Byron Grevious: The Deep Cuts

A DyeStat story by Dave Devine

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You probably haven’t been here before.

Not too many make it this far north.

It’s a meandering country road near a body of water called Great Bay, a few miles inland from the blustery Atlantic. A lightly-traveled thoroughfare, close to where the eastern shoulder of New Hampshire meets the southern tip of Maine. Five-miles of dirt and gravel, hemmed on both sides, intermittently, by a wall of sheep pasture rocks.

Autumn in New England, so there’s a cathedral of sugar maples overhead, a carpet of orange leaves already mottling the road. It’s like something ripped from a Robert Frost poem — rustic, pure, arboreal.

And hammering through this landscape? 

A team of high school boys on a tempo run.

They’ve traveled up from Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school about 10 miles south; they’re members of the cross country team. This is one of their favorite spots. A respite, a proving ground, a place to come and hone their fitness. 

Dame Road. 

As usual, when the Exeter boys set off on Dame they’re a loose, playful group. Bright and funny, close-knit and inquisitive. They sling jokes, give each other a hard time, argue senseless minutia — just like any group of teenage boys. But they can also collectively flip the switch when it’s time to roll. 

And when they do roll, when the time comes to suffer together on this tempo, there’s an obvious No. 1 that emerges. A guy who pushes the pace, has a bigger engine, inevitably pulls away. 

He’s a lean, relentless, grinning kid named after a jazz musician.  

And he’s not just the best runner on this Phillips Exeter team, he’s one of the best runners in the nation.  

Everything is everything / What is meant to be, will be.
- Lauryn Hill, Everything Is Everything

In Fairfield County, Connecticut, where Byron Grevious grew up, there is a clear path to youth soccer success. Kids begin in the recreational leagues, progress to travel teams, perhaps move on to the premier squads, and then, for the most promising, a berth on an academy team.

Byron, as a quick-footed middle schooler, had advanced to an academy team.

Small for his age, he nonetheless played up, competing and traveling with older teammates to prestigious national and international tournaments. And it was there, blazing along the wing on the soccer pitch, that he most clearly saw his athletic future. 

It was an athleticism he came by naturally. Both of his parents have a background in sports.

His father, Stephen (pronounced Stef-ehn), grew up on the south shore of Long Island, running high school track and exploring sports like horseback riding and skiing through membership in a local social club. After matriculating to Yale, Stephen decided he wouldn’t run collegiately, but he did continue running, eventually making a name for himself on the roads as a local elite.

Byron’s mom, Julie Cochran, was a diver at Dartmouth College until a back injury forced her away from the pool. Needing other outlets, she took up golf, and helped launch a women’s golf team at Dartmouth. She also began running on the same fairways where she played, a pursuit that eventually led to entering marathons.

When she and Stephen met, running was one of the things they had in common. After Byron was born, they would bring him along to various road races in which they were competing. Byron would hop in the Toddler 200, the Kids 1k Race, the 1-Mile Fun Run, always with a nagging question for his parents:

“Why can’t I run with you in the 5k?”

Eventually, Julie and Stephen relented, allowing Byron to tackle the more ambitious distances.

“He would run with his age group,” Stephen recalls, “and beat a bunch of 20- and 30-year-olds and people would say, ‘How often does he train?’ and it was like, you don’t ‘train’ a 10-year-old, you just let him play and have fun.”

But even as Byron began showing promise on the local road scene, running remained squarely in the background, soccer at the fore. He’d compete in a handful of road races on free weekends, make an occasional foray into summer track during lulls in the soccer travel season.

Then a shift came in the fall of seventh grade, when Byron first participated in Junior Olympic cross country.

“It was sort of a turning point,” Byron says, “because every time I’d go to a track meet or the cross country meets, I just loved the camaraderie that we had with the runners after the race — the environment in cross country just drew me in.”

Those feelings happened to coincide with a growing disillusionment with the elite-level soccer to which he’d devoted so much of his life.

“Soccer at the academy level became really toxic to me,” Byron recalls. “It became an environment where I didn’t really feel like I could flourish as a player, as much as I still loved the sport.”

He began devoting more time to running and cyclocross, gradually letting soccer slip away. At the same time, he and his parents were beginning to weigh high school options. Byron, who is biracial, was feeling an increasing pull to find a more diverse experience than he was encountering in the Fairfield County schools.

