Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

Clyde Hart, 73, has coached track for 50 years, and the longtime Baylor coach is the acknowleged guru of the 400. Michael Johnson won two Olympic gold medals in the event with Hart's coaching. Johnson retired in 2001, but three years later Hart had another Olympic 400-meter champion - Jeremy Wariner.

The 23-year-old Wariner is a favorite to win the event at this year's world championships and next year's Olympics in Beijing. He's also closing in on Johnson's world record.

Hart also coaches Sonya Richards, a former University of Texas sprinter who is the world's top female 400-meter runner.

Hart spoke about the event, his athletes and why he keeps going in his 70s before a recent workout at Baylor. Excerpts:

How did you become the guru of the 400?

If you study track, you'll notice something immediately: The track is 400 meters around, so it's got to be important. The 400 plays a big part in track and field. To build a track program, you can do so many things with 400 runners.

If you want to have a successful track team, that's a good place to start, because 400 runners can drop down and run the 200, those guys can be made into intermediate hurdlers, they can go the 800, they can run on relays, it's a good place to build. When you get a shot putter, if they can't make it in the shot, they're probably not going to make it.

How did you revolutionize coaching the 400?

When you've been at this business as long as I have, you're going to get better. I really believe I'm a better coach today than I was last year and the year before. I think if Michael were running today, he would be running faster than he did in 1999. It should be that way. I'm continuing to learn.

You learn from your athletes. Our lab is the track. We aren't able to bring a kid in every day and put them on a treadmill or hook them up and draw blood to test them. We observe them as coaches. You gradually eliminate those things you feel like they don't work and keep those things that work. We don't make drastic changes, but we make subtle changes every year.

I train my 400 people today more like I trained my 800 and 1,500 runners 20 years ago. I think there's a lot of misinformation on the 400. I think training for the 400, the demands are different than we thought. The 400 is a sprint-type event, but it doesn't necessarily have to be trained like a sprint event. The aerobic capacity (in training) is greater in the 400 than people ever thought it was. They thought the majority of it was anaerobic running, and it really isn't.

You teach your athletes pace by training them with a machine that beeps. Explain your concept of pace in the 400.

The race starts at 200 meters. The first 200 sets up the race. You want to hit a certain speed, come through there, and then you make your moves. If you're going to make a mistake, I'd rather a young man come through in 21.5 than 20.5, because you don't find a chair over there (at 200 meters) where you can stop and rest. We've got a saying, you don't fool Mother Nature. If you go through (200) too fast, the party's probably over.

When Michael set the world record (43.18), it was basically 21-22. Michael was like in fourth place (at 200), maybe fifth. The others were going out at 20.8, 20.9, which was ludicrous. None of them broke 44. It's because they didn't run their own race.

Your training programs are out there for other coaches to follow. Does that bother you?

It's been published all over the world. I have no problem with that at all. It used to worry my athletes. I remember Michael asking one time, "Coach, do we want people to know what we're doing?" I said, "Michael, there's no secrets out there. The things you're doing, I stole from somebody else. We refined it, we changed it.

We're not like football coaches who lock up their playbook. Track and field is a universal sport. You want people to improve. You certainly want your kids to win, but I've never known a track coach that wouldn't share information.

Training programs are great, but you've got to have somebody who's experienced, who knows where to make changes. You've got to be able to interpret it and apply it to your own athletes.

Compare Jeremy Wariner and Michael Johnson coming out of high school.

Jeremy was a much more highly recruited athlete. Michael never won a state championship in Texas, he was second. The young man who beat Michael, Derrick Florence, went on to win U.S. Juniors and the world juniors. He went to a neighboring school south of us and he never beat Michael when they became freshmen. We recruited Derrick. He committed to us, and at the last minute we couldn't find him to sign him. I got to thinking, I need a relay man, we're short. I remembered Michael, so I headed straight to Dallas. We felt he'd give us some help on the relay team immediately. He not only did that, the rest is history.

Jeremy was the Texas high school champion in the 200 and the 400. He had the second or third fastest time as a schoolboy in the 400 (in the nation) and the fastest time in the 200.

You thought you'd retire when Johnson retired, but then Jeremy came along. How much longer do you expect to coach?

I'm committed to this next Olympics and we'll play it by ear after that. I don't really have anything else to do, to be honest. I'm not very good at golf. If I was better at golf, I might think about (retiring). As long as I'm healthy and happy I'm going to continue coaching. I enjoy it, and I think working with young people keeps you young.

Waco, Texas - The man who coaches Jeremy Wariner, the world's greatest white sprinter, was once a pretty fair country sprinter himself. And when Clyde Hart says skin color has little to do with success as a sprinter, he harkens back to his boyhood in segregated Hot Springs, Ark., in the 1950s.

In those days, Hart ran with Bobby Mitchell, who had a Hall of Fame career in the NFL and set a world indoor record for the 70-meter hurdles. Neither had a track or a coach in high school, so they trained by racing each other.

"He was the state champion in the black school division and I was the state champion in the white," said Hart, Baylor's guru of the 400 meters who coached Michael Johnson to three individual Olympic gold medals in the 200 and 400 and world records in both events. "We never raced officially. We would run until one of us would say uncle. He never beat me."

