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STAYING THE COURSE

Talon Hull is putting together an impressive year two by directing his determination through Coach Powells' plan.

By Washington Huskies

March 1^st, 2019

SEATTLE - Talon Hull is something of a self-starter.

In high school, while becoming one of the top prep distance runners in the country, Hull would practice by “just sort of do whatever I wanted really. I didn’t like a lot of structure in my training.”

Back home in Ogden, Utah last summer, between his first and second years of college, Hull, like the rest of the Huskies, had a period of training without a coach’s prescribed plan, as Washington would hire Andy and Maurica Powell towards the end of June.

So Hull went back to his high school nomadic style.

“I just went back to Utah for the summer and I got really fit just doing basically whatever I wanted,” he says. With nobody to answer to but himself, “I ran up mountains a lot at altitude and just got pretty fit.”

But Hull, the Pac-12 cross country runner-up and the newest UW sub-four-minute miler, has learned the value of the team structure as well.

“I’d say I’m self-motivated, but being around a team environment and having a lot of guys around me helps a lot in my training.”

Sometimes, a team helps a runner get out the door to tackle ten miles. In Hull’s case, as someone who says he loves the training just as much as he loves racing, it often helps him pull back on the reins.

“I just did hard workouts and would feel bad a lot of the time,” Hull says about his past summer. “I trained a little too hard. I came in being pretty fit, but I don’t think it was the safest or smartest thing to do.”

STAYING THE COURSE

STAYING THE COURSE

STAYING THE COURSE

STAYING THE COURSE

Structure came back into the picture along with new head coach Andy Powell.

“Andy is a really observant person and he’s still trying to get to know me better, but I think I’ve built a pretty good relationship with him so far and he’s just really been able to understand me and help me in my training,” Hull says.

“Training is a little different, the workouts overall are very purposeful I’d say, and I do a little bit more volume.”

Results have been stellar. In his second collegiate cross country season, Hull was a top-five scorer for the Huskies at every meet, helping UW to a sixth-place team finish at NCAAs, the program’s best in twenty-nine years.

The men’s squad had set some high goals for itself going into the fall, aiming to finish better at nationals than the 2015 Husky squad that placed eighth, which was the only top-10 men’s team in the past two decades.

“Being top-eight seemed pretty lofty in the moment, but after starting off pretty bad we plugged in some guys and things just started clicking,” says Hull. “As I got to know Tanner (Anderson) and Mick (Stanovsek) and the coaches, training just got easier, and it was just a collective effort on everyone’s part. Everyone was doing their part in practice and in races and we all knew we could depend on each other. We just got stronger and stronger and had a great showing at Nationals. I didn’t have the best race, but there were four guys ahead of me who had really good races.”

STAYING THE COURSE

Hull’s big personal highlight was a runner-up finish at the Pac-12 Championships as he was just beaten by a step by Stanford’s defending champion senior Grant Fisher after the two sprinted side by side for the final hundred meters.

Halfway through that Pac-12 race, going for the win was nowhere in Talon’s mind.

“I was feeling terrible for maybe 4k,” he says. “Then I got a second wind and just put my head down and went with the top pack. With a kilometer we started picking it up, and for whatever reason the faster we got the more comfortable I got, so I just got more and more comfortable throughout the race.

“With like 300 meters to go you go around this turn and into the finish and it’s a really long finish, so people hadn’t started to go with like 200 meters left, and me just being really antsy and wanting to go I went for it, and I just hit top speed with maybe a hundred meters to go. I wasn’t really thinking of beating Grant Fisher, I was just in a pack of about ten people and I just blew past them and was like, ‘I could win!’ I wasn’t thinking about him individually but just thinking about winning got me super excited.”

STAYING THE COURSE

STAYING THE COURSE

STAYING THE COURSE

STAYING THE COURSE

The reaction to that moment, despite coming up just short, was special. Videos showed his track and field teammates watching the race live in the track locker room and cheering wildly down the homestretch. And those who knew him best knew he deserved it.

“Andy Snyder told me after the race, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to do something like that,’ because I’ve been working hard for a really long time and that was kind of a payoff for me, validating my hard work,” he says. “I saw that video, everyone was going crazy. I’m just good friends with everyone on the team and they know how hard I work and we’re just really close, and seeing them be that excited for me was really motivating and fun to see.”

Talon took up running in the sixth grade. He knew he was fast from playing soccer as well, but when he won the first 5,000-meter race he ever ran, in a time of 21:21, “for a sixth grader that seemed pretty good,” he says, and he hasn’t looked back since.

Hull’s father is in the military and thus his family moved around frequently when he was young. When he started running, it was while living in Portland, and there was also a short time spent in Tacoma during middle school, which gave Talon a good impression of the Pacific Northwest.

Moving to Utah in eighth grade, Hull developed into one of the top recruits in the country. He made Foot Locker Nationals, one of the two premier national cross country championships, as a junior and finished 37th. The next year, Hull won the West Region title and was fourth at the national meet.

A runner that took fourth at Foot Locker Nationals, not to mention third in the 2-mile at the Brooks PR Invite, would typically have a trophy case packed with state titles. Hull was a little unlucky in that regard.

He happened to be in the same state and the same class as Casey Clinger, the 2016 Gatorade National Cross Country Athlete of the Year and the Nike Cross National Champion.

When asked about his high school rival, Hull was self-deprecating. “You could call it a rivalry but I never beat him so it was a little one-sided,” he says. “It was really motivating for me. Every single time I’d race him I’d never come in with a mindset that I would lose to him, but that’s always what happened. He was just better than me, and I did everything I could to beat him, every single time I raced him, but he was just better. So every single time I lost to him that just motivated me to work harder.

“So even though I never ended up winning any state races I ended up doing really well when I didn’t race him. I don’t think I would have been as fast as I was if it weren’t for him.”

Hull took visits to Washington, California, and Georgetown, but ultimately decided on UW being the right fit.

“Seattle’s a really urban area but UW is kind of outside of the city, and other schools I looked at were very central in the city and I didn’t like that as much, and neither area was as great for running as Seattle is,” he says.

He came in considering a Business major but now is planning to major in Public Health, with a goal of being a physical therapist.

“I’ve always been really interested in physiology and anatomy, and training and how that applies to running.”

STAYING THE COURSE

STAYING THE COURSE

During the current indoor season, at the UW Invitational, Hull made his collegiate track debut after he had redshirted the 2018 track season while suffering from shin splints. In his first individual track race, Hull became the seventh Husky ever to break the four-minute mile barrier, running 3:59.56.

“Going into it I knew I could break four, because I train with (volunteer assistant coaches) Sam Prakel and Amos Bartelsmeyer and Mick, all 3:55 or faster milers, and they were telling me I was in shape to break four. I didn’t exactly know what that felt like but I knew I was in good shape and I knew I was fast, so it didn’t seem unrealistic."

The indoor season hit a minor bump as Hull came down sick after his sub-four mile, limiting his racing over the next couple of weeks, but as the NCAA Indoor Championships loom on March 8-9, he has started to pick up speed once again. Hull will achieve another goal this year as he is scheduled to be part of Washington's distance medley relay when it battles at the national meet in Alabama.

“The DMR was one of my main focuses to try and qualify for nationals and the mile gave me a lot of confidence for that event," he says.

Just two months into his college track career, the self-starter is still just getting started.

STAYING THE COURSE

Footnotes

Photos by Red Box Pictures, Spencer Allen, and Greg Dixon

FootNotes

Photos by Red Box Pictures, Spencer Allen, and Greg Dixon

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