PUBLISHED 10/24/2007
Alan Culpepper, the 2004 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials winner in 2:11:42 and winner of the 2007 USA Cross Country Championships, is preparing for the U.S. Men's Olympic Marathon Trials on November 3. Besides his victory at USA Cross Country, Culpepper's 2007 races include a 27:50.05 for 10,000 at the Cardinal Invitational, a fourth place at the Bolder Boulder 10K, and a fourth place 28:34.01 for 10,000 meters at the USATF Championships in June, and a sixth place 1:03:34 at the NYC Half Marathon Presented by Nike in August. He was fifth at the 2006 Boston Marathon in 2:11:02 after a fourth place 2005 Boston finish in 2:13:39. Culpepper, 34, set his personal best of 2:09:41 in his debut in Chicago in 2002, placing sixth. He was 12th in the 2004 Athens Olympics in 2:15:26. His 10,000-meter best is 27:33.93. In 2006, Culpepper was third in 1:03:11 in a highly select half-marathon staged before the Freescale Austin Marathon. He grew up in Texas and was the 1996 NCAA 5000-meter champion for the University of Colorado. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado with his wife Shayne, the 2004 U.S. Olympic Trials 5000-meter winner, and their sons Cruz and baby Levi, who was born June 9, 2006. Recently, Culpepper, along with Pete Julian, formed Tempo Sports, a running club being coached by former Chicago, London, and New York City Marathon champ Steve Jones.
We've had the impression you've been somewhat of a loner in terms of your training and running up to this point. For you, why did this Tempo Sports team need to come about? Did Peter Julian come to you about it, or did the two of you independently come to a realization that something needed to change?
Alan Culpepper: We've always been more or less of the same mindset, and we've talked about things like this along the way over the years as a way to have a cohesiveness. Back when I first came out of school, he was of that group of guys who met and trained more together. There were a couple of things that let us to this point, for sure. For Shayne and I personally, it was going through the last year, and just making it through last fall for me was very tough. This is my 11th year (as a professional). To do all the workouts and do every step by myself was hard. Over the years, I've had different training partners at different times, and that always has helped me, whether it was (Adam) Goucher for awhile, and Scott Larson's always been around, and Silvio Guerra and Andrew Letherby. There have always been different folks along the way, but now that really hasn't been the case here in the last couple of years. So from a personal standpoint, there was that, and going through last winter was very difficult from the training aspect, even though I obviously ran well at cross country nationals.
Was it a tough winter in Boulder (and Lafayette)?
AC: Yeah, it was our toughest in 100 years or something. It was just cold, really bad, with permafrost. So it was a combination of those things. And then Shayne, last spring, did incredibly well, and essentially coached herself. She did every workout by herself, and had no one to meet with her, ever, and she ran 4:05 for the 1500. I would wager to say there's no one in the world that's ever done that. So it was kind of that combination for us personally, and also with seeing this breakdown and this void where we're just not maximizing the potential of the runners that we have here. It's kind of a combination of those two things, where we personally need it but there are a lot of other people in town who need that help and support and need other people invested in what they're doing and aware of what they're doing so that they're not just going at it by themselves.
The "Denver Post" article on Tempo Sports mentions that Jenny Barringer is the only Boulder runner who made the U.S. team for the World Championships in Osaka. Obviously, you are mainly perceived as a marathoner, but was not making the team in the 10,000, just missing it by one spot, a real blow to you personally?
AC: It was in that it was the first track (World Championships) or Olympic team that I went out for and didn't make since I graduated from college. For me, the goal was to make it, not necessarily to go to Osaka but just to prove that I could still make it. So that was disappointing in that aspect. But honestly, for the other plan for the year, it wasn't devastating. It was probably better in a sense for me to just begin my marathon build-up at that point.
