Braden racing into elite club

To Forest Braden, there’s something about being a man in uniform.

Which is just one of several reasons he’s been looking forward to today’s USATF Club Cross Country Championships at Plantes Ferry Park. He’s in a club. At least he thinks he is.

Another reason was the weather report: snow and more snow.

“I like it,” said the former seven-time Idaho state track and cross country champion from Bonners Ferry. “I don’t imagine the guys from Arizona, California and the South are going to be ready for it. I like getting wet and dirty.”

And it’s not as if he’s simply counting on the elements. Braden was fourth in last year’s club championships in Cincinnati, 13 seconds behind winner Ryan Warrenburg, a one-time Arizona State runner who returns to defend his title. As transitions go from collegiate running to the post-collegiate scene, it could hardly have been more encouraging.

It was only later that Braden discovered how difficult it really is.

Nonetheless, he’s signed on for four more years, which if you do the math takes him into an Olympic year. After graduating from Boise State in 2007 and spending a year training and competing with the Brooks-sponsored Indiana Elite club in Bloomington, he’s returned to the Inland Northwest and hooked on as Pat Tyson’s assistant coach at Gonzaga University, and from this vantage will try to catch up with the elite U.S. distance runners.

One step at a time.

Today’s step is a bit of an antidote to the every-man-for-himself nature of American running. More than 1,000 open and masters runners are expected for the races beginning at 9:30 a.m., most of them aligned with clubs like the Hansons-Brooks Running Project in Michigan, which has won five team titles. This year their lead dog is Brian Sell, who finished 22nd in the marathon last summer in Beijing.

Braden entered to run with the Brooks ID club made up mostly of Seattle runners, though they were jumping through some eligibility hoops because not all of them live in the same city. He would prefer not to go solo.

“Running after college is different because you don’t have a team,” he said. “You don’t have that Boise State on your chest – or Bonners Ferry. It’s more for yourself and sometimes it’s harder to get motivated.

“When you’re with a team, you don’t want to let them down.”

On the flipside, of course, is that you’re master of your own schedule. There doesn’t have to be a meet every weekend, or three different seasons to peak for – and that’s if you don’t have aspirations to compete internationally during the summer.

Braden thought he made the adjustment well enough, starting with this race a year ago and continuing into the spring. At the Jordan Invitational at Stanford on the track in May, he ran 10,000 meters in 28 minutes, 35.36 seconds – a lifetime best by 15 seconds.

“Which was good,” he said, “any other year.”

But in an Olympic year – this Olympic year – 28:35 made him just another guy.

“I don’t think 28:30 has never not gotten someone into the championship race,” Braden said. “The competition always takes a jump every four years, but I also think U.S. distance running has gone to a new level. More people hit the Olympic ‘A’ qualifying standard than any time since the 1970s. You saw Bernard Lagat stepping things up in the middle distances and Galen Rupp and some young guys coming into their own, and older veterans like Abdi Abdirahman and Adam Goucher had a resurgence.”

Braden did try to get in to the Olympic Trials on appeal. His time was 30th on the qualifying list for a field of 24, but Goucher – who was 32nd – had his appeal approved, which created the requisite Trials controversy. Braden was disappointed at being denied, but realistic, too.

“I just told myself I’m not going to put myself in that position again,” he said. “Don’t be on the bubble.”

As for motivation, he can always fall back on the underdog approach that has served him so well throughout his career. Even as a seven-time state champ, he was still well off the beaten running path in Bonners Ferry, which caused countless Northwest schools to overlook him. Likewise, as collegiate distance meccas go, Boise is no Eugene, Boulder or Madison – and yet Braden won seven Western Athletic Conference titles and was an NCAA All-American three times.

If the pedigree is abridged, the confidence is not.

“I feel like I can run with the top guys,” he insisted. “I still have a lot left in me. My 10,000-meter time last year was 12th or 14th in the country – some of the Trials qualifying times came from the year before – so I was up there pretty decent. It’s a motivator, really, to see some of those guys running so good. Galen Rupp has really kind of taken over and I’ve run with him for years. He’s great. But I really look forward to the challenge of trying to get up with those guys.”

It’s the club he really wants to join.