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Back To Balboa: Four-Timer Graydon Morris Joins Exclusive Club At Foot Locker

Published by
DyeStat.com   Dec 10th 2019, 11:40pm
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Graydon Morris: Back to Balboa

Texas star becomes second male athlete to qualify four times to Foot Locker

 

A DyeStat Story by Dave Devine

Before every race, Graydon Morris quietly mulls a quote from one of history’s greatest distance runners.

Whether jogging his warm-up, moving through stretches or shaking out on the starting line, the high school senior cycles through a single sentence until it devolves, inside his head, toward something like a mantra.

A refrain to center him. A way to quiet his renegade nerves.

A path inward.

The words belong to marathoner Eliud Kipchoge:

If you don’t rule your mind, your mind will rule you.

For Morris, the sentence is a steadying factor, meant to steel him for the discomfort he expects in the coming miles.

“The mental side of running is so big,” he says, “arguably bigger than the physical part.”

A runner since second grade, Morris has increasingly come to appreciate the mental aspect of the sport after long stretches when that piece broke down for him. Years when doubt crowded out confidence, brain overthrew body, and the prospect of a race rendered him so anxious he’d vomit before competitions.

Time, experience and the kind of perspective offered by Kipchoge’s quote have brought him to a better place.

“I’ve learned how to control my mind better,” he says. “I say that quote to remind myself to calm down, that I’ve done all the work leading up to this point. Let everything else fall into place.”

Torres
Four.

In the 40-year history of the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships, there have been 24 girls that qualified for the national meet in all four years of high school.

Among them are Olympians like Cathy (Schiro) O’Brien and Deena (Drossin) Kastor, as well as current pro standouts like Marie “Mel” Lawrence, Jordan Hasay, Emily Sisson and Jessica Tonn.

Young women from every era of the meet — 1980’s through the 2010’s.

In that same time period, from the nascent Kinney days to the current Foot Locker branding, races staged in San Diego and Orlando and back to San Diego, exactly one high school boy had been able to accomplish the same thing.

Jorge Torres, representing Wheeling, Illinois, from 1995 to 1998, cemented an enduring, seemingly unassailable claim, as the only four-time Foot Locker qualifier on the boys’ side.

Until now.

When Aledo, Texas, senior Graydon Morris toes the line in San Diego’s Balboa Park on Saturday morning, Dec. 14, it will mark his fourth consecutive trip to the Foot Locker final.

For an event that provides a single, ruthlessly objective means of entry — qualifying as a top 10 finisher in one of four hotly contested regional competitions — a national meet in which even one qualification amounts to a realization of years’ worth of dreams and diligence, making four final appearances is a remarkable feat. 

The margin for error is so narrow, the aperture so slender on any given day, that to effectively manage all the variables — health and fitness, competition and course conditions — in multiple years, is outstanding.

To do it four times, on four distinct days, over four years, is something else altogether.

When he allows himself to consider the achievement, which isn’t often, Morris admits he didn’t imagine it was possible when the 2016 Foot Locker South regional got underway his freshman year.

Coming off a third-place finish in the Texas 5A state cross country meet, he was primarily seeking experience for future years.

“Going into the race freshman year,” he says, “I didn’t really think I had a shot of making (the championship) at all, then I just started counting places.”

He soon realized he was in the top 15, and if he moved up slightly in the final half mile he’d have a chance at a ticket to San Diego.

Advancing four places in the final kilometer, the frosh soared home to claim seventh, one of five Texans, including eventual national champion Reed Brown, moving on to the final. 

“Every year,” Morris says, “my approach to Regionals has been focused — not on the win — it’s literally been, Come in the top 10. All you’ve got to do is qualify.”

He spends time glancing around; counting places and checking position; noting who’s behind him; their capacity for a kick; the ways that might impact the final, frantic rush to the line.

“Just making sure I’m in a good place with about 200 meters left,” he says. “That’s usually where I make my move to make certain I’m in for sure.”

This year, during his fourth visit to Charlotte, North Carolina’s McAlpine Park for the South regional, Morris felt more comfortable than he ever has before. More convinced, after some adjustments to his training this season, that there were reserves in the tank if he needed them.

Gears he didn’t need to touch.

“I just felt like I was able to relax a little more,” he says.

Jorge Torres, two decades after becoming the first four-time qualifier on the boys’ side, remembers a similar feeling.

Currently a Boston-based sports agent with Global Athletics and Marketing, Torres recalls the confidence he carried into his senior campaign, a poise honed by fitness and familiarity with the regional meet.

But he also has vivid memories of uncertainty around his fledgling attempt as a ninth grader in 1995. How the four-peat almost didn’t happen, because he nearly skipped his first national meet.

Torres and his twin brother, Eduardo, were talented youth runners on their Prospect Heights club team at the time, with little concept of Foot Locker or its national prominence.

“We always had this vision as a team to qualify to USATF Junior Nationals and win the team title there,” Torres says now. “My coach, on the other hand, had a different vision.”

