5 Questions with Chris Derrick

Published by the Daily Relay on November 20, 2013

A year after missing out on making Team USA with a fourth-place finish in the 10,000m at the Olympic Trials in Eugene, Chris Derrick fought for third on a hot night in Des Moines to make the plane to Moscow.

That performance was just one of many accomplishments in Derrick’s first full year as a pro. He also finished first in the USA Cross Country Championships and then placed 10th in the subsequent World Cross Country Championships. After an injury limited his pre-Worlds training — he would finish 18th  — Derrick completed the heart of his 2013 season by setting a personal best of 13:08 in the Brussels Diamond League meet in early September.

We sat down with the Stanford alum when he was in New York for the Dash to the Finish Line 5K in early November (he’d finish ninth in 14-flat). Derrick discussed making the World Championships team, that bizarre 5,000m race at USAs, the Stanford-Oregon rivalry and more.

5 Questions with Chris Derrick

What was the 10,000m like at USAs? How did you feel going into it? A lot of people thought there was really only one spot up for grabs and you got it.

Derrick: That’s one of the most high anxiety situations I’ve ever been in — so much building up to just making the team for weeks in advance. It went out really slow, and I had put myself in second, which I think was good, ’cause I didn’t have to look at anyone or think about anybody else — just run really easy for a while. I was there to cover the moves.

And Dathan [Ritzenheim] made the big move. It was definitely tough running, and I looked around — looked at the big screen with a “K” to go — and I saw we had like 40 meters all of a sudden, and that’s the first I knew that it wasn’t five guys in a group. It was just a huge relief at that point. I probably didn’t finish as well as I could have — Jerry [Schumacher] got on me for that: “You can’t just be happy just to make the team.” I was like, “Just this once, can I just be happy to make the team?”

It was a big relief to make the team — a lot of tension building up, especially with how slow it went for so long. It’s always an abrupt transition when you go from real slow like that to picking it up. You don’t feel very good at all. You expect you would feel really fresh.

[Did you work on that transition in training?]

Derrick: We didn’t do that much. We’d work on the constituent parts of that. We did strength work, we did faster stuff and all that kind of stuff.  Maybe earlier in the year we did some tempos, some repeat miles. But that’s something that it’s more just a mental thing. You just have to remind yourself that your body is clearly capable of running this pace, and you need to get into a rhythm and establish that and you’ll be fine. So, that’s what I was able to do. Thankfully, it was the three of us away and clear.

Were you able to watch the 5,000m final a few days later? What did you think of that race and the slow pace in particular?

Derrick: I was on the backstretch, obviously supporting teammates. To be honest, it was a little ridiculous, as a spectator and someone who wants to see the sport be entertaining. When they’re running that slow, it’s just like, oh, c’mon, it looks so bad. The last mile was always gonna be really exciting. From my perspective, I mean I knew a couple guys that maybe thought could have benefited from actually trying to start faster. From being in that situation previously, it’s hard to fault someone for not wanting to take on people. Sometimes people don’t understand quite as much that, at this level, the margins between people are so small. The difference between, maybe not first and eighth, but third and eighth is not very big, and so when you’re younger and you’re in high school or even college, the gaps are bigger and you can get away with the small disadvantage of being the leader and pushing the pace a little more. But as the gaps get smaller, the punishment is greater, especially in a 5K where true hard 5K pace is a very fine line. It’s really hard to push other people to that line and not go over it yourself, so in the end what you end up with is a lot of long runs for home — Ben True from a mile out. Ideally, for the optics of it all, you’d like to see it not go out in 70 seconds. But it’s just kind of what happens. No one’s going to go out and do 63s, so you hope they do 66s.