Arcadia High School: Preaching the Gospel


September 17, 2011

Cross country is sometimes referred to as the "sport of last resort," a refuge for those not big or coordinated enough for football or soccer. While that can often result in a second-class mentality among its participants, Arcadia High School has simultaneously embraced and challenged it, taking a bunch of guys who in four years have gone from "not good enough" to the best harrier team in the nation.

A lion's share of that success goes to their charismatic coach, Jim O'Brien, a gravel-voiced motivator who embodies Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote that nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, and who throughout his career has instilled a work ethic in his charges that has produced overachieving success stories.

"O'Brien makes us believe in ourselves and the program," says Allen Leung, one of the seniors on the team. "We do what he says, and don't worry about what anybody else is saying or doing. We just need to show up on our day."

For the Apaches, that day came early last December when they bested the top teams in the country at the Nike Cross Nationals in Portland, Ore. Their winning total of 92 points outdistanced second place by 43 points, and they placed five runners in the top 33 team scorers. While they were spearheaded by the fourth-place finish of Ammar Moussa, a gifted runner who was one of the top seniors in the country, the rest of the team consisted of kids who never ran a serious step before they entered high school in the eastern suburb of Los Angeles.

"Every single kid has not run track or cross country as a sport or with a club before they got here," says O'Brien. "We have taken kids who are throwaways from every other program. We sell them on the idea of taking four years to build an athlete, that hard work brings huge dividends."

O'Brien is first and foremost an athletic proselytizer, which may be fitting given his background. In spite of two abortive starts as a priest ("I tell the kids I may be the only person to have gotten kicked out of the same school twice," he quips about his attempts at completing seminary), O'Brien retains a religious fervor when addressing his team. Their post-workout meetings are part coaching instruction and part spiritual revival meeting, with the runners seated on a grassy slope in Arcadia County Park as he delivers another "Sermon on the Mount." Even he admits, "I'm constantly preaching the gospel."

Sometimes the meetings are as long as the workout: When O'Brien gets rolling, there's no stopping him, and one parent joked that the team award dinners always take twice as long as scheduled as a result. But that gung-ho, can-do attitude is infectious, and has proven successful wherever O'Brien has gone.

After growing up in Pennsylvania and Virginia, O'Brien drove a 1958 DeSoto across the country to attend college and run at San Diego State University. "I wanted to go to California, so I just up and went," he says. His college running was solid, but he discovered his forte was endurance rather than speed, which would shape his future coaching philosophy. After a stint as a grad assistant, he moved across town to the University of San Diego, a relatively small, academically oriented school. That summer, he met Arthur Lydiard, who convinced him you can't do anything in distance running without a great foundation. Melding that with Joe Vigil's emphasis on pace workouts, within a few years he'd taken a bunch of non-scholarship runners and built them into a regional power.

In 1985 he moved up the coast to Cal Tech in Pasadena. "They are probably the smartest kids in the country," says O'Brien. "You could tell them about the physics of the long jump or the physiology behind distance running and they'd get everything you were saying and more."

Although the academic rigors of Cal Tech prevented him from demanding too much training time from his athletes–"I don't know of any program as challenging," he says–the teams became NCAA Division III powers, which O'Brien feels was rather embarrassing to some administrators who believed athletics should be little more than an adjunct activity at such an academically prestigious school.

That led O'Brien to begin looking for another job, which he assumed would be in college. "But the principal at Arcadia got me to come in for an interview, and I took a teaching job there. I've never regretted it," he says.

He might have had second thoughts when he showed up to the first cross country practice in 1996 as a volunteer assistant. "We had 18 boys and a dozen girls, in a school of almost 4,000," he recalls. O'Brien began recruiting in his PE classes, and started scouting the eighth grade track meets for potential talent. At the time, he was just looking for bodies, kids willing to work to get a little better as athletes, but the philosophy hasn't changed much in 15 years, even if the achievements and goals have risen.

"I'll take anybody who walks on the campus and let them try out for the team," says O'Brien.

"If they give me a great effort, they're dedicated, show up every time and work toward our team goals, they're going to be with us. They may never score a point in a meet, but they are valuable to our team. I believe that."

The Arcadia program is based on amassing a huge distance base over the summer, with the top guys running 1,000 miles in 13 weeks, to enable the runners to race their best at the championship meets. "I've seen a lot of great teams fade down the stretch," says O'Brien.

"I'm willing to take the risk of not being great early to be great when it counts." O'Brien will sometimes hold part of his varsity out of early regular season meets so they can do a workout instead, or have them treat the race as a "zone run," the Arcadia term for tempo workouts.