“There are not a lot of people who look like Byron,” Julie acknowledges, “and by eighth grade he was really noticing that.”

Although neither of his parents had experience with boarding schools, Byron began researching the possibility on his own. There was no shortage of options in the New England area. Perhaps surprisingly, given historical perceptions, many of the boarding schools in the region had made strides at diversifying their student bodies across racial and socio-economic lines. New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy stood out to Byron for its efforts in that regard, as well as its unique, discussion-based learning model known as the “Harkness method.”

When he toured the school with his dad in eighth grade, Byron felt an immediate connection to the distance coach, an Alaskan-transplant named Brandon Newbould, who combined youthful energy with an obvious expertise for cultivating runners.

“In the end,” Stephen remembers, “it came down to feeling this tremendous bond with Coach Newbould and the team. That’s what made him decide on Exeter over other schools.”

Newbould remembers an equally impactful first impression. Laughing now, he recalls a kid that was “small, polite, courteous, and dressed to the nines — Byron has always had immaculate fashion sense.”

And he remembers that the visiting eighth grader had an unexpected question.

The kid wanted to know if Exeter runs the steeplechase.

“I just fell in love with him immediately,” Newbould says. “I mean, what eighth grader asks that question?”

How you gon' win, when you ain't right within?
– Lauryn Hill, Doo Wop (That Thing)

Byron’s ninth grade year, known as “prep year” in Phillips Exeter parlance, began under a cloud of COVID restrictions. 

The pandemic had swept across the United States the previous spring, and although Exeter was welcoming students to campus in the fall of 2020, the far-flung nature of the student body — traveling from over 40 states and 30 different countries — dictated a firm policy of distancing and isolation.

“In terms of COVID spread at the time,” Byron recalls, “they needed to make the protocol at Exeter really strict. But it was a rough time here; we were locked down pretty intensely.”

At a school known for vibrant, seminar-style courses, students were restricted to their dormitory rooms, logging on for Zoom classes. On a cross country team that attracted Byron with its sense of community and connection, runners wore masks at practice and trained in small cohorts divided by class.

On top of the social isolation, a summer growth spurt, combined with an increase in weekly mileage, left Byron’s knees in near-constant pain from Osgood-Schlatter disease.

“It was a tough freshman year,” he says.

When the school offered students the option of completing the winter term via distance learning from home, Byron packed his bags for Connecticut. The time at home with Stephen and Julie provided a respite from the loneliness of his dorm room, while also offering space and time for his knee pain to fully subside. 

When he returned for in-person classes in the spring of 2021, many of the COVID restrictions had been lifted, but the reemergence of a familiar anxiety around athletic performance continued to impact his mental health.

He had long-struggled with pre-race anxiety, even in those smaller Junior Olympic races — “It used to overwhelm me when I was younger,” he says — but as the 2021 track season got underway, those old feelings began to rise again.

It took Newbould some time to realize how acute the anxiety had become for his young charge.

“He’s a really playful guy,” the coach says, “but there’s an intensity that’s under the surface.”

Newbould had already taken note of Byron’s physical gifts: his strength, his aerobic engine, his grit and determination. How the ninth grader didn’t shy away from challenging the upperclass runners, once he finally had an opportunity to take a shot at them that spring. But the coach also saw the impact of expectations Byron was placing on himself, particularly during a “pandemic time trial” the team ran one afternoon in the absence of viable track meets.

“It wasn’t super demonstrative or anything,” Newbould recalls, “but it was serious. That was when I realized he does feel the expectations and the pressure. Who knows where it comes from — it’s not from parents — it’s just there.” 

With more than a decade mentoring high achievers in the crucible of an elite boarding school, Newbould realized how much work he and Byron would need to devote to the psychological side of the sport.

“It strongly influenced my work with him since then.”

A major shift came Byron’s sophomore year, at the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) cross country champs, where he faced 4:01 miler and University of Virginia signee James Donahue.

Until that meet, Byron always prepared for races by listening to a pump-up soundtrack, a playlist he curated and counted on to get him ready, but he forgot his headphones that day. Without those headphones, Byron says, he was forced to draw energy from connecting with, and being present to, his immediate surroundings. There was no escapism; instead, he grounded himself at the meet. He paid attention to his teammates on the bus. The fans lining the course. The sights and sounds. 

For a kid who loves music, it was a startling revelation.

