Penn State Nittany Lion junior Owen Dawson, a Pennsylvania native, recently sliced two seconds off his 800-meter personal-best time this past indoor season, running 1 minute, 47.77 seconds and earning his first All-American honors. As part of one of the best 4x800 relay teams in recent history, there are whispers of records falling at next weekend's Penn Relays, but you won't hear Dawson or his tight-lipped teammates predict a time or a finish. How fast do you think the Penn State 4x800 team can go?

Are you racing this weekend?

This weekend is just a small Bucknell meet. I might just pace an 800 for some other guys on the team or just train through.

You've historically done really well at the Penn Relays. What are your goals for the big meet?

For Penn, we're just going for the 4x800.

Not the open 800?

Nah, just the 4x800.

What is your team looking to run?

We haven't talked about it. Everyone's talking about time and breaking the record and all that stuff, but all we're talking about is getting the win.

You haven't conversed over what you could possibly do?

Yeah, we've talked about it. We don't want to focus on that. We want to focus on getting the wheel first. If we can do that, then the time will probably come with it.

With your 800 time dropping significantly this indoor season, what do you attribute your improvement to?

Just a really great group of guys to train with. We have probably the best group of guys in the country to train with. We've got a pretty a pretty large group with Kevin and Mark and a couple of other guys that train with us and we help them out and then we train with them and they help us out.

Do you train with just 800 guys or do you bump up with the distance guys?

We have three basic groups. It's the long distance guys—5K and 10K guys. The low miler group and then us. On the longer run days, we usually all run together. But for workouts and shorter runs, we'll split up a little bit.

What's a typical week of training for you like during outdoor?

My mileage is around 60-70. It depends on the person with us. Lionel has a little less than me and Ryan. Then, we have two or three workouts a week and the rest are normal quality run days.

What's your long run like?

Long runs are over an hour. We usually do those on Sunday. They're a relaxed pace, not really hammering them...but pretty good pace.

You mind sharing what you consider to be a “pretty good pace”?

For some of our runs, we get down around—and this wouldn't be for the long run—six-minute pace or faster.

You're a half-miler and your twin brother is a distance guy. Why did you start racing different distances?

He was always a lot better in cross and stuff and I always tagged along. When it came to track, I would do a lot better in the shorter stuff. It started when we started running in high school.

How did you and your brother get into running in the first place?

My parents didn't run but they were always athletic. My older sister ran and when we got into high school, my mom was like, “just do what you're sister does!” And we got on the track team and it sort of took off from there.

Did you do any other sports?

I swam in high school.

Do you still use swimming as cross training or anything?

Oh, not much. I'm pretty much done with swimming.

Why did you choose to stay in-state to go to college in the first place?

Basically, I only really visited here and Tennessee. I liked it here more.

What's with the twin situation in Pennsylvania? You and your brother and the Miller brothers. Is it something in the water?

Oh, no (laughs). Me and Kyle are fraternal. There have been a couple good sets of twins coming out of PA. My dad is actually a twin.

They say that twins have “twin language”. Do you and your brother have anything like that?

We don't have a language, but we're usually on the same page with stuff without having to really say anything to each other. I wouldn't say ESP, but we know what's going on.

What are your long-term goals in running? What do you want to accomplish?

I'm sort of in between the 800 and the mile. I'd like to break four in the mile and get down near 1:45-1:46 in the eight.

After Penn, what's your schedule?

There's been talk about maybe going out to Stanford to run a good 15 out there. I ran 3:45 in Florida and I think I could do a little better than that. Maybe around 3:43. Around there.

What do you and your teammates do for fun when you get free time?

Free time? Hobbies? A couple of us have long boards. We like to cruise around on those a bit. (Laughs) There's not much I can actually say in an interview like this...

Come on...shenanigans?

Shenanigans? You could say there's some. We play a lot of jokes on each other. We play kind of mean jokes on each other. They're all in fun. There was one incident where a guy on the team, he was playing jokes on other people. We decided to get him back. We got a deceased squirrel and put it in his room and hid it there. We covered it up so he wouldn't see it and put it on his chair. It turns out that he didn't check his chair before he sat down on it and realized what it was and freaked out. Stuff like that! (laughs)

Did it make a bit of a mess on his chair?

Oh, no! We cleaned it! It wasn't like a disgusting dead creature. We took the nasty and gross stuff out. It was just the body.

Oh, it wasn't a disgusting dead squirrel. It was just a cleaned-up dead squirrel?

(Laugh) You could say that. All the guts and stuff weren't in it or anything.

Are you the catalyst for this trick-playing or one of many?

Most of the time I would start this, but there's a lot of this going around.

If you could have one meal, prepared by anyone, what would have and who would make it?

One meal, prepared by anybody. It would probably be—this is a hard one—something pasta. That's my favorite food! My mom makes a really good pasta dish. That would be it! As boring as it sounds (laughs)! She makes a really good red sauce!

Can you share a crazy running-related story?

Once our coach decided to have a Sunday early morning long run during preseason. Everyone was pretty miserable about it. It was raining and kind of cold out. We all go out for the run and get to the golf course and see the greens. They're like really wet and slick. I'm like, “it looks pretty slippery. I'll try it out!” Everyone is still mopey and mad and I just run out and slide across the green. I go like 10 feet and everyone realizes that this is a pretty cool thing to do. It was pretty fun. For the next hour or so...we just slid around all the greens on our golf course. We realized that if we went back to the track, covered in grass and mud, the coaches would think something was up. We didn't know what to do until we came across this huge pond in the middle of the golf course. We ran and dove into the middle of the pond and cleaned up a little bit.

There are a few other others...but if they come back on me...(laughs). There was one time where—and this is kind of not really safe. It snowed and it was melting and there was rain at the same time. All the rivers and streams around here got really, really high. We went out on one of our runs and we call this “The Docks” because it's sort of a wetland with a boardwalk so you can still walk through it. That was all flooded. We go close to the stream and we were like, “it would be kind of cool if we could get through it!” It was much, much faster than we thought it was and some of us sort of got pulled along (laughs). That one hasn't gotten back to the coaches yet! When it freezes...we'll go ice skating a bit too.

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