*** THIS IS THE NINTH in a series of 10 local sports stories The Dominion Post believes would make a good sports documentary. They will be posted online every Saturday and Wednesday through July 1.
MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — For an entire year of his life, Eric Ryan raced only against himself and a clock.
By the time he had reached his senior year at Preston High School in 2005, no one else in the state was going to catch him or even stay within reach of Ryan in the 1,600 meters (one mile).
It was him against a state record of 4:17.52 set in 1986 by Morgantown High’s Don DeCarlo.
“The entire year before the state meet my senior year, I still remember posting notes around our house that kept me in line with going for that record,” said Ryan, who is 33 now and working as a structural engineer near Boston. “The notes told me what I had to accomplish that day as far as what workout I had to do or how many workouts I had to do that day. That basically started the summer before and carried into the winter and so on.”
Ryan called it a grind and it truly was, because by the time the track season started, his training was geared toward developing a pace that would carry him around four laps at Charleston’s Laidley Field in 64 seconds or less each time to claim the mark.
“The problem became for the majority of the year leading up to the state meet, I was basically running alone at the other meets,” Ryan said. “It really became frustrating only chasing after times.”
Yet, Ryan’s story of his senior year is not complete without the tale of the one time when the clock mattered as much to him as water does to a cactus.
To get the drama out of the way, yes, Ryan did go on to break that record at the state track meet, a culmination of determination and hard work coming together at the right time.
That is not the moment, though, that Preston High track coach Paul Martin refers to Ryan as “superhuman.”
And that is where we begin to weave this tale, because in West Virginia high school sports, we often get to see the great athletes make their accomplishments look easy.
Rarely are the great ones stuck behind the eight ball and asked to become “superhuman.”
A day before Eric Ryan set the state record in the 1,600, he was asked to become extraordinary.
He had spent an entire season being chased, but this was the one great exception.
A drop and a gasp
The 4×800 meter relay, as well as other individual distance events, has always been a sort of calling card for Martin and how he developed his track teams at Grafton and Preston high schools during his coaching career.
He himself had been a distance runner in high school, which led to Martin running for the WVU men’s track team in the early 1990s.
At the 2005 state track meet, the 4×800 relay was the first event and Martin’s girls’ team of Karly Hamric, Kaylyn Christopher, Hilary McConnell and Jordan Hamric had kicked off the day by setting a Class AAA state record in winning with a time of 9:37.34.
“I was still so pumped by our girls’ performance by the time the boys’ race began,” Martin said. “We were the defending champs in the 4×800 on the boys’ side, so I just remember being really excited to see them go out and go for the sweep.”
As Josh Mullenax began to pull away in the final seconds of Preston’s first leg, it looked like the beginning stages of a sure thing.
“I was sort of back away from the track, but I did see Josh pulling away late,” Ryan remembers. “I couldn’t really see the exchange zone. I didn’t really see what happened next.”
What happened next was pure disaster. Ryan called it “carnage.”
Mullenax and teammate Josh Feather got tied up on the exchange and the baton hit the track and went rolling from Lane 1 all the way into Lane 3.
“I heard the gasp of the crowd,” Ryan said. “Usually when you hear a gasp like that, it’s because someone fell down or something bad had just happened.”
Mullenax desperately ran back to retrieve the baton. In doing so, he now had to avoid to the best of his ability the wave of other runners who were also making their exchanges.
After picking up the baton, Mullenax had to dodge a few more runners and then dove through the air with his arm outreached toward Feather.
As he was in the air, yet another wave of runners were coming through and there was some contact.
It wasn’t exactly a NASCAR pileup, but contact nonetheless.
No harm, no foul, so just keep going
To this day, Martin admits his initial thought was his team was going to be disqualified from the race.
“Honestly, I don’t how they weren’t disqualified,” he said. “At that moment, my heart just sank.”
As to the ruling, The Dominion Post reached out to the head referee of the meet, Dave Hickman.
“You can drop the baton,” Hickman said. “The runner who is charged with the drop has to be the one who goes back and gets it and the exchange still has to be within the exchange zone, which they clearly were.
“As far as impeding the other runners, it is up to the umpire of that race and the head referee on whether or not the other runners were adversely affected. In this case, it didn’t seem like the contact was significant enough. It is purely a judgment call.”
By the time Feather began his leg, the Knights had fallen from first to ninth place (out of 16 teams).
The leading pack was at least 10 seconds ahead as Feather began huffing it around the track, so a disqualification at that point would have seemed to be trivial at best.
Not to Eric Ryan.