When Torres advanced to the Foot Locker final as a freshman out of the Midwest, he planned to bypass the San Diego trip for a run at the Junior National title with his clubmates, but Coach Greg Fedyski convinced him of the significance of the race in California.  

“He was like, ‘I don’t think so. You’re going to Foot Locker.’”

Once Torres absorbed the full Foot Locker experience, the stay at the lavish Hotel del Coronado and the complimentary gear, the elite race and the professional athletes on hand, he was sold on returning as often as possible for the remainder of his high school career.

“I got a taste, for the first time, of what it was like to be at the national level,” he says, “and what Foot Locker actually meant.”

Torres placed 13th that freshman year, followed by finishes of fifth as a sophomore, second as a junior, and a national title to crown his senior season.

His successor, Morris, has had a similarly impressive run.

After a self-described “overwhelmed” performance in 34th place his freshman year, Morris returned as a 10th grader for an eye-popping runner-up finish, then crossed in third place as a junior to prove the big sophomore run was no fluke.

Although the two have never met, Torres has followed Morris’ career and acknowledges, with the perspective of 20 years, the rare air the young Texan now occupies.

“Looking back at being able to qualify four times,” Torres says, “I knew it was kind of special then, but not really to what extent.”

Grayd1 

Three.

Third place in his third trip to San Diego — after the sterling runner-up finish as a sophomore, some might have viewed the modest slide backward as a letdown, but not Morris.

He knew everything he’d gone through just to make it to San Diego last fall.

A stress reaction in his knee during the summer heading into 11th grade meant reduced mileage, a heavy dose of cross-training, and a re-framing of goals for the 2018 season.

After a season of often uncomfortable racing, he arrived at Foot Locker South with another Texas 5A state cross country title, but uncertainty surrounding his fitness.

McAlpine Park was familiar ground, but cold temperatures and a drenched course didn’t necessarily play to his strengths.

Then he was badly spiked just as the gun went off.

“Right off the line,” Morris recalls, “I felt a sharp, stinging pain in my Achilles area, but I never looked down because I was so worried about getting out.”

As the race progressed, he felt an unfamiliar hitch that he tried to ignore, an imbalance that left his right foot repeatedly clipping his left knee with each stride.

He powered on, deploying his typical Regional approach: glance around, count heads, cover moves, leave something in reserve for the big push to the finish.

Only this time, the glancing around delivered troubling news.

With 400 meters to go, Morris found himself sitting no better than 13th.

“I was definitely scared I wasn’t going to make it back at that point,” he says.

Digging deep, he found the reserves to rally home a struggling eighth — through to San Diego again, but not exactly brimming with the confidence of a three-time national qualifier.

“When I crossed the finish line and looked down, my ankle was all bloody, and I was like, ‘That is not good.’”

He had two weeks to prepare for Balboa Park.

Arriving in San Diego, Morris acknowledged feeling pressure as the top returner in the field, an expectation to claim the Foot Locker laurels he wasn’t certain he could meet.

There had been the stress reaction and the lost weeks of summer training, the discomfort that seemed to migrate around his leg even after the knee calmed down, the uneven build-up and the weight of anticipation on his shoulders.

“At that point,” he acknowledges, “I was just hoping to get top five again.”

Which is exactly what Morris did.

Racing with the caginess of an experienced — if dinged-up — veteran, he ran the race he knew he could manage, clinging to a pack inside the top 10 even as eventual winner Cole Hocker and runner-up Jake Renfree drew away over the final kilometer.

He crossed in third, running 15:25.1 for back-to-back podium finishes.

And still a year remaining in his high school career.

“Just to come out and execute after everything that had happened,” he says, “I was really happy with it.”

Gracie 

Two.

Back in December 1995, when Jorge Torres ran his first Foot Locker final, he was, in many ways, running for two.

His best friend, toughest competitor, and the guy who pushed him in practice every day, was his twin brother, Ed. 

When Jorge ran in San Diego that first year, he carried the hopes and aspirations of his brother with him. And when he returned home to Illinois, he regaled Ed with stories of everything he’d seen on the big trip west.

In those days, there was no streaming coverage of the race, no live results to refresh or video highlights uploaded overnight to the internet.

No message boards or Twitter feeds to dissect the outcome.

There was, however, a video cassette that might arrive in participants’ mailboxes at some point after the race had been run.

“Back then,” Torres says, “a few weeks later, they would send a VHS tape of the whole experience. And when that video came in, I showed it to my brother, and Eduardo was like, ‘Whoa, I think I need to qualify for this next year.’”

Together, they set a joint goal to qualify as a pair — as twins — for the three Foot Locker finals that remained in their high school years.

From 1996 to 1999, while Jorge was ascending the ladder toward his national title, Ed was stamping his own impressive run, recording national finishes of 23rd, sixth and sixth.

Twin powers, activate.

But here’s the interesting coincidence: Graydon Morris is a twin, too.

He and his twin sister, Gracie, have been running together since those early youth days in elementary school.

