pretty impressive programs in new york city talking about john hunter cap thanks for having me well we met when i saw you running on a track and that was your intro to the sport i wondered when you were growing up were  one of those kids that won every little playground race and was the fastest kid on the football team all that how did you find out you were so fast well i don't know who was training for the new york city marathon in the early eighty's he played football he put on some weight and he was a bartender by trade so you know it was my next door neighbor dan dan de veau and he started training for new york to do some weight getting him and his wife barbara and so he would just bring me along and i would run the kids fun run but i i would often do probably i would do very well  know really and not start out as a sprinter but i was one of the things i would do well in them but i also would my closest competition was often my two younger sisters who were three and a half and five years younger so obviously they have the good genetics too so i was good at it but i also was in many kids running in the races at that age at that time so i wasn't like cocky or anything i realize ok i'm getting my two sisters and a couple who will but i was i was exposed to the sport at a pretty young age and then actually in the other sports running is often a punishment for those sports do laps because you're goofing off or just for conditioning and people hate it our support is your sports punishment right so when i coach athletes now that are new or new the running again or haven't been running in a while they often say all right exactly pretty fun but they remember is that is being a terrible experience in the sports but i would coaches would try to punish me by doing laps i definitely i would definitely would not get tired and i would sit there with a grin on my face running and the coaches often would get upset because they were trying to punish the group and most people around our breath and i would just keep going with in the punishment for me it's about was i do you remember about a couple times but you ended up gravitating toward what i think is one of the twenty six that's that's flying and that's that's something that like a lot of people can run marathons and get pretty good because of you know dedicating their self themselves to hard work etc you can't fake your way into a top level eight hundred that's a lot there's some tactics in the eight hundred we're probably talk about but it was like for me i wasn't as quick at the four hundred meters as a lot of my competitors right and so oftentimes i was going out for four hundred not to my best four hundred ever but i mentally because it was two laps versus four and oftentimes you fall asleep before the rd quarter and so as i got better they had to realize how hard it was meant to mean literally flawlessly right now something that a lot of people don't know about the eight hundred is that it is the st event as you're moving up to the events one hundred meters twenty thousand four hundred it's the st event that's not run in lanes and what that makes is contact between the runners so they go out in lanes around the st turn and then everybody breaks for the inside and tries to get into whatever position they want which means a lot of bumping and potential falls things that don't typically happen in a race with lanes and it where no one ever touches anybody else so did you find that difficult to adjust to it was it was exciting it actually made it more in a year from outside and you having to hold your ground you have one hundred meters to kind of right to go out faster to go out slow and see and then you also when you break into the outdoors it's more challenging because it's more chaotic because it's four laps of eight hundred dollars or eight laps to the know you have you know it's really about three hundred and fifty meters maybe to break it depending on the track of what's going on but it it does add to the the drama or the i was it made it more nerve wracking because like you're in your own lane yeah when i when everyone eight people per race i'm thinking about when you break from the inside trying to get position now that's almost like a you know middle of a soccer game or something here is like holding people outside you are keeping people from passing you having to deal with getting around other know it's a different kind of sport then people will run marathons and things think about but what i'm interested in to tell our viewers is not many eight hundred metre runners they might move up to the mile that's very common but do they move up to the ten k and then to the marathon i say almost no and no in that i know a couple of great great runners have had success at both those distances i mean i think rod dixon ran some eight hundred and then of winning the new york city marathon he's mostly a mile to marathon not so weird eight hundred to marathon so you know we don't ever ran a marathon ever salafi didn't run in eight hundred these people had great range but how did you translate your interest in the racing mile and we'd average like four hundred and thirty a mile and i would just hang on for dear life so i would help them and speedier workouts because i had the lower right but a longer stuff i would just get dragged along and hang on for dear life and my senior year i had enough stray maturity mental country there's a dirt track in the south of the track it's never stop there starting in august for pre season here and if you're fast enough in the state meet the end of june and the trials were in july so during the time that you were at that level running with you know enclave which is a really what makes running different than other sports i think it's really an individual a lot of him to be he was a great motivator his runners he get a lot of those writers because of the motivation factor i must say like his kids would run through brick system where it was a lot of funding and in stable a you know i was on skull full scholarship i was getting an education they pay for my meals that pay for my housing where you graduate i would get three hundred dollars a month from reebok i was happy to get but i had to get a part time job but in the reason why i had a part time job is because i did you know i couldn't work eighty hours a week or forty hours a week over it was entrained so i would work twenty to thirty hours a week and my last year at the enclave i started coaching in high school at this will high school in virginia and as a boarding i was twenty five years old i coached this high school and it was a high school that was you know super they could program they were actually everyone wanted to play the