Brian Holdmeyer has a strategy for success-and so far, it’s working. The freshman runner led the SLU cross country team at the Wash U. Early Bird Meet on Sept. 1 in Forest Park, completing his first 8K with a time of 26:36.06.
“In the back of my mind, I knew winning would be difficult and that it probably wouldn’t happen,” Holdmeyer said. “But in this race, I just had to run the best that I could.”
His current coach, Jon Bell, describes his first race at Washington University as “unbelievable.”
“Any time a freshman guy can run under 27 minutes in his first collegiate meet is a pretty big deal,” Bell said. “I was a little surprised to say the least, but it was a good surprise.”
Holdmeyer said the major difference between his high school 5K meets and his first 8K in college is “a different feel and a different kind of pain . but at the same time, you’re running the same pace as you were in high school. College races are just more competitive all around.”
The ninth place finish-out of 124 runners-was a victory for Holdmeyer, who began running 5K as a freshman at St. Francis Borgia High School in Washington, Mo. His two older brothers, who ran track and cross-country, influenced his decision to begin running.
Kurt Russell, the cross-country coach at Borgia, said “he’d been one of our best runners since he was a sophomore [and] a natural leader on our team.” His work ethic is “unbelievably good . he never complains and does sometimes more than we ever made him do.”
An injury to his diaphragm at the state meet his sophomore year of high school forced him to drop out of the most important race of the year, but the injury served as a motivator to redeem himself the following year.
Holdmeyer said he felt a “big upswing in [his] performance” during his junior year of cross-country.
“In high school, I normally ran at the front of the pack,” he said, “but talking to the coaches the day of the race, I didn’t want to go out too fast, so I just stuck in a pack that I felt was a comfortable pace. At the same time, I didn’t want to settle into one pace, so I just focused on catching the runners in the pack in front of me and moving up in the field.”
The Borgia cross-country team goes to Michigan as part of their summer camp to get out of the heat and run in a different environment. Holdmeyer has joined them every summer since he’s been on the team, including this past summer.
“My coach was an All-American runner in college, and he talked to me a lot about the transition that I would make,” said Holdmeyer of the move to college cross-country. “My high school running was basically about keeping the mileage low and not getting hurt or hindering my performances in college.
“The intensity of the workouts is much higher. One positive thing is that you have a group to run with every day, and that makes it easier to go on longer runs.”
In high school, Holdmeyer found motivation in his fellow teammates’ dedication. Team members would meet each morning at 7:00 to go running, and Holdmeyer said that this commitment kept him in condition for cross-country each year.
“He’s an unbelievably nice kid [who] led by example,” Russell said. “With cross-country, it kind of makes a close-knit community of the people still around. Our kids . still watch the papers and watch what he does.”
This week, the students from Borgia read about Holdmeyer’s accomplishment, and the freshman runner plans to listen to the coaches and not settle for anything less than a best effort in the future.
“It’s not necessarily that I have to keep first on the team, especially since every race goes differently,” Holdmeyer said. “But it’s just one of those things where you have to listen and keep working and hope that the next race goes as well as the previous one.”
