Abdihamid Nur: Altitude & Elevation

 

A DyeStat story by Dave Devine

“Go crazy!”

 — Abdihamid Nur, freshman, Northern Arizona University

2019 Wisconsin Nuttycombe Invitational

_______________

 

Abdihamid Nur said it during the race.

Or he didn’t.

He can’t be certain.

Sometimes, he acknowledges, he gets hyped mid-race, calling out to teammates in the heat of competition — an encouragement or a rallying cry — and then forgets about it later. A memory that slips underfoot. Something fleeting, like the countless miles his team has covered over the last few months. 

So, it’s up for debate.

The other guys on the Northern Arizona University cross country squad are fairly certain about it. Drew Bosley, the true freshman who was surging at that point in the 2019 Wisconsin Nuttycombe Invitational — he heard it.

Geordie Beamish, who would eventually front the Lumberjacks to their fourth straight Nuttycombe title, and number-two-man Luis Grijalva, they heard it.

And Theo Quax, fourth for NAU that day — he, too, recalls Nur encouraging the team to make a collective move. Or the team making a collective move on the heels of Nur’s contagious enthusiasm. Either way, a lit fuse.

A communal gear-shift. 

“All the boys just got really excited,” Quax admits with a chuckle.

After that, the 8-kilometer competition, featuring some of the nation’s best collegiate teams, became what the New Zealander termed “a proper race.”

And Northern Arizona, season-long No. 1 in the USTFCCCA coaches’ poll, won that race handily, scoring 59 points to runner-up — and then-US#5 — Stanford’s 133.

Crazy, right?

Nur concedes with a laugh that it certainly sounds like something he’d say — “If someone has energy, or does something that needs to be recognized, I’ll say, ‘Go crazy!’” — but in his admittedly shaky recollection, he insists he didn’t mean the entire team, just Bosley.

A Wisconsin native who prepped at Homestead High in Mequon, 90 miles east of Madison, Bosley had mustered a big move at that point in the race. A fitting homecoming in front of family and friends.

“And he’s a true freshman,” Nur enthuses. “I just thought that was a gutsy move, so I probably said, ‘Go crazy!’ And that’s when two other teammates heard me and we all started moving up. We had five or six guys in the front group almost right away.”

If it all felt a bit impulsive in retrospect, unnecessarily risky at that point in the race, the surge and eventual 16-second scoring compression also revealed something essential about this Lumberjack team.

They thrive on connection and accountability.

Simultaneously loose and focused.

They crave, by their own admission, the experience of seeking out teammates in the crowded pack — that moment in the race when they can glance left or right and see a friend hurting. Reassured by the knowledge that they’ve been there before, numerous times, on trails and roads 7,000 feet up, rolling as a unit through their Flagstaff proving grounds.

“Our guys are so close,” NAU head coach Mike Smith says, “and it’s not in the superficial ways that a lot of people find in bonding at this age, it’s from the commonality of what they’re chasing.”

When the Lumberjacks surge, they surge together.   

And Nur, in only his first season wearing an NAU kit, has become an important cog in that culture.

“That goofiness we have around each other,” he says, “once that gun goes off, it changes to the serious group of guys we are. We don’t want to take a loss for NAU. We can flip that switch really fast when it comes to racing.”

 

“I like being underrated, because when I show up at a meet they’re like, Damn, where’d this kid come from?”

 

– Abdihamid Nur, senior, North High, Phoenix, Ariz.

2016 Desert Twilight Festival post-race interview

It’s a fair question.

Where did this kid come from?

It’s one that Smith has fielded more than a few times over the last several months, ever since Nur burst into the Lumberjack top seven right out of the gate. 

The inquiry might come from colleagues or fellow coaches, NAU supporters or alums, curious fans that take one look at Nur’s name, maybe note the country of origin on his NAU Athletics bio, and wonder aloud whether Smith snagged an unheralded international recruit. 

