‘He’s been in those gritty situations’: How Ed Eyestone shapes, builds and coaches champions

Ed Eyestone was still jet-lagged and sneaking naps following his return from the Paris Olympic Games — and, for that matter, the yearlong, intense run-up to those Games — when he had to get back to work. He took his BYU cross-country team to Eden, Utah, for its annual preseason training camp and the start of another training cycle.

“The grind starts again,” says Eyestone.

But what does he do for an encore? It has been an eventful few months for Eyestone and BYU’s distance running program. No university had more current or former distance runners on the Olympic track than BYU .

“It was a great year,” says Eyestone. “It’s been one thing after another.”

It really started in 2023 when Kenneth Rooks , a relative novice, won the steeplechase in the NCAA championships and “that seemed like the greatest moment for a coach,” says Eyestone. But then two weeks later, Rooks won the U.S. championships after falling and somersaulting twice on the track , “and I thought, well, this has to be the greatest,” says Eyestone. Then Conner Mantz and Clayton Young finished sixth and seventh, respectively, in the 2023 Chicago Marathon, producing the fourth- and seventh-fastest times ever by Americans and becoming the only Americans to achieve the Olympic A standard. “And I thought, well, this is the greatest day ever,” says Eyestone, but then three months later Mantz and Young finished 1-2 in the U.S. Olympic marathon trials , “and I thought this is the best day and I’m going to have a grin on my face for a while,” says Eyestone.

But then came the U.S. Olympic track and field team trials, where Rooks and upstart James Corrigan placed first and third in the steeplechase , “and that was just crazy good,” says Eyestone. A few days later, Eyestone and Corrigan flew to Philadelphia for a hastily arranged race designed to give Corrigan one more chance to achieve an Olympic qualifying time; against all odds , he qualified and set the American collegiate record, “and I had thought no way he’ll run the standard, and he gets it and it’s one of the best days ever,” says Eyestone.

Then came the Olympic Games, where Mantz and Young, whose best times had ranked them no better than 60-something in the world, finished eighth and ninth in the marathon , and Rooks stunned everyone by winning the silver medal in the steeplechase, “and that was the greatest thing ever,” says Eyestone.

After pausing, Eyestone concludes, “It wasn’t a bad summer; let’s put it that way.”

Easy E

Eyestone — Easy E, as his athletes sometimes refer to him — was at the center of it all, the common denominator to all that success and one of the hottest coaches in the running world. At 63, he’s been a constant presence on the national and international running scene for nearly five decades in one role or another — NCAA championship athlete, NCAA championship coach, Olympian, perennial Road Racer of the Year, NBC color analyst for the 2008 Olympics, TV road-race analyst, Runner’s World columnist — and this year he found himself coaching athletes on the biggest sports stage in the world.

Seeing the coach’s success, other athletes are joining the Eyestone training group. Keira D’Amato, the 39-year-old who set an American marathon record of 2:19:28 two years ago (since broken), moved her family to Utah to train with Eyestone in Park City, and on Monday won the U.S. 20K championships. She will race the Chicago Marathon in October.

Former All-Americans McKenna Morley, a 2:30:28 marathoner, and Aubrey Frentheway, formerly of BYU, also are training with the coach. Rory Linkletter, another former BYU All-American who ran for Team Canada in the Olympics while training with Ryan Hall in Tucson, also has expressed interest in training again with Eyestone.

This is in addition to the core of Team Eyestone — among them: Mantz, Young, Rooks, Corrigan, Casey Clinger and Jared Ward, the sixth-place finisher in the 2016 Olympic marathon who will break from the group to study at Oxford this fall. Mantz and Young, still recovering from their Olympic effort, will pass on a return to the Chicago Marathon and are starting another training build to compete in the New York City Marathon in November.

“It would be impossible to quantify how much of the success I’ve had has been directly from coach Eyestone, but he’s been a huge part of it,” says Mantz.

Ask Eyestone how he’s doing it — how his athletes are so successful — he says, “It starts and ends with really good athletes.”

Utah talent

In Eyestone’s case, while other coaches go far and wide for athletes, he’s succeeding mostly with athletes who live within an Uber ride of the BYU campus. Of the five current or former BYU athletes who competed in the Paris Olympics, four are from Utah high schools. Diljeet Taylor, the talented women’s coach whom Eyestone discovered at a small California school, guided two of her athletes to the Olympics, both of them from Utah.

Eyestone has addressed this topic many times, citing the advantages of the Utah lifestyle, the strong “Mormon stock” (as he terms it) that hailed from hard-working, marathon-tough pioneers, and improved high school coaching in the state.