"We train them hard all summer long," he says. "We train every single kid to be the last man standing. If Ammar is going to the state meet, then everyone trains like they're going to the state meet." Although the team's recent success has made it easier, getting everyone to buy into it isn't always easy. "We have a large Asian population here, and many of the parents believe that it's all about academics. Athletics can be a hard sell." In spite of that, close to half the team, including several of the top varsity runners, have come from that demographic.

No matter what their ethnic or athletic background, O'Brien feels he can turn his runners into champions, through hard work fueled by frequent injections of his encouragement and enthusiasm. "It's not the kid, it's the system," he says. "The coach is the driving force. You're the planner of workouts, you're the guy changing the culture of your high school into becoming a running school instead of a football or basketball school."

Clearly, with a national championship, as well as their first California state title, O'Brien's army of runners has put its imprimatur on Arcadia, making it, for one year at least, a running school that all others must measure themselves against. And who knows, maybe the best athletes there will start going out for cross country instead of football or soccer. That would really give Jim O'Brien something to preach.


High mileage base training is the foundation of Arcadia's long-term success.

The more top high school running programs you examine, the more it becomes apparent that there's no magic workout or secret ingredient for their success, simply a solid training philosophy and a lot of hard work. Arcadia High School is no different, except that they might work a bit harder and run more miles than other teams. That's not surprising, given their coach, Jim O'Brien's, belief in Arthur Lydiard's system of building a big aerobic base before the competitive season, and his background as a marathoner and ultramarathoner. (He ran Boston 22 times in 23 years, and still holds the course record for the hilly trail Angeles Crest 100-miler.)

"We're a high-mileage program," says Allen Leung, one of the top five runners on the national champion team.

"But none of us had any background in running before we got here, so we don't know anything else. It's what we're used to."

"I was initially overwhelmed by the amount of miles we were running," says junior Ryan Vargas. "My first day was 20 minutes on the track. It felt like two hours and the next day I couldn't walk. I wondered what I'd gotten myself into, but it got easier after a few weeks."

For the Apaches, the cross country buildup begins the day after school ends in early June, with captain-led practices during the California-mandated no-coaching period. "Everybody has a schedule, they know how much and what pace they should be running," says O'Brien.

Three weeks later, on July 1, semi-official workouts begin under the auspices of O'Brien's Army, a USATF club. That continues for seven weeks until school practices begin the last week in August, three weeks before the first meet. Over those 13 weeks the Apaches log prodigious miles. The top 14 runners who will make up the varsity top 1,000 miles, with underclassmen and JVs running 800 to 900. Even the lowest-level runners are asked to do 650 miles.

"The first three weeks are just mileage, with a few easy fartleks thrown in," says O'Brien. When the more organized workouts begin in July, they add repeats of 800m to 2 miles and zone runs, which are based on Joe Vigil's VO2 max charts. On the repeats, O'Brien says, "We'll start doing those at 85 percent of a guy's mile PR, then gradually increase that to 88, 91, and finally 94 percent." The zone runs are done at a lower percentage, and based on a runner's 3-mile best. For example, someone with a 3-mile PR of 15:00 does a 75 percent zone run at 6:00 per mile, whereas 85 percent results in a 5:40 pace. "It makes the math real easy for the kids," says O'Brien.

Five days a week the runners do doubles, logging up to 5 miles before 7:15 a.m. One day on the weekend they'll do a long run that reaches 16 miles by the end of the summer. Hill repeats are introduced around that time, run on a median strip up the nearby Santa Anita mountains.

Once school begins and the competitive season approaches, 2-mile repeats at lactate threshold are added. They complete only three or four repeats of these, but with scant rest. Mileage drops in deference to the demands of school, and the hill repeats are dropped while the zone runs shift to the uphill median strip to prepare the runners for the terrain at the state meet.

In spite of this challenging workload O'Brien takes pride that none of his runners has suffered serious injury. "That's because we do everything on dirt or grass," he says. "We don't run one step on the track." Arcadia County Park, a 10-minute jog from the school, has a well-worn figure-8 loop where O'Brien can monitor workouts from the central point, and a nearby dirt horse trail provides a soft, traffic-free venue for distance runs.

The system is geared toward success in the long term, both over a single season as well as the athlete's high school career. O'Brien's teams are known for peaking at the championship meets, evidenced by qualifying for six consecutive California D1 sectional meets, more than any other program. Similarly, his runners tend to exhibit deliberate but ultimately impressive gains over their four seasons of cross country, and all five of the graduating varsity runners will continue competing in college, led by Ammar Moussa at Colorado.

The success isn't quick, either for a season or for a coaching career. "It took time to get kids to buy into it," says O'Brien. But as each succeeding group of runners did, and piggybacked themselves on the work and achievements of those who preceded them, they've managed, through the basic and unglamorous dint of hard work, to climb their way all the way to the top of the national scholastic running mountain.