Ryan Sheridan, an Iona Gael, is a key component to his distance team's success. Sheridan took 41st over all at the NCAA cross country meet this past fall pacing his team to a second place finish. At the NCAA East Regional Championships, Sheridan defeated a strong field of 5,000-meter runners to get his automatic bid to the NCAA Outdoor Championships June 11-13.

Seed times did not have you as a favorite to win the 5,000 at the East Regional meet.

Well, those are a little misleading. I had the first early non-Stanford seed time. I ran at the William and Mary Colonial Relays in the first week of April—April 3rd or April 4th—and had Ed Moran pace me for my first race in 14:06 there...two months ago. Then there were a lot of times coming in from early this month and Penn Relays and stuff. I don't think that time was indicative of my ability right now. I think can go a bit quicker.

Any idea how much quicker you can go?

I'm not going to say a minute, but less than a minute for sure. Maybe 10 seconds.

A race that goes fast from the gun, does that play into your hands...or do you prefer a kicker's race like Regionals?

I was hoping it was going to go out faster. I know I don't have as strong of a kick as some of those miler guys. My goals was to be in the 10 this year because of the way the system is going to be next year. I heard they are going to have a 10,000 in the Super Regional. I don't know what the deal is for next year, but I think they're going to with descending order. I figured that if I could go and get the 10,000 at Nationals this year and get the time, then I could run it twice as opposed to having to run it three times. My training has been going really well, but I don't think I have that great of a kick. I was afraid when I saw that Sam (Sam Chelanga KWIK-E) wasn't going to be in it and he would going to run the Reebok Grand Prix, that it would be really slow and it would come down to the last lap. I was hoping it would be faster. I do better in a quicker race.

What was your split for the last mile?

Four twenty-something. 4:20 flat maybe.

It was still pretty wet out there, how did that last mile feel?

I felt a lot worse in second place. It felt good though. A little tiring. We were really dogging the first 3,000. We were going at 72s, so it wasn't like a race before hand. Everyone was going 71s-72...except Big Al.

Was that predetermined? Your teammate takes the lead from the gun? (Ryan's teammate, Alex Soderberg, took the early lead, about 20 meters ahead of the huge, tight pack.)

Totally not. Someone asked our coaches if that was a tactic we were using, but that was Big Al on his own. He did the same thing at ICs. He's run 3:50, so he's got speed...but he just wanted to go for it. And he did obviously.

Going into the NCAA meet, do you have a place goal in mind?

I have to see the results from last year to see what guys finish where. I haven't seen all the Regional results yet either. As long as I run to the best of my ability and my fitness...then, I'll be pretty happy about it. My goal is really to make the final. I could go in there and have all 19, or however many guys ahead of me...24 guys...be better than I am.

Do you still consider yourself more of a cross country runner than a track runner?

I like cross country a whole lot better. I find cross country more fun, just because it's a longer distance race. And especially because I'm at a school like Iona and we have a huge emphasis on cross. It's a big deal here and that just makes me like it a lot more. Track, this will be the farthest my track season has ever gone. I've never made it to the state meet in high school. I ran more cross country than I did track in high school. Maybe if I run more track I'll change my mind.

So, longer stuff like the 10,000?

I like the 10,000. I would have loved to have gone quicker and made it to Nats, but I can't complain getting in the five.

Your team seems pretty interesting at Iona. What's the team chemistry like?

Considering that the whole team is distance guys, the team chemistry is really good. Everyone has the same attitude. Iona is a really small school and kids are coming here for one reason really: to be part of the team. I don't think anyone grew up with the idea that they want to go to Iona College. They happened to have a really good cross country team compared to other schools. We come here, especially the guys from overseas, with all similar goals in mind.

Yeah, you have a lot of overseas runners. That must be awesome to be so diverse?

Yeah, we've got a German, an Australian, English, Irish, Belgian...oh, if I forget someone then they'll be pissed. Oh, Mo (Mohamed Khadraoui KWIK-E) is from Morocco. And this year we have another German, another Irish...a Danish. Oh, and Big Al is Swedish. I think it's awesome to have people from all over the place. You get to experience a bit of each of their cultures. They might be a pain in the ass and smell funny from the food they're cooking. But you don't really get that anywhere else.

Can you explain the illnesses/injuries that you went through in high school?

It was a series of bumps in the road. I had kidney stones when I was younger, in eighth grade and ninth grade, so I had a history of those. They were causing problems for me, like a birth defect. I had a bunch of extra tissue in my kidneys. I didn't notice any of this until I got a hip injury my sophomore year. I had this injury and then I went to get an MRI, thinking I had a stress fracture or something in my hip. Well, they noticed that I had swelling in the kidney. They were two completely unrelated things...combined. The kidney took me out for six months and I had surgery. I recovered from that. I thought they might be related. I spent the next year and a half with the hip thing and it turned that my spine was crooked and I have wicked scoliosis bottom near my hip. I had to go to a chiropractor and I have to wear shoe lifts all the time now. It was a lot of little stuff that piled up together to make one giant pain the ass. It's over now though.

For someone who's never had a kidney stone...can you explain how much fun those are?