Utah, only the 30th-most populous state, has become a hotbed for high school distance running . Utah athletes have been voted Gatorade national cross-country Runner of the Year four of the last eight years. Herriman and American Fork high schools finished one-two at last year’s national championships. Daniel Simmons of American Fork set a national high school record in the 5,000-meter run. JoJo Jourdon of Olympus High joined the sub-four-minute-miler club. Utah preps are sprinkled throughout the annual top 10 times lists for the 800-, 1,600- and 3,200-meter runs. There aren’t many states that outperform Utah’s prep athletes on a per-capita basis.

They have been the backbone of a BYU program whose worst finish in the last eight NCAA cross-country championships is seventh, while claiming three thirds, one second and one first. The women’s program won the national championship in 2021. Whittni Orton won the 2021 individual championship and Mantz won the same title in both 2020 and 2021. Both are native Utahns.

Eyestone is in an envious position for a coach and not just because so many great preps are in his backyard. A number of top athletes reach out to the coach, rather than vice versa, some even turning down scholarships elsewhere simply to walk on at BYU. They come for the reasonable tuition, the lifestyle, the quality of the program and the coaching.

Born to run, not bat

Eyestone is a big draw. He has spent roughly 50 years in the sport, beginning when he was cut by the junior high baseball team (which seemed inevitable for a guy whose favorite part of practice was running laps). He was the state cross-country champion at Bonneville High. Following his freshman year at BYU, he won the bronze medal in the Junior World Cross Country championships in front of 80,000 spectators on a horse track in Paris.

He proceeded to win four NCAA championships at BYU, and he remains one of only four men to claim the collegiate triple crown — cross-country plus the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races on the track. He also is the only man ever to win an NCAA cross-country championship as both an athlete and a coach.

He qualified for the U.S. World Cross Country team for a remarkable dozen years, placing as high as sixth. He qualified for two Olympics teams, in 1988 and 1992. He was the five-time U.S. Road Racer of the Year. He won many of running’s biggest, most prestigious road races — the Bay to Breakers 12K in San Francisco, the Lilac Bloomsday 12K in Spokane, the Peachtree 10K in Atlanta, the Falmouth 7-miler in Massachusetts. Even if he didn’t win a race, he was usually the top American at a time when Kenyans dominated the scene.

“Those were heady years,” says Eyestone. “My running career was amazing.”

He had an extraordinarily long career, remaining competitive deep into his 30s, which is why Reebok continued to re-up him to four-year, six-figure shoe contracts until the very end. As he describes it, “I had a nice, fat shoe contract that allowed me to be financially stable for four years and then four years turned to eight years and then eight years turned to 12 and then 12 turned to 16.”

He retired at the age of 39.

Putting in the miles

Much of what Eyestone brings to coaching comes from 25 years of hard-won experience as a competitive runner. He coached himself for much of his career, writing his own workouts. That forced him to think about training cycles and lactate thresholds and tempo runs and so forth, and to understand when and why.

He began planning for his long-term future as a coach while he was still an undergrad student at BYU and sought advice from successful coaches. After earning an undergrad degree in psychology with minors in coaching and Spanish, he earned a master’s degree in exercise science.

Eyestone was coached by Pat Shane , the BYU women’s distance coach at the time, for the first Olympic cycle, but then he moved to Layton in 1988 and coached himself for the remainder of his career. He trained with Paul Pilkington, a former Weber State runner who also had a successful professional road-racing career, and they designed their own training plans. It worked well for a decade, but by the time Eyestone reached his mid-30s, “I was wanting to change it up,” he says. “I knew the end was near.”

Eyestone, who learned Spanish as a missionary in Portugal, contacted a group of highly successful Mexican marathoners, led by German Silva, and asked if he and Pilkington could join their training group near Mexico City. They moved to Mexico and trained there for several months.

“I took notes of what they were doing,” Eyestone says. “Much of my stuff (his training program) is from that. They’d do 15x1K with a 60-second recovery, 25x400, 5x3K, power runs 45-50 minutes long. Some were new workouts. Some were based in science … I gained additional insight into coaching the marathon.”

Eyestone, then almost 35, failed to make the 1996 Olympic marathon team (he was 15th in the trials), but another opportunity presented itself. Weber State coach Chick Hislop invited Eyestone to serve as an assistant coach. Hislop was a highly respected distance coach and the guru of the steeplechase, but Eyestone immediately called BYU athletic director Rondo Fehlberg to see if he could return to his alma mater.

With no staff openings, Fehlberg told him he should take the Weber job and build his resume. Eyestone worked for three years under Hislop while continuing his running career, and Weber State beat BYU twice in the NCAA cross-country regional meet.

“I learned a lot from working with coach Hislop,” says Eyestone. “Any success I’ve had in the steeplechase came from Chick and the system he developed. We got a silver medal (in the 2024 Olympics) out of it. It was an important time that I worked there.”