“No,” Smith says, betraying a hint of weariness for the question. “We recruited a guy that we thought was a great athlete in the state. We knew him because he was local.”

Which is one answer: Nur came from North High School in Phoenix, where he was an Arizona Division 1 state cross country champion in the fall of 2016. 

But the answer shifts, depending on where you are.

Or when you’re asking.

If you’re at Flagstaff’s Coconino Community College in summer 2017, the answer is that Abdihamid came from 145 miles south on I-17, in downtown Phoenix.

But if you’re a high schooler at North High in the fall of 2013, hanging around the soccer field when a skinny, unfamiliar freshman shows up for tryouts, the answer is that he came from Minnesota.

A place he and his family left to get away from the cold.

But if you want the full answer, if you really want to know where this gregarious, conscientious, whip-smart kid came from, then you’ll need to open Google Maps.

And get ready to drop quite a few pins.

Abdihamid H. Nur was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, but his family left for Kenya while he was still an infant. His mother owned a shop there, something Nur remembers quite clearly. He was there from the age of 1 to 4, before moving again — this time to Cairo, Egypt. The family lived there until Abdihamid was 8 years old.

The next move, in 2006, was to the United States, where Nur’s family landed in Minnesota.

“That was that a cold state,” Nur says. “A real switch from living in Egypt.”

He has extended family in Minnesota, including an uncle that Abdihamid jokingly says, “warned us what we were getting into.” 

Unlike some immigrant families, arriving to a frigid northern state only to be stunned by the single-digit temperatures, Nur and his siblings were greeted at the airport by that same uncle, bearing a load of winter clothing.

“He had hats, gloves and coats waiting for us,” Nur says, still sounding appreciative.

But if the cold was an adjustment, the language barrier — at least initially — was an even steeper hurdle. 

“The biggest difference,” Nur says, “was not speaking the language and coming to a place where you don’t know anybody.” 

He soon found both companionship and a makeshift classroom in one of the few places that felt familiar in this new country — the soccer pitch. If Abdihamid wanted the ball passed to him, he’d have to learn how to call for it. If he wanted to get in the game, he’d need to ask the coach for minutes.

Nur proved an apt pupil.

“Learning to communicate in sports,” he says, “you have to learn the language quick.”

When the family moved again, this time to Phoenix before the start of his freshman year of high school — “My mom was tired of the cold,” Nur says — he continued his burgeoning soccer career until a car accident sophomore year left him seriously injured.

He missed the entire soccer season and three months of school.  

“It was a really bad time for me.”

After a lengthy recovery, Nur was eager to return to the pitch in the best shape possible for the start of junior year, so he turned to cross country to improve his fitness.

“I wanted to do everything I could to play soccer at the same level I was at before the accident,” he says, “so I took on cross country and it ended up being really good for me.”

After some promising early results, the coaches at North assured Nur he had a future in the sport if he made a full commitment to running. But letting go of soccer proved no easy decision. The sport was woven into the memories of every place he’d ever lived, entwined into the family in which he’d been raised. 

“Soccer was something I grew up loving,” he says. “Something my whole family did — all my brothers played — so for me to quit soccer, it sounded crazy.”

He ran track that spring, somewhat indifferently, heart still aching for his childhood sport.

Finally, in the summer of 2016, as he angled toward senior year, Abdihamid fully invested in becoming a runner. 

“Once I committed,” he says, “and I started seeing results, I knew I’d made the right decision.”

His coming-out party was the Nike Desert Twilight Invitational, where he ran 15:45 to win the second-tier Championship race, after being left out of the Sweepstakes event.

A month later, he was the Arizona Division 1 state champion, beating several top finishers from that same Sweepstakes race. 

“That opened opportunities for me with colleges,” Nur says. “A lot of them started calling after that.”

 

“Coming here, you know everyone is good. So, you can’t have an off day or be goofing around.”