“You know, the strange thing about the whole deal was not once did I ever feel a sense of panic,” he said. “That surprised me.”
Then came the miracle
By the time Feather passed the baton to Bryan Hooton for the third leg, the Knights had moved up to sixth place, still well behind the leaders.
Hooton had maintained that spot when he handed off to Ryan.
What happened next can best be described by the YouTube video shown above.
“If you watch the video, there was another runner who went out right next to me and he went out really fast,” Ryan said. “So, I just went out fast with him and then I just tried to keep that same pace.”
Suddenly, Ryan was no longer running alone. The clock that had defined his training and his mental approach to running no longer mattered.
“Honestly, I wish I could tell you there was something I was thinking about, but I don’t remember thinking anything at all,” he said. “You hear about athletes getting in a zone and how they shut everything else out. That’s basically what I did.
“I turned off my head and just raced. I didn’t worry about splits. I just kept my eyes on the leaders and did what I had to do to catch them.”
On his first lap, Ryan had moved the Knights up to fourth place, the three leading runners still four to five seconds ahead of him.
“He just started hunting people down,” Martin said. “Normally, when people go out as hard as Eric did to start his leg, they eventually burn out, but this was Eric Ryan. He really was superhuman.”
The gap began to close. Each stride Ryan took brought him a step closer.
“At that point, I felt like I had nothing to lose,” he said. “It was something like all the stars had aligned together just right or something like that. First place, that’s all I kept looking at.”
In the final turn, Ryan caught the leaders. In the final 100 meters, he began pulling away.
So many times throughout his high school career Ryan had crossed the finish line in first place, but never like this.
His final split in his 800 meters was 1:51.8, according to runwv.com. To put that into context, it is more than two seconds faster than the Class AAA state record that stands today in the individual 800.
The aftermath and a record
To this day, Martin said he is approached occasionally at the state track meet by someone who remembers that race.
In the moments that followed, Ryan said his teammates surrounded him with thanks, but it wasn’t necessary.
“I didn’t feel like I had saved anyone,” Ryan said. “To me, it was still a team thing. Josh Mullenax was already in first place when he dropped the baton. Josh Feather was amazing in the ground he made up. Bryan Hooton was a bulldog for us and never lost any ground.”
The following day, Ryan set out what he had intended to do by breaking the state record in the 1,600.
Again, he did it with some last-lap heroics. He entered the fourth and final lap five seconds off the pace he had worked an entire year to build for himself.
He finished with a record time of 4:14.03, three seconds ahead of DeCarlo’s mark.
“The gun went off for the final lap and that got me going,” he said. “I ran the last lap in 59 seconds to break the record.
“I don’t know, I guess I was just a final-lap kind of guy back then.”
In the years that followed, Ryan ran track at both Cornell and then as a graduate transfer at Tennessee, where he earned all-SEC honors in the 1,500 meters.
He admits now that his accomplishment that day in Charleston in the 4×800 relay had also become a sort of curse.
“I got to a point where I was almost ashamed of myself,” Ryan said. “After doing it that one time, the expectations became so big. It was like, ‘why can’t I do that every time?’ To be honest, I can’t even tell you how I did it the first time. I have no idea how it happened.”
The beauty of this story: Even 15 years later, no one can really explain how Ryan pulled off his comeback run.
Maybe it was former The Dominion Post sports editor Bob Hertzel who summed it up best.
In his column off the race, Hertzel closed with these words:
“I’d say you had to be there to believe it, but that would be a lie,” Hertzel wrote. “I was there. I didn’t believe it.”
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TIED TO HISTORY
In 2009, North Marion’s Zach Tennant broke Eric Ryan’s record in the W.Va. Class AAA 1,600 meters with a time of 4:13.84. In 2011, Cabell Midland’s Jacob Burcham (left/photo by Sholten Singer/The Herald-Dispatch) broke Tennant’s record with a 4:08.80. Burcham, who ran in college at Oklahoma, also holds the Class AAA records in the 800 and 3,200 meters
ALSO IN THE 2005 state track meet, the Preston High girls’ team won the school’s first state track title. It, too, came down to late heroics, with the school’s 4×400 relay team finishing second in the race to narrowly outpoint Jefferson, 60.5-56. In the final 20 meters of the race, Preston’s Karly Hamric outsprinted runners from both Jefferson and John Marshall to secure the team victory. Hamric continued her running career at WVU.
“There was so much going on with the baton drop on the boys’ side in the 4×800 relay to Eric setting the record in the mile and then the girls won the championship in the last event,” Preston coach Paul Martin said. “By the end, I was totally exhausted.”
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