Where are they now? Wesley Meyer

Ex-Rochester 3-sport star became realtor after breaking 4-minute mile

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Wesley Meyer (photo provided)

Roughly 2,300 men have ever run a sub-four minute mile.

Approximately 750 American men have ever run a sub-four minute mile.

Wesley Meyer, a 2016 Rochester High School grad, is one of them.

He did it on June 6, 2021. He viewed it as his one chance. It was the peak of his career but also the end of his career, at least the middle distance phase of his career.

“I wouldn’t change my high school experience for anything,” Meyer said. “I think it was exactly what I needed. It set me up perfectly for success at the higher levels.”

After graduating from Rochester, Meyer attended Olivet Nazarene University, an NAIA school located in Bourbonnais, Ill., and ran cross-country for four years and track for three years. His senior track season in 2020 was canceled due to COVID, so he was allowed another year of eligibility in that sport only.

He reached out to Lipscomb and coach Nick Polk, hoping he would offer him a scholarship for the spring of 2021. Lipscomb is an NCAA Division I school with an enrollment of 4,500 affiliated with the Churches of Christ and located in Nashville, Tenn.

Meyer had won the NAIA national title in the indoor mile in 4:06.09 at a meet in Brookings, S.D., in March 2020 just before the pandemic hit.

“Lipscomb had recruited my out of high school, and they were probably third or fourth on my list just because I wanted to stay closer to home,” Meyer said. “But I remember they had a good program. I knew they were a solid Christian university, which is what I liked. And we liked the idea of being in Nashville.”

Meyer knew of the university, but he did not know Polk, who had been there only a year. Meyer told Polk what he had done at Olivet Nazarene – a 1:53.04 in the 800, an 8:21.03 in the 3,000 and a 15:18 in a 5K cross-country race in August 2019.

“I said, ‘Hey, what can you do for me? This is what I’ve done. This is what I think I can do time-wise and competitive-wise,’” Meyer said. “He said, ‘Yeah, we can pay for you to come here.’”

Asked if he was a better runner at Lipscomb than when he was at Olivet Nazarene, he said he was the same.

“The difference, I think, was who I was training with,” Meyer said. “At Olivet, I had to adjust my training. I did a lot of stuff by myself. Just because if I was training at full capacity, not many people could run with me. At Lipscomb, I was not the fastest on the team. And so it was a really nice change to be able to be pushed and to actually lose out sometimes during practice. That made the big difference, just being a normal-sized fish in a big pond. That made the difference.

“And also the coaching. I firmly believe Nick Polk is one of the top distance coaches in the NCAA system. He’s excellent. His training was exactly what I needed.”

The 4 Minute Mile

Though there are some accounts of a man running a four-minute mile that go back to the 1770s, it was Roger Bannister, a British neurologist, who became the first man to break four minutes in the mile when he ran a 3:59.4 in May 1954 at a track in Oxford, England.

Meyer had gotten the idea he could break a four-minute mile when he ran a 3:48.98 and finished fourth in the 1,500 meters during his sophomore season at Olivet Nazarene at the NAIA Outdoor Nationals in May 2018. (There are 1,609 meters in a mile.)

“That was the fastest I had ever gone,” Meyer said. “That was within realm of four minutes, and I knew I had so much more to give. So that was kind of the linchpin of realizing my dream of running sub-four was actually within reach.

“And so switching to Lipscomb, that was really my goal. That had been my goal ever since my junior year.”

Moving from an NAIA school to an NCAA Division I school, he said there were perks that Olivet Nazarene did not have. He could get massages every week. He was doing more runner-specific weightlifting that was included in the system there.

“The added support and the athletic and medical staff were excellent,” Meyer said. “One of the big differences was I was able to stay uninjured. I was just constantly plagued with chronic Achilles injuries. After graduating and then changing to Lipscomb, my strength training program was really stellar, and I think that contributed a lot to me being able to stay healthy and run to my full capacity.”

He ran a personal best 4:03.23 for the mile as an unaffiliated runner at a meet in Columbia, S.C., in December 2020.

In his first meet at Lipscomb in March 2021, he ran a 3:47.36 at a meet at Georgia Tech for 1,500 meters. He ran a 4:04.98 at a meet in Atlanta, which was his best mile for Lipscomb.

He ran a 3:45.33 for 1,500 meters at the Atlantic Sun conference meet in Jacksonville about three weeks before the Music City Track Carnival in Nashville.