— Abdihamid Nur, two days before the 2019 NCAA Mountain Regional

The first cross country meet Nur ever ran was in Flagstaff.

The North High coaches took the junior soccer player on a two-and-a-half-hour road trip to the Four Corners Invitational at Buffalo Park, less than 3 miles from the NAU campus.

But if there were any Northern Arizona coaches in attendance that day, they likely wouldn’t have noticed the lanky newcomer scrapping his way to a solid 18:15 third-place finish — in the JV race.

A year later, he returned as a senior to claim sixth overall, dropping a much-improved 16:22. At that point, he was already on NAU’s radar, if only faintly. Smith and his staff had met Nur at a summer running camp the Lumberjacks hosted.  

“We instantly saw a guy with a ton of potential,” Smith recalls, “but he honestly hadn’t done a lot.”

The state title Nur won that fall certainly moved the needle, but he didn’t come close to qualifying for the Foot Locker final, and the following spring his senior track PR’s hovered in the 4:20’s for 1,600 meters and the upper-9:20’s for 3,200.

Smith continued to stay in touch, but both he and Nur acknowledged there was an assortment of obstacles — academic, financial and athletic — if the promising 2017 graduate was going to join the Lumberjacks.

“The best I could do,” Smith says, “was to paint the picture of all the things that would have to happen in order for him to run for us in college. I thought it was probably a long shot, but he really wanted this.”

Since Nur didn’t qualify academically for NAU right away, he enrolled at Flagstaff’s Coconino Community College and immediately began drilling into academics.

“That first year,” he says, “I just focused on getting into NAU and getting my grades right.”

Running became secondary as he adjusted to college courses, living on his own in a new city, and the challenges of training without a team or coach.

“I just trained completely on my own, because I couldn’t train with (NAU),” he says. “Being an Arizona kid, I had friends in town, so I trained with them off campus.”

He and Smith remained in occasional contact, Smith continuing to paint the picture: “I’d tell him, ‘Look, you’re trying to run, not just for any team in college, you’re trying to join one of the strongest programs in the country right now. If you think 40 miles a week is a lot right now, you’re going to have to figure out how to double that.”

The isolation, and the gap between his abilities and the standard he was attempting to reach, offered copious space for doubt to creep in. Sometimes Nur would cross paths with the NAU squad on a trail or a road loop, and marvel at the ease with which the team was attacking the miles.

“Flagstaff is a small town,” he says, “so I would see the work they were putting in, the results they were getting, and it scared me sometimes. Like, ‘I don’t know if I can be part of that. I don’t know if I can run with this squad or make their team. Forget making the top seven, just making the roster.”

In the spring of 2018, Nur learned he was still a non-qualifier according to NCAA standards, which meant another year on his own, another year without joining the Lumberjacks. But what might have been a setback for some, sufficient cause to abandon the dream altogether, became an opportunity for Abdihamid.

The additional year offered a longer runway to build his fitness and improve his grades. Twelve more months for the Phoenix kid to ramp up his miles and adjust to altitude.

The thought of NAU remained aspirational — the vision of who he wanted to be, shaped by who he already was. All the things that had formed him.

Watching his mom run that shop in Kenya.

The uncle, waiting with winter clothing. Gratitude and generosity.

The move to Phoenix. The car accident.

Older brothers, encouraging him in soccer.

The fabric of a family, the ways he missed that in his Flagstaff apartment.

He saw all of it in the tightness of the team at NAU. It made those two years harder, in some ways, but it also prepared him to be ready when his moment came. 

“That helped me keep my focus,” he says, “thinking I could definitely be part of this.”

Once his grades were up to par and he’d been ruled a qualifier by the NCAA, Nur reached out to Smith again.

Fully accepted and enrolled at NAU, he was finally able to begin training with the team in summer 2019.

Smith started him slowly, uncertain of what his new addition could handle. How much he’d been able to close the gap in the previous year.

