Blanks learning to excel in big races
Harvard standout one of men's title favorites entering NCAA Cross Country Championships on Saturday
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It is one thing to tell yourself you are capable of winning a race when you toe the starting line for a high-level collegiate cross-country meet.
It is quite another to truly believe that.
That’s one of the big differences between the Graham Blanks who earned All-American honors with a 23rd-place finish in the 2021 NCAA Cross Country Championships as a Harvard University freshman and the Graham Blanks who will be one of the individual favorites when the men’s race goes off in this year’s national title meet in Earlysville, Virginia, at 11:10 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, on Saturday.
The Crimson junior has won all four of his races this season, including the prestigious Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational on Oct. 13 when he made a big move with 500 meters left in the 8-kilometer race at the Thomas Zimmer Cross Country Course to defeat a stellar field that included four of the top 10 finishers from last year’s NCAA meet.
“Yeah. Of course,” Blanks said when asked during a Zoom interview last week if he entered the Nuttycombe meet thinking he could win. “I wouldn’t have won if I didn’t believe that.”
After talking further, he added that “maybe as a freshman at Harvard, I thought I could win every race, even though I probably shouldn’t have believed that, right? But this is a big season because I’m finally at a point where I believe what I’m telling myself. Maybe I was lying to myself [as a freshman], because you know what’s true and what’s not. So yeah, I definitely thought I could win [Nuttycombe], but it’s never given on those days. Ultimately, a lot of times, it just comes down to luck because all those guys are incredibly talented and incredibly fit.”
Blanks, who had finished 28th and 26th, respectively, in his two previous Nuttycombe Invitational meets, ran like a seasoned veteran in this year’s contest. He was among the top 10 runners when Northern Arizona senior Drew Bosley led the field through two kilometers in 5 minutes 44.8 seconds and four kilometers in 11:47.2 during a race that was contested in cool, wet, and breezy conditions.
He was in ninth place when NAU junior Nico Young, second in the NCAA meet last year, brought the 21-runner lead pack through six kilometers in 17:39.1.
Defending Nuttycombe champion Ky Robinson of Stanford took the lead with 700 meters remaining in the race, but Blanks drew alongside him with 500 meters to go and then seemed to surprise all of the other leading competitors by launching a long, drawn-out kick shortly after that.
His surge opened up an immediate lead and he never relinquished it while ascending the final uphill portion of the 8,000-meter course and finishing in 23:23.4, nearly three seconds in front of Young, who placed second in 23:26.1, Habtom Samuel of New Mexico, third in 23:26.2, and Robinson, fourth, also in 23:26.2.
“He’s a good racer, he’s learned how to close, and he timed it really well,” Alex Gibby, Harvard’s associate head coach of track and field/cross country, said about Blanks’ victory. “There’s a process in learning how to do this right. First thing is the positive self-talk, the belief in one’s self. And then you have to figure out how to actualize it, right? And that’s where he’s getting to. But yeah, it was a good tactical set-up for him at [Wisconsin] and he carried it out to perfection.”
Blanks, who was born and raised in Athens, Georgia, played soccer growing up. He was first introduced to running when he took part in some 5-kilometer road races with his mom.
He ran cross country during the fall of his middle school years while playing soccer year round. But Neville Anderson, the track and field coach and cross country assistant at Athens Academy, did not know of Blanks until he started running cross country as a freshman in high school.
Although he had a promising season in the fall of 2016, he did not run track the following spring because he was playing for the school’s varsity soccer team.
After watching Blanks improve further during his sophomore cross country season, Anderson told his young charge that he viewed him as a runner playing soccer, rather than a soccer player who was a pretty good runner. Anderson also invited him to run in an indoor track and field meet in Birmingham, Alabama, that Athens Academy competed in annually.
The Last Chance Invitational did not start well for the track newbie as he was disqualified from the 1,600 meters for a false start because he jumped off the starting line after getting spooked when a pole hit the runway during the pole vault competition nearby.
He then took part in the 4x800-meter relay, but inadvertently ran only three laps — instead of the required four — during his leg on the 200-meter track, which led to the team being disqualified.
However, he ended the meet on a positive note when he ran 10:08.10 in the first 3,200-meter race of his life.
Although Blanks chuckles that meet officials “DQed me from the third heat of the [1,600] like it was the Olympic Games,” he “loved” his first track meet. Not long after that he decided to “ditch soccer and just go all in” on running.