“There was something about not trying to artificially hype myself or get myself into a ‘zone,’” he says, “but instead to naturally find the energy and the synergy in my environment. It really helped me so much in that race.”

He won that NEPSAC race over Donahue, and then traveled to Birmingham, Ala., for the Running Lane Cross Country Championships in December, where he ran a massive personal best of 14:41.94.

By the end of outdoor track, he’d run 9:04 for two miles and 14:36 in the 5,000, both at Nike Outdoor Nationals.

Leaving behind his pump-up soundtrack might seem like a relatively minor shift in his pre-race routine, but it propelled Byron through a successful sophomore year that provided the bridge to his breakout junior campaign. 

It was a solution he discovered naturally, almost accidentally, but it’s now something he does for every race.

Trusting that his fitness is there — already in him.

Yo, hip-hop started out in the heart.
— Lauryn Hill, Superstar

Even as Byron realized he would need to set aside the pre-race hype playlist, he was discovering other ways to deepen his love of music. 

He and a classmate, Malcolm Courchesne, began hosting a weekly radio show called “Behind the Bars” on Exeter’s WPEA 90.5 FM signal.

It’s been incredibly freeing, Byron says, a platform to talk about the songs that feel important in their lives.

The format is the same every week: They select an album, listen to it separately for several days, take notes and conduct research, and then write up an analysis to share on the air. They discuss the album for the first 30 to 40 minutes, then devote the remainder of the hour to songs that captivated them. And it’s not simply the hits; Byron and Malcolm take pride in focusing on the deep cuts, exploring the more esoteric end of an artist’s catalogue.

The selections span genres and eras — mostly hip-hop and R&B, the occasional indie folk and pop artist thrown in — Kendrick Lamar to A Tribe Called Quest; Eryka Badu to Frank Ocean; Kid Cudi to Bon Iver.

And always, at least for Byron, Lauryn Hill.

It’s rare, he says, for a day to pass without listening to her music.

His personal playlists are populated with her songs.

“She’s just such a strong Black voice,” he says. “And the messages she has on all her songs and albums — even separating it from the rhythm, and sonically, what I love so much about it is what they mean culturally.”

Which leads to an understandable question: How does a 17-year-old in 2023 become a devotee of an artist who released one prominent — albeit, massively influential — solo album in 1998? 

The answer, while complicated, goes back even further than those childhood road races.

In addition to a love of running, Julie and Stephen share an appreciation for jazz music. When their son was born, they wanted to give him an original name that honored that passion.

They settled on one of their favorite jazz clarinetists, Don Byron.

“He was almost Ornette,” Julie says, laughing about an early suggestion to name their son after free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. “And Miles,” Stephen chimes in, acknowledging that with greater prescience it would have been a more apt name.

But Byron it was.

His parents reinforced the moniker with a steady diet of the music that inspired it.

“When I learned where my name came from,” Byron says, “I felt like I always had a connection to the genre of jazz. My dad and mom — really, since I was born, that’s what was playing at our house, like 24-7. It was always on the car radio and on the speakers at home.”

As he’s matured, his interests have veered from the standards that soundtracked his childhood toward something distinctly his own.

“I’ve definitely gone into my own thing of — not even looking for new people,” he says, “but looking at the intersection of jazz and hip-hop and R&B. That’s where I find my music taste, specifically.”

It’s also created an additional point of connection with Coach Newbould.

Besides mentoring one of the top prep distance squads in New England, Newbould is a professional musician, playing the trombone in local ensembles and orchestras.

“My love for music is deep enough,” Newbould says, “that I’m trying to make a career out of it, so I talk to a lot of guys who like music. And it’s been a fun connection point with Byron, because he really does, he loves good music.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, they connect most deeply on the works of Lauryn Hill. 

“A lot of her songs,” Byron says, sounding as if he’s on his radio show, trying to tease out meaning and influence, “it feels like my insides have been made sonic. It’s like she somehow gets me, and my…”

He trails off, laughing a bit self-consciously.

But he doesn’t need to finish.

He’s a teenager, attempting to articulate how music speaks to the deepest part of who he’s becoming — who hasn’t felt that before?

I was on the humble, you on every station.
– Lauryn Hill, Lost Ones

With 1,200 meters to go in the Battle Roads Twilight 5k on June 3, 2023, Byron swerved around the designated pacer — a guy from Providence College — and seized the lead.

It was an instinctual move on a cold, rainy track. All guts and moxie.