They're about as much fun as giving birth, I've been told. It was a lot more interesting to tell people about it. I don't want to say impressed, but maybe they were disgusted a little bit. It was a cool story to have when you're in eighth grade. And I also got an unlimited bathroom pass. It was pretty nifty. I could go to bathroom whenever I wanted. I had to have catheters for my surgery...which is probably the worst thing. I have a friend who is a cop and he has on his Kevlar vest, “if you have to put a catheter in me, let me die.” Those are much worse than any kind of kidney stones.

Do you use that as a pick up line...the pain you'd had to go through?

I try to avoid that. I don't use that one much. I don't think the catheter talk is going to go over very well...with anyone as a point of attraction. I don't think my girlfriend would appreciate me wielding around pick up lines. If I used my catheter lines she might catch me.

The unlimited bathroom pass. Did you ever abuse your privilege?

I abused it tremendously. I feel safe saying it now. Being so far away from high school—well, two years—I had a math teacher who refused to give out bathroom passes unless it was an emergency. I came back from surgery and asked her to go to the bathroom. She was being a hard ass and said, “no”. I had to go for the second time in the week, which is unprecedented in her class. She asked me for my doctor's note and low and behold, I had my doctor's note saying that I need to use the bathroom as frequently as possible. I went whenever I could...I never liked Math A.

So, was your injury a gradual thing to make you stop running or was there an instance where it had to be taken care of immediately?

The hip pain was immediate and I don't know exactly what did it, it was when I was running a track work out and I tweaked it. It was instant and I couldn't run a day after that without pain until two years later. It wasn't a matter of me slowly trying and trying and trying. I couldn't run at all. Then, when the kidney stuff came on, it completely went to the back and I couldn't think about running.

Was there a point when you thought you'd never run again?

I didn't know about the scoliosis stuff until December of my senior year. I wasn't even sure then. I went to doctors in New York City. I was commuting into New York City my junior year of high school. I went for four months to Ward Performance. Going three times a week after school. I went to a whole bunch of big specialists and had no idea what it was. I wasn't sure I was going to run again. It wasn't really a sad thing though, my parents never let me get too upset about it. I wasn't sure if I was going to run again, but I had friends and did other sports like playing around with basketball every once and a while.

Do you ever wonder where you would be if you had that year and half of your running career back, where you might be?

I look at it like, “maybe if I had that year and a half, maybe I wouldn't even want to be competing.” I was pretty successful when I was young, so I had been competing at a high level for my high school career and maybe I wouldn't want to. My little brother is younger than me and he jokes around that he's run more season of high school track than I have. I think he gets tired of that, but I had a nice break. I was lucky that I was good before I had got hurt and hadn't really accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. Maybe if I had kept running I would have got my ass kicked and regressed a shit ton. I couldn't have changed it, I can't change it...so, I don't look at it that way.

Things work out for a reason sometimes.

Things worked out very well. Surprisingly well. Some people get upset if they have shit races and some people get upset if their training isn't going well, but I have those moments where I'm really grateful to be able to run. Three years ago, if I knew that I would be at this school, running with all these guys...I wouldn't have believed it. Sometimes I don't worry about the competition aspect of it...just being able to do it.

What's your training like?

Mileage, over last summer, was probably about 85-90. I was around 95 all winter and spring. Now I'm down around 80-85. It's probably 75 right now. The guys here run some long mileage, with tempos and stuff. I've only been here two years and I was building up mileage from 50, from the injury in the spring. Then this past summer we had the whole thing with the coaches leaving and it was a weird limbo thing. Physically it was fine, but mentally it did make training a little rough.

Are you running the streets a lot down there? Is it a lot of stop-and-go running?

That's a big misconception. We have a pretty decent trail system near our school. I run trails every day unless it's snowing out. There's a 17-mile loop half a mile from our school. Then a half mile south of our school there's an apartment complex with a 10-mile loop down there. We do run at VCP. We'll do workouts on the back hills or whatever. They're really nice trails around here. I run the trail system around here every day. It's not a big park or anything. They meander through the neighborhood. It's a pretty good situation.

Do you have to clear up that misconception a lot?

Yeah, with recruits we like to show them our trails. We aren't really in New York City...about 5 miles north of the Bronx. Everyone thinks we run on the roads all the time. But, no, we don't...we don't do that at all. We run up at Rockafeller and do our long runs there. We can have these trails here and no one understands that we do.

Can you give me a crazy running-related story?

How about the time I was most scared on a run? And more so because of the way it happened. Well, we got to camp last year and I hadn't done a workout all summer. We go up to New Paltz and spend a week up there. There are a bunch of trails around there to run. I don't think anyone on the team had done this run...but the team had done it in the past. We're warming up and no one knew what we were doing. I was looking at Mo (Mohamed Khadraoui KWIK-E) and he looked worried. If he's worried...then the mere mortals on the team need to be really worried about what we're doing. We get in three miles into our run and line up on the base of a hill. They just said, “just get up”. It ended up being eight miles uphill...straight up a mountain. We had no idea how long it was or when the end was coming. That was my first impression of college cross country. The workout was... “just get up.” It was pretty intimidating. I was just hanging on for dear life on Jason Weller's back. It was just pain every step. It was frightening. An assistant, who's at Lamar now, I remember being on a corner and him being like, “there's one mile to go.” And we think that was at like four miles. I just kept pumping thinking we have a mile to go the whole time. I was just holding on for dear life the whole time.