It turned out to be a wise decision as Blanks lowered his personal best in the 3,200 seven times during the course of the outdoor season and finished his sophomore campaign with a top time of 9:33.15.
Impressed with Blanks’ passion for running and his eagerness to become a student of the sport, Anderson spent a week at a USA Track & Field coaching clinic in San Diego, California, during the summer of 2018 getting his Level 2 certification.
“I was like, if I have kid who’s that hungry, he needs a coach who’s better,” Anderson said. “I tried to become better as a coach to be worthy of his talent.”
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Blanks’ improvement continued during his junior year as he won the first of two consecutive 1A Private titles in the Georgia High School Association State Cross Country Championships in the fall. He then clocked 9:11.75 in the two mile to finish 17th overall in the New Balance Nationals Indoor track and field meet, and 9:13.93 in the 3,200 to win the 1A Private final of the state track and field championships outdoors.
His upward trajectory continued during the 2019 cross country season when he posted victories in the championship race of the Great American Cross Country Festival, the 1A Private race in the Georgia state championships, and the Nike Cross Nationals Southeast Regional.
After winning the regional by nearly five seconds, Blanks was determined to stick close to pre-race favorite Nico Young of Newbury Park High School in southern California when the Nike Cross Nationals final was contested in Portland, Oregon, the following week.
However, Young, who had run a nation-leading time of 8:40.00 in the 3,200 during his junior track season, broke away from the field early in the race while on his way to setting a course record of 14:52.3 — despite running in cold, rainy, and sloppy conditions — over the 5,000-meter layout and finishing nearly 14 seconds in front of the second-place runner.
Blanks, who placed 28th in 15:37.3, admitted that once the race started, he was unable to keep pace with Young.
“I couldn’t even get there,” he said. “Like I couldn’t. I couldn’t have started the process of that because of how hard he got out. That was a really, really good race for him. It was pretty incredible.”
After Blanks ran 9:04.92 in the 3,200 during the 2020 indoor track season, Anderson figured he was capable of breaking 4:05 in the 1,600 and 9 minutes in the 3,200 outdoors. But the season was cancelled due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although Blanks had been looking forward to running in meets such as the Arcadia Invitational in southern California in April and the Brooks PR Invitational in Seattle in June, the cancellation of the season gave him a chance to get a jump on increasing his training mileage in anticipation of running cross country for Harvard in the fall.
But as the summer wore on and the severity of the pandemic became more apparent, Blanks received a text from Acer Iverson, one of his future Harvard teammates, who informed him that he and several other Crimson runners had decided to take a gap year because the Ivy League was not going to contest any sports that fall because of the pandemic.
With paperwork needing to be filed quickly, Blanks did not have long to make a decision about whether to take a gap year. But after talking things over with his parents, he chose to spend the year training with many of his future teammates.
They spent a couple of weeks in Fort Collins, Colorado, at an elevation of 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) during the fall before moving their training base to Flagstaff, Arizona, at an elevation of nearly 6,900 feet (2,103 meters), for about a month.
While there were few races to be run during the fall due to the pandemic, things began to open up in the spring and Blanks spent about three months living in Flagstaff with six or seven other teammates in a four-bedroom house they rented.
Calling it a blast and an amazing experience, except when it came to chores such as doing the dishes, Blanks’ training volume increased from the 30 miles a week he typically ran in high school to the mid-60s while he was in Flagstaff.
Not surprisingly, his performances took off.
After running 14:10.10 in a 5,000-meter track race in Scottsdale, Arizona, on March 21, he clocked 13:47.72 in a meet in San Juan Capistrano, California, on April 2 before lowering his best to 13:35.45 in a meet in Irvine, California, on May 15. Then came a 13:27.39 performance in Boston on May 29 that eventually put him 31st on the U.S. performer list for the year.
“I was really lucky, I mean super, super privileged, that I was able to get into the races I got into, and travel the way I was able to travel,” Blanks said. “It was really nice to be able to train at altitude and then capitalize on that opportunity in races.”
After his track performances during the spring of 2021, Blanks had an impressive freshman cross country season that saw him finish fifth in the Ivy League Heptagonal championships, second in the Northeast region meet, and 23rd in the NCAA championships.
However, a case of tendonitis in his right Achilles tendon prevented him from racing during the indoor track season and limited him to three races outdoors that were topped by a 5,000-meter best of 13:51.65.
“It wasn’t fun to be running almost 30 seconds off where I was before,” Blanks said of his season that concluded with a non-qualifying 20th-place performance in the NCAA East Preliminary Round meet. “But honestly, at that point, I was just happy to be healthy again.”