“So that race has been happening for a while, and it’s a whole track meet, and really there is a single race every year at that meet where the goal is to get as many guys to break four as possible," Meyer said. “I actually had run it two years prior at Olivet. Coach took me down there, and we ran it. But really that year, it was an Olympic year. The goal was to get a last-chance opportunity for professional athletes to get some Olympic qualifying times in before the end of the season. It was a Tokyo year (for the Olympics), and that was the focus for a lot of the athletes that were there.”

It was the 4:03.23 in South Carolina that made him think he could run under four minutes.

“After that race, I was super confident,” Meyer said. “Because that was right at the beginning of the racing season, and I have never been that fast before at the beginning of a season. If the pattern had held to basically where I usually start and where I usually finish, I knew it was a big possibility.”

He described the training for the race as “really easy.”

“We had done all the work,” Meyer said. “We had done all the hard workouts. It was more just maintaining what we had already done and actually taking quite a bit of miles off of what we typically would do. … With the added strength training that I was doing, it protected me from getting injured with the increased training.”

Meanwhile, the Lipscomb coaches got Meyer out of his comfort zone and started running him in the 5,000 meters. Though he had run that distance in cross-country at Rochester and at Olivet, he had never run it on a track.

“I had myself convinced that I was a middle distance runner,” Meyer said. “When I started being competitive on this level, I realized, hey, actually I have a lot to give in these longer events. I really think that was the key. It built my aerobic engine bigger. I could maintain my speed that I’ve always had, but my base was bigger, and I think that was key for me to break four minutes.

His time of 14:00.29 in the 5,000 at a meet in Oxford, Miss., in April 2021 stood as the Lipscomb school record for two years.

When he arrived at the Music City Track Carnival, he said he was “pretty nervous.”

“I knew that was probably going to be my last shot, at least definitely in a Lipscomb uniform,” Meyer said. “If I didn’t do it then, life has a way of continuing on, whether you want it to or not. I knew it was a big moment, and I knew it was the best competition I was going to have probably for the foreseeable future. I had the mentality of it was now or never.”

Meyer’s training partners, coach, parents, wife, brother-in-law and pastors were in the stands. This race had a pacer, or rabbit, in track parlance. His job was to jump out to an early lead and set the pace for a four-minute mile. The pacer would then step off the track about halfway through.

Meyer’s strategy was simple: Stay close to the front. Because if you stayed close to the pacer, then your pace is good.

Meyer kept that even pace through the first two laps. He was behind only the pacer and Ole Miss runner Michael Coccia.

The pacer dropped off on the backstretch of the third lap. Meyer stayed a short distance behind Coccia at the bell lap. He was right at 3:00.

Sean Torpy, a runner from Miami (Ohio), passed Coccia and Meyer with about 150 meters left. Straining slightly, Meyer was in third but passed Coccia.

The crowd was giving all the runners a standing ovation, trying to cheer them across the line.

“I think we got three!” the track announcer exclaimed. Torpy won in 3:59.04, Meyer was second in 3:59.69, and Coccia was third in 3:59.90.

“The pacers at that meet are usually really good,” Meyer said. “So I was just trusting him, and when he dropped off, there’s a big clock right at the finish line, so you know if you’re on pace or not. I knew I was on pace. It wasn’t too strenuous to run that pace. I was honestly surprised. It really didn’t start becoming too difficult until that last 200 meters. … It was the most even split race I’ve ever done in my life. I couldn’t have run it any more efficiently than I did.”

That was Meyer’s last competitive track meet.

“Four minutes was my big goal, and so I did that, and then I switched gears and started running longer events,” Meyer said.

He continued to train under Polk but started running road races, beginning with the Indianapolis Monumental Half Marathon. His goal was to run an Olympic trials qualifying time in the half marathon in order to qualify for the Olympic trials in the marathon.

He was coaching as a grad assistant at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tenn., about an hour drive from Nashville. He said the arrangement allowed him to have an income as a coach while training for the half marathon.

“I think I got eighth place in a really competitive half marathon,” Meyer said of his 1:04:44 at Indianapolis. “That was the last competitive race I ran was that half marathon.”

His wife told him she was pregnant. It was time to stop running.

Rochester roots as runner, swimmer

Running for coach Scott Stalbaum, Meyer did not make the sectional team in cross-country as a freshman at Rochester in the fall of 2012. In track in the summer of 2013, he was a regional qualifier in the 1,600, running a 4:40.70 and finishing third in a race won by teammate Alex Gudeman.