Just before the gun went off, the pacer had stated an intention to run 14:10 pace, well below Byron’s personal best at the time, but within range of his fitness. Remaining behind the guy, at least for another lap or two, would have been the prudent thing to do.

But that’s not what Byron did.

When you consider his breakout junior year, from cross country through outdoor track, there are three 5-kilometer races that would seem to define Byron’s emergence. Fifteen-thousand meters worth of running that elevated him from New England standout to national star.

Two of those races — a 15:00.9, 12th-place finish at Nike Cross Nationals in December 2022, where he finished as the No. 2 junior in the event, and a 14:24.04 victory at Nike Outdoor Nationals in June 2023 — provide splashy, national-meet bookends to his eleventh-grade campaign.

The third race, that Battle Road Twilight 5k, was a lowkey, local affair at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. If NXN and Nike Outdoors were the big releases, the hit singles, the Battle Road race was a Byron Grevious deep cut — the sort of meet that required digging around the internet in order to find results.

But the effort Byron dropped there was seismic.

Surging past that pacer with three laps to go, he continued to nudge the pace under the initial 14:10 target — “With a half lap to go they realized he wasn’t coming back,” Stephen recalls — and eventually held off a hard-charging post-collegian to claim the victory in 14:04.44.

The meet was small enough that Stephen could stand in the rain at the finish line, holding out a cell phone with Julie on the other end, ready to congratulate Byron before he stepped off the track. But it was far more than a nice win at a local meet, or a solid tune-up for the Nike Outdoor 5,000 two weeks later; it was one of the best underclass performances in prep distance history.

When Byron stopped the clock at the Bentley track in 14:04.44, he slid past a pair of names in the record books that would be immediately recognizable to any fan of U.S. track and field. His mark topped a 48-year-old New England 5,000-meter record held by Alberto Salazar, who ran a hand-timed 14:04 in 1975, and also surpassed an Age-16 national record of 14:12 set by Craig Virgin in 1972.

The 5,000-meter distance had already been thrust into the spotlight last spring by a trio of high school seniors — Lex Young, Connor Burns and Tyrone Gorze — all chasing marks under 13:50, but with names like Salazar and Virgin attached to Byron’s feat, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect significant attention in prep running circles. A high school junior dropping a 14:04 in a winning effort, that would draw some eyeballs — right?

Remarkably, it didn’t.

“It was kind of surprising,” Byron allows, “running 14:04, and getting, like, one LetsRun (message board) thread about it.”

By that point in his career, he’d already grown somewhat accustomed to being overlooked. Some of that, he attributes to the insular nature of boarding school culture combined with Exeter’s location in a small, northeastern state.

Most of the school’s meets, he points out, are minor affairs — traditional cross country duals against other prep schools; no electronic timing; no live-stream; mostly paper results that rarely make their way to the national high school websites.

He recalls a recent article claiming he ran three cross country meets last year.

“I ran, like, seven,” he says. “They just didn’t know about them.”

It is, in a way, another kind of deep cut — only more literal. 

An omission that actually cuts deep. The persistent sting of relative invisibility for a kid, and a team, accomplishing impressive things. He acknowledges that in big races, those slights push him to shine a light on Coach Newbould and his Phillips Exeter teammates.

“That’s what fuels me, when I go to these national championship meets,” he says. “Putting, not just my name, but Phillips Exeter boys cross country or track and field out there.”

And while he’s content — or polite enough — to ascribe the lack of attention to factors like geography and school culture, his coach doesn’t shy away from noting that there’s also a racial component to distance running coverage in the U.S.

“He occupies traditionally white spaces as an African American distance runner,” Newbould says, “and there’s an element of that here, as well…He’s certainly noticed it, and he’s stayed really classy about it.”

It’s partly why, heading into last June’s Nike Outdoor Nationals 5,000, when Byron was receiving little pre-race buzz despite the 14:04 at Battle Roads, Newbould told his protégé that he should feel free to flex his muscles at Hayward Field. 

Let them know who you are. 

Byron soared to the national title, more than 18 seconds clear of the field.  

“He made a breakaway much earlier than anyone should,” Newbould says, “and there was no reason to do that, except to show everyone how strong he was.

And I made up my mind / To define my own destiny
– Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

It’s just a few sentences. 

An athletic footnote in the sports section of the Sunday, October 22, 1950 edition of the New York Times. Down there at the bottom of Page S7, buried beneath a wall of horse racing results in agate type.