Decades later, Mitchell spotted Hart in the audience at a speaking engagement, pointed to him and said: "That's the only white guy who ever outran me."

Color irrelevant

No wonder Wariner, the reigning Olympic and world champion in the 400 who just might break Johnson's world record this year, doesn't think of his skin color as a disadvantage.

"I don't see that," Wariner said before a workout at the Baylor track this spring. "I'm an athlete, they're an athlete, we're all trying to do the same things. The only hurdle I had, my first hurdle was trying to get under 45 (seconds), the next one was getting under 44. My next hurdle is to get under 43.

"I don't see, 'The first white to do this, the first white to do that."'

Others do, though.

"I've never seen a white man run that fast," Grenada's Alleyne Francique told reporters after finishing fourth in the race Wariner won at the 2004 Athens Olympics. "It was a blazing race, man. The kid is good."

So good only three men in history have run faster than the 43.62 he ran last summer at age 22. So good he became an Olympic champion before turning professional. So good he's closing in on Johnson's world record of 43.18, set at the 1999 world championships when Johnson was 31.

All in the family

On May 5, Wariner ran 44.02 - the fastest time run in May, when sprinters are just gearing up for the season - on the track in Japan where the world championships will be held in August. He said he hopes to break the record when he returns.

If he does, at least the record will stay within the circle of men who helped forge it. Not only do Wariner and Johnson have Hart's coaching in common, but Johnson is Wariner's agent.

Hart doesn't deny successful white sprinters are unusual today.

"I think the black athlete in our country has taken advantage of the opportunities to get their education (through track), while a lot of our white athletes are on the computer, they're driving their cars, they're playing golf," Hart said. "I don't think there's any physical reason. I think the white athlete is not as hungry as they used to be."

Football first

Wariner demonstrated exceptional speed at a young age. Growing up in Arlington, Texas, he played everything - soccer, baseball, basketball, football, roller hockey - often changing clothes in the back seat of his mother's car on the way from one practice to another.

"Playing soccer when I was a little kid, I was always running down the field before everybody else," Wariner said. "Playing basketball, I was always too fast to do a layup - I was always missing them because I couldn't get the rhythm down for a while."

Wariner's mother, Linda, has some Cherokee blood in her ancestry and believes that's where Jeremy got his speed.

"As early as the fifth grade, somebody noticed how smooth his stride was," Linda said. "They said, 'Your son runs like an antelope."'

As with any true Texan, football was Wariner's first love. In the living room of his parents' home in Arlington is a picture of him getting blown up by a defensive back after making a catch for Lamar High School in a state playoff game at Texas Stadium. Wariner had dreams of playing college football and attracted scholarship feelers, but he was as frail as he was fast, so he decided to concentrate on track after winning the 200 and 400 at the state meet his senior year. He weighed 145 pounds.

"Yeah, I miss it," said the 6-foot-1 Wariner, who weighs 150 now. "Everyone who plays high school football in the state of Texas and stops, they're always going to miss it."

Fast company

Baylor was the perfect place for Wariner because of Hart's knack for coaching the 400. After seeing what Hart did for Johnson, Wariner and Darold Williamson, another world class 400-meter runner from Baylor, former University of Texas sprinter Sonya Richards asked Hart to coach her. Last year she became the world's top female quarter-miler.

"Penn State University, they're known as Linebacker U.," said Hart, who is in his 50th year of coaching. "We're known as Quarter-Miler U."

Wariner emerged on the world scene as a Baylor sophomore, putting up times that transformed him from phenom to Olympic favorite in mere months.

"We were just hoping he'd make the relay team," said Wariner's father, Danny. "But as we got closer and closer to the (Olympic) trials, with the way he was running, 'He's got a chance.' When he dominated at the trials, then all of a sudden you're thinking, 'Now he's going to Athens, and there isn't anyone there he can't beat."'

Wariner won the Olympics in 44-flat, the fastest time in the world that year, and claimed a second gold medal in the 1,600-meter relay.

"It didn't hit me until I got home about a week later, when I realized I was going to be turning professional," Wariner said. "I was like, 'I guess I won't be wearing the (Baylor) green and gold no more."'

Wariner says he always believed he could run with anyone, regardless of color.

"And I think that's how a lot of the young kids growing up should feel," Wariner said, "that they can do anything anybody else is doing."

Wariner's father can hardly believe his son is running on the heels of Johnson, one of the greatest stars in track history.

"Michael is a hero to me," Danny Wariner said. "To think Jeremy is just right there ... that's amazing."
Fast, faster, fastest

Best all-time marks in the 400 meters:

(Time Runner Year Age)

43.18 Michael Johnson 1999 31

43.29 Butch Reynolds 1988 24

43.39 Johnson 1995 27

43.44 Johnson 1996 28

43.49 Johnson 1996 28

43.50 Quincy Watts 1992 22

43.62 Jeremy Wariner 2006 22

Note: Johnson didn't go under 44 seconds until he was 24 years old.