But Nur came in ready. 

“He was immediately, almost out of pure will, wanting to train with our top guys,” Smith says.

Returning All-American and rising junior Luis Grijalva was on campus all summer, and Nur glommed onto him as a training partner and mentor. 

“Luis is one of the top runners in the nation,” Nur says. “The work that he put in, the character that he has, really motivated me. He’s like a big brother to me.” 

Grijalva was grinding out 90 to 100 miles a week; Nur managed 80 to 90.

He recalls one particular workout the two completed together, a series of one-mile repeats, when he was stunned to find himself on Grijalva’s shoulder at the end of the session.   

“That was a big one,” Nur says. “It was like, ‘Wow, if I can keep up with this, I can crack the top seven.’ It gradually became a reality.”

Smith recalls a similar thought, watching Nur tuck into the lead group as they streamed past on a fartlek:

Dang, he’s hanging. He’s actually keeping up.

If the running was going well, the team cohesion was going even better.

“My personality really meshed well with a lot of the guys on the team,” Nur says, “so it didn’t take long for us to have that connection everybody sees now.”

It’s a team, he says, that reminds each other what they’re working toward. One that focuses on the moment, the blessing of this thing they get to do together.

“It’s a genuine chemistry,” he says, “a genuine flow. It’s not forced upon us by Coach, it’s just something we bring out of each other.”

That chemistry was on full display Nov. 15 at the NCAA Mountain Regional in Salt Lake City, where the Lumberjacks swept the top three spots behind Beamish’s 30:25 victory, placing five scorers in the top nine to claim a fourth consecutive regional title for NAU, 21-53 over Colorado.

Nur ran as the number four man, crossing in 30:39 for sixth place.

“Abdihamid is someone who had to really work for this,” Smith says. “You can’t do what he’s done without great ownership of the process.”

All of which leads back to a certain moment at the Nuttycombe Invitational, about five kilometers into that October race.

A playful shout and a collective surge forward.

“I was just having fun with the moment,” Nur says. “And seeing Drew do that, show up in his home state like that, it made me really happy because he’s a hard-working kid who’s come a long way.”

Like many young harriers, Nur knows he can still be coltish at times.

Occasionally impulsive and full of run.

He’s learning, under Smith’s tutelage, to balance passion and enthusiasm with self-control and circumspection. That essential, big-race skill of running within yourself.

“That was something I had to learn,” he says, “coming here to NAU — how to control your emotions. And that’s not even just during the race, but also before the race, the whole day before…I had to learn to focus on the moment, letting the race come when the race comes.”

Go crazy, maybe. But not too crazy.

“You want to have something saved for that last 2k.”

He’s well aware that races — especially NCAA championship races — are decided in those closing kilometers. He wants to be the one who’s ready to move when the team surges forward. He looks forward to that moment, late in the race, when the Lumberjacks glance around and find each other, drawing strength from proximity.

That sense of accountability and cohesion.

“You look over and Brody’s working that hard?” he says. “Theo’s working hard? It means I should be working hard and pushing it as hard as they are. Cross country is a team event. Nobody is going to remember what place I got, what place Luis got, they’re just going to remember the whole team and say, ‘They won a title together. They were the strongest team in the country.’”

If, in fact, that title comes for the Lumberjack men Nov. 23, it will be a record-tying fourth straight trophy for NAU, matching the success of UTEP (1978-81) and Arkansas (1990-93) as the only Division 1 men’s programs to win four in a row. And if Nur can help lead that podium charge, it will mark the culmination of a remarkable climb from promising Phoenix harrier to NAU top seven.

But there’s already a sense, even now, that in the ponderosa sprawl of Flagstaff, in the altitude and high desert of northern Arizona, he’s found a path to elevation.

Not just for himself, but for his teammates, as well. 

“There’s no doubt,” Smith says, “Abdihamid is somebody that elevates everyone around him.”