Gracie’s freshman campaign was nearly as promising as Graydon’s, placing 23rd at the Foot Locker regional after a fifth-place state meet finish, and then claiming the 5A state 800 crown the following spring. 

However, at Foot Locker South her sophomore year, a lingering foot injury caused Gracie to drop out of the race even though she was in contention near the front of the pack. 

A subsequent doctor’s visit revealed a broken navicular bone in the top of her foot. 

While her twin brother was soaring to his runner-up finish at Foot Locker in 2017, Gracie had surgery to repair the broken bone.

Her road back was lengthy and gradual, with the remainder of her sophomore year and the first half of her junior year lost to recovery and rehabilitation.

She rebounded for fifth in the 1,600 meters at the 5A state meet last spring, and rose to second in state cross country this fall.

Shortly before that state meet, she and Graydon both verbally committed to the University of Texas, maintaining their twin connection with matching college plans.

At this year’s Foot Locker South regional, Gracie took one final shot at making the final, but came up short with a 25th-place finish.

Although Graydon was hoping to finish the season with his twin alongside him in San Diego, he points out that in her eagerness to get back racing on the trails, Gracie’s fall started much earlier than his.

“By the time state rolled around she was pretty mentally exhausted,” he says. “Her season was going really well, she thought she was going to make it to Nationals, but she said her body felt exhausted when the gun went off in North Carolina, and it never really got better.”

Noting that his sister is more of a mid-distance runner, he says she’s already shifting focus toward her first undercover campaign.

“Rather than dwell on not qualifying for Foot Locker,” Graydon says, “she’s planning to run her first indoor season ever, turning her energy towards that.”

In the meantime, Gracie will be alongside the course at Balboa with the rest of the family, cheering on her twin.

“It helps a lot in the training process,” Graydon says, “having her there. Getting ready for this last race.”

 Gmorris

One.

There is one race left on Graydon Morris’ calendar.

One more opportunity to take what the hills and flats of Balboa Park have to offer, to see how he might counter back.

If historical expectations hover over him, he tries his best to push them from his mind. 

He’d been mostly successful with that approach until he reached packet pick-up at the Foot Locker South regional two weeks ago. There, he kept encountering people who inquired about prospects at becoming a four-time qualifier, hinting at the possibility of that rarified air.

He could feel the weight of it getting to him.

“When I went to go do my warm-up,” he says, “I tried to get that out of my head as much as possible. I just started focusing on myself, and then I actually felt pretty calm before the race started.”

If you don’t rule your mind, your mind will rule you.

He knew that three previous trips to San Diego had prepared him for this moment.

His freshman year, when “it almost felt like I didn’t belong. I didn’t feel like I was fast enough, and I let that pressure get to me and it took the fun out of it.”

Sophomore year, and his eventual second-place stunner: “I’d come back with a completely different outlook. I decided I was just going to have fun with it. Whatever happened, happened.”

Junior year, when the uneven preparation and the spike wound left him content going for top five, thrilled to finish third.

Years that have taught him how to keep the fun in running.

How to internalize the hard-earned lessons from seasons in which the prospect of stepping to the line might have left him feeling panicked.

“I was putting too much pressure on myself then, and I wasn’t remembering why I started running. Which was that I had this love for this sport that I couldn’t really describe, it was just there. And I lost that for a couple of years.”

Occasionally, he’ll call to mind a moment from that overwhelming freshman trip to San Diego, when he glanced across at fellow Texan Reed Brown and saw no evidence of nerves.

“He was just cutting up with his friends and stuff, and I was like, ‘I need to have that approach.’”

Brown, of course, won Foot Locker that year.

And years earlier, Torres had to come to a similar realization.

At the 1998 meet his senior year, he recalls a gathering the night all the athletes arrived, how he and Eduardo were unafraid to enjoy themselves with the race only two days away.

“I remember my brother and I being very relaxed,” Torres says. “We were old veterans. You could totally tell the first timers from the old timers.”

Laughing, he talks about noticing two other Midwest runners, guys that were teammates from the same high school in Michigan.

Rockford High.

How he tapped Ed on the shoulder and nodded at Jason Hartmann and Dathan Ritzenhein, huddled in a pair of chairs in the corner.

“Those two look a little nervous over there.”

He laughs again, and says they can all laugh about it now because Ritzenhein and Hartmann both became close friends, but his point is clear.

“I wasn’t afraid to participate in the fun because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I knew that having a little fun wasn’t going to hurt my race.”

When Torres thinks now about Morris taking his fourth shot at the crown he won in 1998, he hopes the Aledo senior can hold on to that same sense of fun and perspective.

“I really do hope he walks away with the success I had,” Torres says, “being able to cap off his career with a great race in his final Foot Locker.”

For his part, Morris is following a similar approach to his predecessor.

Keeping things enjoyable, drawing confidence from his preparation, only worrying about the variables he can control.

“I just focus on myself,” he says, “focus on my own training, and then put it all together on race day.”

There is one more of those this season — one more race day.

One more starting line.

One more chance to ponder and spin Kipchoge’s words in his head.

If you don’t rule your mind…



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