By Peter Gambaccini

Photos by Victah Sailer

Nick Willis of New Zealand was the 2008 Olympic 1500-meter bronze medalist - though after the case of apparent 1500 winner Rashid Ramzi of Bahrain, who is reported to have tested positive for a banned  substance, is adjudicated, Willis is likely to become the silver medalist. In the 2009 indoor track season, Willis was second at the Wanamaker Mile at the Millrose Games in New York in 3:59.48 and then won the mile at the Reebok Boston Indoor Games in 3:53.54 and at the Tyson Invitational in Arkansas in 4:02.70. He then hoped to race outdoors in New Zealand and Australia, but an injury scuttled those plans. Willis won the 2008 Continental Airlines Fifth Avenue Mile in New York in 3:50.5. He was the 1500-meter gold medalist at the 2006 Commonwealth Games. He holds the New Zealand 1500-meter record of 3:32.17 and is second on the country’s mile list (after John Walker) with a 3:50.66. While competing for the University of Michigan and Coach Ron Warhurst, he won the mile at the 2005 NCAA Indoor Championships and was a member of two NCAA Indoor Distance Medley Relay champion quartets. Willis, who still spends much of the year in Michigan, had hip surgery for a labreal tear on April 10 and missed the 2009 outdoor track season, including the World Championships. Willis and his family are involved with a running travel venture called Kiwirun Tours (www.kiwirun.com), which he discusses below.

You obviously had a great 2008 with an Olympic medal, and came and won the Fifth Avenue Mile, and then started off the 2009 indoor season so well. And watching you and talking to you, I thought "this guy is wearing all of this very well. He's enjoying his success, traveling with his wife, he's so at ease with himself, it's like a charmed life right now." Things changed, didn't they?
Nick Willis: Yeah. as you said, things were going well and we were just enjoying every moment of it, both the running and the travel, and just savoring every opportunity that we had, really. And then when I was back in New Zealand getting ready for a couple of races that we'd helped promote to encourage the sport in my country to grow back to some of the loftier heights that it once was at, I pulled up lame with my hip, and I found out seven weeks later that I needed to get surgery. So that threw a bit of a wrench into the works, so to speak. It was a trying time. By the end of June, I was starting to slowly jog again. I was trying to decide whether I was going to make a late campaign to get ready for the end of the outdoor season, if was going to have a go at Berlin (the World Championships) or maybe some of the meets afterward.