Blogs : NCAA Division III Blog

Interview: Ian Ramsey-North of Haverford College

It was November of 2005 and Ian Ramsey-North was capping his strongest season to date with an individual All-American performance at the National Cross Country Championships, adding to his All-American selection anchoring Haverford College’s DMR earlier in the year.  But even as he was helping his team to its best ever 3^rd place finish that day, a significant part of him was hundreds of miles away in Panabaj, Guatemala.  The community (where he had done some academic research earlier in the summer) had been recently rocked by hurricane-induced mudslides that would leave over 400 missing or dead.  At the end of the semester, Ian left Haverford to aid in Panabaj’s rebuilding process and in search of his own life lessons along the way.  It would be a full year before he would return to Haverford and Division III competition.

Ian is back this year as a senior co-captain of Haverford College’s cross country team.  Last May, Ian finished seventh in the steeplechase at the Outdoor Track National Championships to complement his 2005 All-American performances from indoor track and cross country.  Now back for his final year of eligibility, Ian talks of the linkages between academics and athletics (he’s a routine scholar-athlete award winner) and running and life.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, like where you're from and how you got started running?

I’m a senior political science major at Haverford College.  I’m from Narberth, PA, which is just a few miles down the road from Haverford.  I started running in 8^th grade because I was tired of baseball and my basketball coach told me to do track.  I really liked it, did it again in 9^th grade, and then sophomore year started running year round.  I’ve been doing it ever since.

How do your PRs in high school compare to what you've done so far in college?  More importantly, how has your understanding of training, racing, and running in general evolved?

My improvement since high school is almost completely attributable to two factors: my coach, Tom Donnelly, and the guys surrounding me on my team.

In high school I raced too much, didn’t do enough mileage, and was in over my head in the harder efforts.  That just seems to be the nature of most high school training.  In college I’ve benefited from a gradual increase in mileage, more threshold-level harder efforts, and an emphasis on consistency and routine that really enables your body to maximize the benefits of training.  When you describe it like that it doesn’t sound like a very complicated system but I’ve seen how difficult it is for people to get it right and I’m incredibly grateful to be in a place where it’s all laid out for you and you just have to make the decision to commit.

Racing in high school I often found myself engaging in that overwrought melodrama where you try to whip yourself up into a frenzy for races, focus on your rival, and decide that when you compete it’s you against the world.  In college I still get incredibly nervous before races but instead of demonizing competitors Tom has taught me that you race out of respect for them.  So what I focus on more now when racing is the competition with myself and that moment where I have to decide to make myself hurt.  I don’t always get it right at that moment but I’m getting more consistent and confident in my ability to make the hard and right decisions.

What drew you to choose Division III, and Haverford College in particular?

I don’t think I had the times for Division I but that didn’t bother me, I didn’t want to go DI.  I wasn’t even sure I wanted to run in college.  I originally visited Haverford just to practice the process of college visits.  Early on I thought I’d ruled it out because it was too close to home.  So after visiting Haverford and talking to Tom I went and did what was, for my school a fairly standard tour of northeast schools.  None of them felt right to me.  I’m not myself Quaker but I’ve been gone to Quaker schools my whole life.  It was only after visiting non-Quaker schools that I realized how central Quaker values were to my way of thinking and learning.  That and the fact that I didn’t speak to another coach who I thought compared to Tom Donnelly convinced me to go to Haverford.

What was your training like this past summer?

This past summer I took two weeks off after outdoor nationals then built up from 40 to 90 miles over about 5 weeks. I then did a couple of 90’s and then stayed in the 95-100 range for the last 6 weeks or so of the summer.  I didn’t do any deliberate, harder efforts but I ran over a lot of hills.

What are your goals for yourself and your team this season and year?

We want to win.  I want to run smart and compete with the top guys at nationals and see what happens.

What is your favorite workout during the cross country season and what do you like about it?

Probably 8x1000m at or around race pace.  We don’t do a lot of race pace workouts so this one is fun for letting loose just a little bit. 

In 2005, you finished a solid 29th at the Cross Country National Championships, capping a strong season and helping to lead Haverford to its highest ever finish at Nationals (third place, one point behind defending champion Calvin College).  That was your last race for over a year.  Can you take us through why you took two semesters off and what you were doing?

In the fall of 2005 I started to feel that I needed to get out of school for a while and see another way of being.  Having gone from a Quaker prep school outside Philadelphia to a Quaker college outside Philadelphia I needed to reassure myself that I could be something other than a student at a Quaker school.  So in 2006 I went to Guatemala for about nine months to live and work in a town where I had previously done some political science research with a professor [Editors’ note: Ian hosts and narrates this video].  In the fall of 2005 the town had suffered a mudslide that killed hundreds and displaced thousands so I was mostly working with NGO’s and grass roots advocacy groups to help the town get back on its feet and rebuild.  It was a hard place to work and the problems they were facing were tremendous, so I’m not sure how much change I effected.  But the people there were incredibly generous with me and I learned a lot.