The simple headline: C.C.N.Y. Victor in Run, 17-46

“City College's undefeated cross-country team gained its third victory yesterday, beating Adelphi by 17 to 46 at Van Cortlandt Park. Lou Cascino, Joe Grevious and Gene Rocks finished one, two, three for the Beavers…”

Joe Grevious — that’s Byron’s grandfather. 

A star runner for the City College of New York in the 1940’s and 50’s, Joe was also a member of the groundbreaking Pioneer Track Club, founded in Harlem in 1936 at a time when few Black men had opportunities to pursue distance running.

Joseph continued running after college, eventually passing along his love for the sport to his son, Stephen.

Stephen has early memories of watching the Olympic Games and track and field meets on the Wide World of Sports with his father — the way Joseph would yell at the television when a U.S. relay team dropped the baton.

“Now it’s Byron screaming at the TV,” Stephen laughs, acknowledging both the generational connection and how little has changed for U.S. relay teams over the years.

But there’s another thing that hasn’t changed significantly since Joe Grevious’ days setting CCNY records on cinders: the dearth of African American runners at the upper levels of U.S. distance running. It’s something Byron increasingly notices, particularly as he's risen the upper ranks of high school distance running.

“I got to the national scene,” he says, “and it was like, ‘Hey…I’m pretty much the only one here.’ It’s not that it’s lonely, at all, it’s just something that I have to face straight on.”

He recently wrote a poignant piece about being a Black distance runner for a website called The Sideline Post, and feels like his success provides him a platform to voice his experience as an African American competing in a segment of the sport that’s still largely white. 

“I’ve talked to my dad a lot about it,” he says, “And with my grandfather also a distance runner, I do feel a lot of pride about it being generational.” 

It helps, Stephen points out, that Byron isn’t the first Black member of the family to run cross country. Or even the second. There’s precedence reaching back 70 years. 

There are generational claims to the starting line. 

“And he has comfort in his own skin,” Stephen says. “He realizes that people are going to look at him differently, but it was the same with soccer — people older than him, bigger than him, and he realized he was different, but always knew he was there for a reason.” 

Everything is everything / After winter, must come spring.
— Lauryn Hill, Everything Is Everything

Back to Dame Road — mid-autumn.

A chill to the air now, visible breath. The simplicity of a hard effort on a wide gravel path. Teammates and laughter. Towering sugar maples and the footfalls of several dozen high school boys, muffled by the leafmash blanketing the road. A loping, motley crew that can flip the switch between squirrely teenagers and fierce competitors at a moment’s notice.

Byron, squirrely as any of them, has learned not to take this for granted — these afternoons in the trees and trails. He knows it’s a special thing, a privileged moment in time.

He thinks deeply about all of it.

The New England setting, the stone-lined gravel roads, the fleeting opportunity to compete for a prep school in a small division. The way this landscape mirrors the intensity of their efforts.

“Grit, cold, windy, wet, muddy,” he says, “and everything we do for training and racing encapsulates that. It’s so quintessentially what cross country is all about. I know that these four years will have been so different from the rest of my life in running.”

In August, he committed to Stanford University, where he’ll continue his academic and athletic pursuits on the West Coast, a world away from Dame Road.

He hopes to pursue a pre-med track, inspired by his pediatrician father; perhaps major in biology.

He knows how soon all of that will come.

For now, his senior year is already off to a good start, with a 15:03, course record win at the Manchester Invitational, and a 15:40 victory at the Black Bear Invitational. The team has been running well, too. After narrowly missing a berth to NXN last fall, they also have their sights set on a possible trip to Portland this December. 

“Maybe this year we can make something special happen,” Byron says.

He knows, of course, that something special is already happening —out there on Dame Road. 

It’s like one more deep cut, this anonymous backroad training in the waning days of autumn. It’s the kind of stuff that never gets published, just experienced. The far end of the catalogue — meant for purists only.

A season that won’t last forever.

Already, there’s the briskness to the air. Some of the trees are nearly bare at the tops, winter isn’t too far off. And after winter, as Ms. Lauryn Hill says, must come spring.  More national meets await. More challenges in a senior year full of promise and potential. Stanford, before he knows it.

But for now, there’s just this road.

This team. These guys.

“Whenever I think of cross country for the rest of my life,” Byron says, “it’s going to be these runs that we do out here.”