Ryan Hill Finds His Identity

Published by Running Times on December 17, 2013

As a child, Hill's sport of choice was baseball, but he soon realized he wasn't big enough to be competitive on the diamond. At age 12, in the summer before seventh grade, he turned to an athletic strength. "I was always good at the mile run in school, so it just seemed natural to try and run track," Hill says.

Although he had speed, Hill quickly discovered that the longer the race, the more competitive he was. By the time he graduated from Hickory High School, not only had he won the Foot Locker South Regional title, but he had also won two North Carolina championships on the track at 1600m and 3200m.

When he got to North Carolina State University and the program headed by famed coach Rollie Geiger, Hill continued to excel at middle to long distances. He was a 10-time All-American in cross country and indoor and outdoor track, and he won seven Atlantic Coast Conference titles at distances from 1500m to 10,000m.

But for a long time, Hill was reluctant to give up the more prestigious event--the 1500m/mile--in favor of his best distance, the 5,000m, so he allowed himself to continue straddling both.

"From an athlete's point of view, you want to do the events that are the most popular and have the most notoriety," Hill says. "For a track and field athlete, that's the mile. I think that goes back to more of a cultural thing. A lot of kids run the mile in school, and you can then relate to the mile for the rest of your life because of those early experiences. So you have guys who want to be milers even though, maybe, that is not their best event. I absolutely fell into that trap."

Hill had an epiphany of sorts at the 2012 U.S. Olympic trials before the start of his senior year, when he finished fifth in the 5,000m in 13:27.49. The clincher came during the summer of 2013. Hill finished third at the U.S. outdoor championships in Des Moines in June, ran a personal-best 13:14.22 for a 10th-place finish in Heusden, Belgium, in July, and then clocked 13:32.69 to place 10th in the world championships final in Moscow in August. It was his first time making a national team.