He truly arrived on the collegiate distance running scene last November when he finished sixth in the NCAA Cross Country Championships in Stillwater, Oklahoma. But an indoor track season that included personal bests of 13:18.45 in the 5,000, 3:56.63 in the mile, and 7:44.76 in the 3,000, concluded with a pair of disappointing 13th-place finishes in the 3,000 and 5,000 in the NCAA indoor meet in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in early March.
“That was completely on me,” Blanks said about his sub-par performances. “I was just dealing with a lot of nagging pains all around. That was the first reason I didn’t do so well. Another is I wasn’t really having much fun. I was running fast, which is great. But I was in a good bit of pain all season. I should have been stretching better and I should have been taking better care of myself as I’ve now had two indoor track seasons where I have not done well health-wise.”
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Blanks’ struggles were exacerbated by two other factors.
The first was his decision to run the anchor — 1,600-meter — leg of the distance medley relay in the Ivy League Heptagonal championships in late February after having previously won the 3,000 and the 5,000.
The second was the 5,130 feet (1,562 meters) of elevation in Albuquerque.
Tripling in the conference meet less than two weeks before nationals was ill-advised, particularly given his injury issues. And he said the altitude in Albuquerque just “completely, completely threw me off.”
Nonetheless, Blanks viewed the meet as a valuable learning experience.
“It was a tough weekend out there,” he said. “But it was also good to get to see the levels I need to be. Some of those guys were just on another level that weekend. It was good to get a front-row seat, literally as they lapped me, to see how fast you need to be able to run at the end of a race.”
After figuring out the causes of his Achilles issues, Blanks had an injury-free outdoor track season which he capped with a sixth-place finish in the 10,000 — in a personal best of 28:15.90 — in the NCAA meet, followed by a runner-up finish in the 5,000 two days later.
Robinson, the Stanford junior from Australia, unleashed a big kick while winning both races.
Although Blanks said placing second in the 5,000 was “definitely a huge step for me,” he was unable to respond quickly when Robinson surged away from everyone late in the slow, tactically-run race.
“Unfortunately, I missed his big move,” Blanks said. “But just getting to see that happen right in front of me was a big learning experience. To know you really have to be focused in those moments. Just trust your gut and cover moves and things like that.”
Gibby, who is in his seventh year at Harvard, said Blanks’ earnestness about running was one of the things that impressed him most when he was recruiting him.
“My original instinct was that running was important to him,” Gibby said. “He was competitive about it, and he was serious about it, and those things have held true.
“Harvard’s a place where there’s a lot of noise. The academic demands are enormous so if it’s going to work, you have to be very intentional and serious about your pursuit of the sport. If you’re not, it’s not going to work.”
As someone who is majoring in both economics and philosophy, Blanks does not have a lot free time outside of running and school. But when the opportunity presents itself, he loves to “whip around” Cambridge on his bicycle, his prized possession, and listen to music.
Though he lists REM — which got its start in Athens — Pavement, and The Replacements as his three favorite bands, he wore a Grateful Dead hat during his Zoom interview for this feature and there was a poster of the late Bob Marley dribbling a soccer ball on the wall behind him.
The poster of Marley, who is often referred to as The King of Reggae, would probably not come as a surprise to Anderson, Blanks’ high school coach. He fondly recalls a meet in South Carolina when the predominantly white Athens Academy team was sitting in the stands next to a predominantly African-American squad.
Anderson, who is black, says he remembers looking over at the other team at one point as some music was playing, and Blanks was right in the middle of the group, “just kind of hanging his head and bobbing with the music. I looked at that and I was so proud of him… He just appreciates diversity.”
He’ll get a chance to enjoy plenty of that in the men’s title race of the NCAA meet on Saturday as some of the top entrants in the 10,000-meter event hail from countries such as Kenya, Eritrea, Australia, Canada, Uruguay, Sudan, Morocco, Spain, and France.
“I’m going to do everything in my power to win it,” Blanks said. “But things are not guaranteed. Just because I won an 8k race at Nuttycombe in October does not mean I can win an 10k race in [Earlysville] in November.
“Of course, I want to win and I’m going to try and do it for my team because there is nothing better that I can do than score one point. But I’m not putting too much pressure on myself. Because I know if I just go out there and do my job, and trust my fitness, good things are going to result from it. And then maybe I’ll be lucky enough to be the guy that crosses the finish line first.”