crossword field hockey really i think they had four lacrosse teams like the a b c and d because they spent a lot of money is and their parents spent a lot of money t so here in new york still running seriously but you never stop coaching as far as i know even when you had no particular position as a coach like i knew you to be coaching a group in the park for free just people who want to show up to do speed work you have to show up from i think you didn't even live you know you did live on the upper east at the time and you would come over to central park meet people and engineers gate just whoever wanted to show up that day this is when i became aware of you as a coach was you were just showing up and  still meets and they do the same kind of passed off to other people i mean they still meet and make a guest appearance but the difference there is i would leave that worked out as far as this is what we're doing today and we do some quick drills and some strides but i would do the work out for me right i but you're kind of unusual in that you will just decide to implement something wherever you go so you brought the november project to new york right yes the newer projects started in boston two guys that rode the road crew  for for north you got a guess not everybody knows what the november project is but it's a free program and they're now if you want city is in a bit around seven years but it when i st learned of it my offer was my in turn the guy that i can't go recruited out of north carolina and coaching over who's been coaching all these years is still doing the live coaching i was doing some personal training stuff which we'll probably talk about and i heard about this at our project i thought i would just check it out so i reached out to them the like their web site and they had all this like criteria of how to so i went to a friday workout there was someone hill somewhere else in boston and just the commuters twitter people in the showed up it was january was freezing and it was just the you know everyone was invited to the party yeah and i just thought wow this has to come to new york and me and i see you is unique in a lot of ways and that you will decide pretty much on your own to take a fairly big chunk of your life and put it into making something available to a lot of people that otherwise would be running on their own not having a teeny maybe i don't want to be on a team as we think of teams but now they're on you know off the hook for their they did november for as you did three years i am you're doing that when you had to get up at something like four o'clock to get to central park all from brooklyn the key was that he had a wednesday location which was like the anchor of the week and if you if you and then we became official because we should be show that we were able to you know we were committed to being whether or not how many people are showing up for this became official they allow you know we got accepted we showed our value we show that we can remember at its peak how many we've had two hundred people at work oh you know that's pretty impressive but the reason why i started gracie mansion because  the current mayor moved in and we thought we'd have some issues but what was the case when there was a cheer that was used rather a wake up call for the mayor one of the workouts which paul the came up with was we stop we have different  runners at the time which i'm extremely aware of because we work together all that time and you were pretty much responsible for the program that i'm now in charge of the training rather on the head coach and you were quoted as we have many many coaches in charge of many parts of crew training all over the city in all five boroughs and that was an idea came kind of out of virtual trainer which you instituted with your friend matt moran that let anyone all over the world train for any major marathon half marathon t online coaching plans that we developed and that matt was responsible for with a an amazing algorithm that took information from those people and gave them a program based on their own input so it was very accurate about predicting a goal you put that into basically the world as well as you know you had even bigger than of every project i'm saying you gave that to everybody and then group training is now thousands of people also you are in a few other people's idea so  because we have little time left i want to make sure people know came from a highly competitive runner yourself too as influential behind the scenes letting other people run and get better as anyone i know in the city yet i was run campus my friends my consulting business and i still do some coaching but a lot of it's just brand building community building but i do find these projects where i start them i train others to do it and i move on to the next thing and s shoes and open your front door and get out and run so it's a very scalable thing it's maybe the mental barriers or more the barriers of too slow i'm not a runner and not a real runner i would say what's a fake runner otherwise running is just as you know race talk you know running is moving forward and leaving the ground to it and most people have chased a bus or chased a two year old and i would say everyone's a runner or some people just don't state she was out there true or their mental barrier of so i like taking away those barriers like teacher teacher i coach a group called make it nice which is a restaurant group with yeah well because you take away the excuses i can't run because i'm not a runner ok well here's a pair of shoes let me hear all right with you i'm too slow and i mean any pace and i'm sol i'm going to start tomorrow i think you might have a streak going with running so if i had like we said another three hours i could fill it asking you things about your running coaching and racing and i know you've run up to the marathon to forty four not that many one hundred meter guy but not enough time to get everything covered but i would like to thank you very much being on the show thank you will sanchez for letting me host the show thanks for man neighborhood network for letting us have the show and i guess we've got to run yeah absolutely who got me not to waste the summer before i started high school and instead started training for cross country ever since then i've been trying to pass on that same message several then we have a great sport that lets you be healthy and fit as well as competit you can get involved in new york road runners by going on our website and looking up crew training in virtual training and any other ways that we can get you interested involved and help you out the company you coach you and welcome you into the running world