By the following year, he was Rochester’s No. 1 cross-country runner, running a 17:37 and finishing eighth out of 68 runners at the Culver Academy sectional. At the following week’s regional, he ran a 17:04, and Rochester finished fourth as a team. During his sophomore track season, he was the sectional champion in both the 1,600 and as part of the 4 x 800 relay.

He ran an eye-popping 4:28.97 in the regional at South Bend St. Joe but finished fifth.

As a junior, he was the frontrunner on a cross-country team that included Austin Kimble, Eli Pugh, Harrison Korkos, Jordan Reinholt, Cole Dowd and Damek O’Dell. He ran a 16:51 at the New Prairie semistate. The team finished 12th.

He also made state in swimming as a member of the 400 freestyle relay team along with Pugh, Sawyer Cripe and Jace Bixler.

If he was not known by then, his star was fully bright by track season of his junior year. He was the sectional champion in the 800, 1,600 and 4 x 800 relay. He was the regional champion in the 1,600 and also a state qualifier in the 800. He finished 19th at state in the 1,600 in 4:23.78 and 13th in the 800 in 1:55.80. Eleven years later, that remains the Rochester school record in the 800.

(As a footnote, Meyer’s older sister Anna holds the Rochester girls record in the 800 of 2:21.80, which she set in 2013. Anna (Meyer) Gehring is now married and the mother of two. She lives in Fort Wayne.)

Meyer’s senior year would have to be mentioned among the best years of an individual athlete in Rochester history.

Meyer won the Culver Academy sectional in 16:00 in cross-country. He duplicated that 16:00 to win the regional on the same Culver Academy course. He ran 16:08 at the New Prairie semistate. The team’s season ended with a ninth-place finish, but Meyer advanced to state as an individual. At state, he ran a 15:59 – only he and Thomas Rohr have ever broken 16 minutes in school history – and finished in 28th place.

In swimming, he made state as part of both the 200 medley and 400 freestyle relay teams. Rochester’s times of 1:40.69 in the 200 medley relay and 3:18.13 in the 400 freestyle relay at the Warsaw sectional that day remain school records a decade later.

In track, he won the Bremen sectional in the 800 in 1:56.24 and the 1,600 in 4:25.03, beating out teammate Pugh to the tape. Then he won the Warsaw regional in both races. He won the 800 in 1:56.80 – the eighth-place finisher was new Rochester football coach Isaac Shaffer, then a senior at Lewis Cass – and the 1,600 in a scorching school record of 4:16.82 that remains the record a decade later.

He was 24th in 4:27.81 in the 1,600 at state but made the podium with a seventh-place finish in 1:56.33 in the 800. No Rochester athlete has made the state podium in track since.

Meyer said that Stalbaum deserves credit for his unlikely success in swimming.

“I’ll be honest,” Meyer said. “I hated doing it in high school. I kind of loathe that I was good at it because then I tried hard, and when I’m good at something, I have to do it because it feels good to be good at something. … If you didn’t know, he made me do it. Because I wasn’t running how I should be in the winter, so he made me do swimming instead.”

Life in Nashville

A little over five years later, Meyer, 28, runs “a few times a month” just to stay healthy.

“Nothing that resembles what I used to be or what I’m capable of,” Meyer said.

He is now a realtor living in the Donelson neighborhood in Nashville, Tenn.

He has been married to the former Kara Brock, herself a former cross-country and distance runner at Olivet Nazarene, since 2019.

“She was the women’s stud on the team,” Meyer said. “I was the men’s stud. So it was meant to be.”

They are parents to son Jesse, who just turned 4.

“It kind of just happened,” Meyer said of becoming a realtor. “When I finished up my time at Lipscomb University, I was working at a running store selling shoes. We found out we were pregnant. We were going to have a baby, and I’m like, OK, I’ve got to find another source of income. So basically it was kind of just out of necessity. I picked it up. I had a good mentor. Learned the ropes, and I’ve been doing it for over two years now.”

He said the housing market was especially “booming” in Nashville at the time he became a realtor.

“From my perspective, I think it’s more competitive to be a real estate agent than it was in track, just because there are more people doing it,” Meyer said.

Stalbaum’s training methods as both a cross-country head coach and track assistant coach – like college, but slightly less rigorous – were the basis of his success, according to Meyer.

“I think it was instrumental,” Meyer said. “Specifically with Scott’s training and just setting me up well and helping me keep healthy and just learning the value of hard work and learning the value of smart training. I took that to Olivet and Lipscomb both.”