Who has been the biggest influence in your life and/or running?

In my life: my mother.  That I can’t begin to describe properly and it wouldn’t be very relevant to a running interview.  In running: Tom Donnelly.  That I also can’t begin to describe but I’ll try:

At Haverford the school seems to constantly return to a debate about whether or not athletics deserves much of a place in a liberal arts education.  I think that in some cases, when athletics is done for the wrong reasons and has the wrong effects, it’s hard to defend it and explain why at a college money should go to a track instead of a new classroom.  But when I think of how Tom coaches, of the effect he has on the guys on our team (and every men’s team for the past 32 years), it seems absolutely obvious to me why athletics should be valued. 

Tom has coached national and world champions and World, American and NCAA record holders.  So obviously the man can coach.  He’s one of the very best around.  But that you can tell from a distance.  What we at Haverford have the privilege to know is that Tom uses coaching as a way to talk to us as people and to talk about life.  Somehow he can give you perspective and tell you that running is just a game while simultaneously making you believe that what you do as a runner has everything to do with who you are as a person.  He’s called running “a game”, not to say its unimportant, but to say that there are other people dealing with things much harder and much more important.  But since we’re here doing it, we might as well do it right and do our best.  I can’t describe in one interview what Tom gets through to us over years of patient teaching and coaching.

What do you like the most about Haverford Cross Country?
Everything I described above is obviously central.  Then there are the guys.  A group of guys fully and unapologetically committed to doing something together.  It yields a camaraderie and honesty that I haven’t found anywhere else.

What's the relationship between the track team and the other athletic teams?   What's the athletic culture like at Haverford?
I think the relationship is getting better but probably to a greater extent than most other teams we isolate ourselves from the athletic culture.  I don’t think it’s necessarily about any negative judgment of other teams but we just operate differently and benefit to a certain degree from being on our own. 

At Haverford, like most schools, there are incredibly committed athletes who are focused on working, learning, and winning; there are also people who don’t take it very seriously.  So naturally you’ve got some team cultures that are about focus, sacrifice, accountability, etc. but there are also team cultures that are about social life, status, and instant gratification.  And within teams there can be vast differences.

Sometimes I hear people say that Haverford’s athletic culture suffers from Quaker modesty—an aversion to competition and excellence—but I don’t think that’s the case.  Quakerism might explain why we continually talk about whether or not we should be devoting resources to sports, but I think that’s okay and could even benefit our athletic culture.  If we’re forced to constantly explain why sports are important, how much they matter to our growth and education, then we’re going to end up reminding ourselves that at some level it’s got to be more than just a game.  And if we really know that why would we mess around?

How do other students (non-runners) and professors at your school view the track team and its members?

I’d say we’re generally viewed as a little cult-like, but as far as I can tell lots of track teams are perceived that way.  I think it comes with the territory.  Running is hard to understand for lots of people.  I don’t really know how professors view the team.  I think that generally they don’t form opinions about the team.  We’re just students to them.  That seems appropriate.

Having so many options open to you--athletically, academically, and from a social justice standpoint--what are your thoughts looking ahead to your post-collegiate days?

I’m not really sure but I’m also not worried about it.  For now I’m enjoying my last year of college and am determined not to let next year interfere with that.  I’d like to get back to Latin America and get my Spanish down but nothing’s definite.

Do you follow running at the collegiate or professional levels at all?

I do.  I read a lot of letsrun and also benefit tremendously from my friends’ and teammates diligent (obsessive-compulsive?) scanning of the internet. 

Would you care to confess to what extent you lurk on Letsrun.com or other message boards?

I rarely lurk on letsrun.com boards.  Every time I check out a good thread it gets derailed pretty quickly.  But I lurk on smaller-scale message boards.
 
Are there any other closing thoughts or pieces of wisdom you'd like to share?

I’d just like to say thank you for maintaining this site.  It’s really nice to get a sense of who other DIII runners are and hear what they have to say about running and life.

Thanks to Ian for a fantastic interview.

Untitled Comment

3:43 PM, October 6, 2007 .. Posted by Anonymous

what a great interview! this guy seems like a role model for his team.

Untitled Comment

7:00 PM, October 6, 2007 .. Posted by Anonymous

Hey Ian,

Killer interview man, a really enjoyable read. Good luck to you and your team throughout the season.

Best,

Jon Phillips

Thanks

6:33 AM, October 7, 2007 .. Posted by Anonymous

Thanks for a little race-morning inspiration.

Give credit where credit is due

10:59 PM, October 7, 2007 .. Posted by Anonymous

nice interview, ian.

maybe trackshark should start citing the photographers of the photos they use, rather than blatantly taking them from someone's picasa web page. just a thought.

--the photog