This is the transcript of a short Q and A with Olympian Ian Dobson (formerly of Klamath Union HS and Stanford) after he served as a pacer for the first 2,000 meters of the 3,000 at the Oregon Preview on Saturday at Hayward Field:
Q: How is it working out with OTC?
ID: It’s been great. My wife Julia and I have been on the team for six weeks now. … It’s been fantastic so far. The last week and a half or so is the first time we felt like part of the team. Coach Rowland has been gone. He was up at Albuquerque with some of the team, and then at Doha for the guys over there. So finally we’re all back together, in the same place, and feeling like a team, which is really what we came here for.
Q: Do you have some meets mapped out for yourself?
ID: Coach Rowland and I just sat down this week and talked about that and to be honest we don’t really know yet. The primary goal is running a fast 5K and getting ready to go for the U.S. Championships. There’s no major championship to qualify for so I want to run fast early, I want to run fast here in Eugene at Hayward Field. So that’s the plan. If we can make a year out of it, make a European season in the summer, great. But that’s secondary. We want to run fast here, and run fast at U.S. nationals.
Q: So, are you on to Stanford next?
ID: No, I’m not going to go. I’m a little off, honestly. I got a real late start in the fall. Took the summer off and had some injuries.
Q: What’s the last six months or so been like, getting bounced around a little bit?
ID: Well, it’s been close to a year now, really. My wife and I left the Mammoth Track Club last May. … At the end of the day, we just weren’t getting results so we had to make a change. We were both getting banged up. We took the summer off from running. We worked a couple camps just to keep our foot in the running world. But we weren’t running much. We moved to Portland in the fall. Decided to make a fresh start, and not really knowing what we were going to do. We were both under contract with other companies. I was with Adidas and she was with Reebok. So we were hoping it would work out to come here but we had to wait and see how it all worked out. Fortunately it worked out. We were happy tom come down here in February.
Q: Did Adidas let you go or did you leave them?
ID: I enjoyed my time with Adidas. It’s just an economic reality for them, and a performance reality. I didn’t perform well enough, the budget’s tight, so I’m on the chopping block. I get a long with those guys. I like them and I think that goes both ways. But it’s our sport.
Q: Kind of like getting traded from one team to the next?
ID: Yeah. Lower economic scale, but the same thing.
Q: What were you doing up in Portland?
ID: I was there from September through January, and I was just getting healthy. I was getting as much base training in as I could, but there’s a chiropractor up there, Justin Whittaker … and saw him a bunch. Mostly just took things really really slow, the priority was not to get fit, it was to get healthy. Probably by December I was back to full volume, full training.
Q: Did you run across guys you knew in the woods (of Forest Park), whether the University of Portland guys, or Jerry Schumacher’s group?
ID: I saw guys around. Saw some of Schumacher’s guys. Jonathan Riley is part of that group and he and I go back to college together so we did some running together. But all of my workouts were alone. And I needed it like that. I needed to be doing it every day at my own pace. The reality is you can’t run at a high level that way. At least that’s not my experience. So I knew we needed to do something. I was just a matter of waiting until it worked out.
Q: Did you have other options?
ID: I wanted to be in Eugene. This is where things are happening. We knew that if we could make this work, this is what we wanted to do. There were secondary things, but we felt like we got our way.
