in his mentor was so great that he moved across the country last November after Thomas had been hired at Virginia Tech.
For Thomas’ part, he did not view Hocker’s injury as something that was just bad luck and bound to happen when one is training at a world-class level. He went back and examined Hocker’s training schedule prior to the stress reaction and came to the conclusion that his charge might have been “doing too many good quality workouts,” and “not enough tapering.”
In short, he learned that he “didn’t have to always be in a damn, big hurry” to get to the high-quality workouts, and that everything didn’t have to be based on seven-day training cycles, which he said was a product of U.S. culture.
“There are different ways to train at different points in the season,” he said. “There’s nothing that says runners have to be on seven-day training cycles.”
Hocker engaged in a lot of cross-training in an effort to stay fit when he was dealing with the stress reaction, and as a result, he still supplements his weekly regimen of 65-70 miles of running with a combined total of three to four hours on a stationary bike, an Alter G treadmill, or in the pool.
Hocker’s dedication to training is a trait that his parents, Kyle and Janet, said he has possessed from a young age.
“We never had to ask him to get out of bed for anything athletic,” Janet said. “He was always very motivated to do something like that.”
Stone Hocker, Cole’s older brother by three years and his best friend, according to Janet, said one of Cole’s “greatest attributes is that he’s very disciplined and I think that’s something you can only really see through if you have a vision for the future.”
Stone and his parents all say agree that Cole, who began running when he was in the fourth grade, thought about being a professional runner from a young age, although he continued to play basketball through his middle school years.
“A lot of kids have professional athlete aspirations and we realized how difficult it would be to achieve them,” Janet said. “But he just kept taking those steps along the way and things fell into place and just worked out perfectly for him.”
Stone adds that to Cole running professionally “wasn’t something that he hoped was going to happen. It was just going to happen and he was going to get there, step by step.”
Kyle Hocker had a hand in Cole’s development from a standout youth runner into a prep senior who won the boys’ title in the Foot Locker National Cross Country Championships in 2018 and ran 4:07.00 for 1,600 meters and 8:56.02 for 3,200 for Cathedral High School in Indianapolis during the 2019 track and field season.
Although Kyle described himself as someone who “was an assistant to the assistant coach” when it came to Cole’s training and racing, Stone said his dad was omnipresent when it pertained to his brother’s running, but he was never overbearing.
One topic that Kyle does not downplay is the importance that he believes speed endurance training has played in Cole’s success. Following the training methods popularized by the late-Lyle Knudson, Kyle said Cole’s training “went for speed intensity, rather than piling on the mileage.”
Even as a senior in high school, Kyle said that Cole never ran more than four or five miles during his longest training runs.
“I think he got use to running fast and he never learned how to run slow,” Kyle said. “You can teach kids to run long and slow, but our objective was to run short and fast.”
When asked about his kick, Cole said that speed endurance has always been part of his training and he’s always had good turnover. And though he does not have an official personal best for a 400, he said he was credited with a 48.5-second split in the 4 x 400 relay earlier this season at the end of a meet in which he had paced the first 1,200 meters of a 1,500, the opening 3,000 of a 5,000, and the initial 600 of an 800.
Due to the combination of his finishing speed, outward joy when he wins, and ease with journalists in post-race interviews, it would be easy to assume that Hocker is an extrovert. But he says that off the track he is “definitely more introverted. I kind of go about my business. I have my [training] group here in Blacksburg, but outside of that, I pretty much keep to myself.”
His mom says Cole “just doesn’t talk at all about anything superfluous.”
Thomas says Cole is always happy to sign an autograph, or talk with or take a photo with someone who is a fan of his. But “he’s totally happy here in Blacksburg when we’re out by ourselves training, especially in the summer when it’s quieter. I think he loves that, just getting his work done with a few of his friends and going about his business, and then just bottling it all up and giving his all in racing.”
Stone Hocker describes Cole as “definitely introverted” and someone who “will not say something if it’s not required to be said.”
However, he added that his brother is “also fascinated by literature and society… What I really admire about him is that he’s incredibly sharp and has a sense of humor that is super witty and quick. So even though he’s very quiet, there are times when he will intervene and he can be quite hilarious when he does that.”
When asked about the contrast between his demeanor on the track and off it, Hocker said that “being on the track and winning races, I can really just show my true emotions. I don’t have to think about anything and just run out there. Pretty much just show the passion that I have for running and racing.”
When it comes to the Olympic Games, Thomas said Hocker’s first goal will be to advance from the first round on Friday to the semifinals on Sunday, and his second goal will be to move on from the semifinals to the final next Tuesday.
As for the final, Thomas said that he’s been training Hocker “to run 3:27 or 3:28. If it’s slower than that, he feels like he can run safe. Like if I run clear, I’ll have a shot. If it’s fast, I gotta get to where I can hang with that lead group, right? So we’re working on that and it’s just the ultimate challenge.”