The Eyestone way

In 1999, he applied for a coaching position at BYU but didn’t get the job. “There’s a place for you at BYU eventually; be patient,” he was told by Val Hale, the new BYU AD. A year later, BYU hired Eyestone as head cross-country coach and assistant track coach. A decade later, BYU combined the men’s and women’s programs and named Eyestone director of track and field.

In formulating his training method, Eyestone, like every coach, gleaned information from other coaches, fellow runners and from reading training books, as well as drawing on his own experiences as an athlete. All of the above eventually coalesced and Eyestone was left with something that was his own.

“The key ingredient is good athletes and then you keep them healthy the best you can and fold in as much mileage as they are capable of handling,” he says. “You find the sweet spot for their event. You look at them and their injury history and the event they’re in and what they did in high school and make the best decisions possible. I’ve always maintained that coaching is as much art as science.

“I’ve always maintained that coaching is as much art as science.”

BYU track coach Ed Eyestone

“Sometimes people get inflexible in regard to the art in the science. Sometimes I simply ask myself how I would be feeling? So we worked hard on Tuesday — how would I be feeling if I were asked to do this workout today? Is this a medium-effort workout or a recovery-effort workout while also taking into account that we had a 10-mile run at marathon pace on Tuesday and I’m going to ask them to do a long run on Saturday. What would I be feeling?”

This recalls something that Mantz said recently about his coach: “What sets him apart from other great coaches is his experience, both as a coach of 20-plus years and as a former professional athlete. When coaching us, he understands how much we should push in our workouts and knows when we should slow down, stop, or speed up because he’s been there. He’s been in those gritty situations. He’s been injured. He’s learned from his own successes and mistakes.”

Mantz chose to continue to train under Eyestone when he left the collegiate ranks to turn pro instead of training under the coach of his professional team, as so many runners do. So did Young when he signed with Asics.

Eyestone monitors his athletes’ mileage carefully, adding 10 or so miles to their weekly workload each year as they progress from freshmen to seniors. For track workouts, he likes to give his runners a general idea of the workload, but often he won’t tell them the specific number of reps, which allows him to end a workout early if he thinks the athlete has had enough, without the athlete feeling like a failure.

“If you end a workout on your hands and knees, I failed as a coach,” says Eyestone. “That’s short-term gains. We want to do things based on sound principles.”

‘Building’ successful results

Eyestone lays out his training plans on calendars. For marathoners, that means a 16-week training build to the targeted race. He writes each workout on the calendar, counting back from race day to the beginning, “so that at any given time I know what week we’re at.” When the build results in a successful race, he will refer to those calendars to see what worked and use them for a new build.

“I’ll copy and paste what worked well for that build,” he says. “I use them as a template, although we won’t do exactly the same thing necessarily. It’s based on changes in pace and the course. We couldn’t do the same thing for the Paris Olympics that we did in Chicago. Chicago was flat, Paris was hilly.”

Unlike some coaches, he likes to build several races into his training plan for a marathon or any big race. “I like my athletes to race,” he says. “I raced a lot myself. It gave me confidence. It relieves some of the pressure. And it’s just fun. And they can make a little more money on the side. You have something to show for it. If you put everything into one race — all your eggs in one basket — and it doesn’t go well, you’ve lost six weeks.”

Eyestone, a practical, relaxed man with a keen wit and a knack for storytelling, is built for the job of working with youth and is no stranger to helping them navigate challenges and achieve goals. He and his wife Lynn raised six daughters and Eyestone served as a Latter-day Saint bishop for five years.

“The guys know I have an open door,” says the coach. “They know they can come to me with their concerns. They might say, ‘Can I do more of this (a particular workout),’ or, ‘I don’t understand why we’re doing this.’ Most of the time if it’s what they believe is really good for them, then it probably is, and so we’ll try it. It’s not my way or the highway. Distance and middle-distance running are hard enough without making them more difficult by being a dictator.” He pauses. “I guess that’s why they call me Easy E.”

Why it works

“He doesn’t overcoach,” says Ward. “He’s there like bumpers in a bowling alley — ready to prevent a gutter ball, but never messing with our spin. He is also endlessly positive. Praising good. You know Coach is disappointed when he is silent. It’s rare, but he stops there and offers no further destructive commentary.”

“He keeps things simple,” says Young. “He has a wealth of knowledge, but distills it to simple terms and applications focusing on the big picture of just getting really fit.”

Ward says much the same thing and points to his preparation for the 2016 Olympics as a case in point. Stressed about the heat and humidity he would face in the Rio Olympics, he proposed various gimmicks to prepare for those conditions, such as training in full sweats in the 95-degree heat of the afternoon.

Says Ward, “His response, multiple times, was, ‘I think we should just get really fit, and you’ll be fine.’ He was not going to experiment in a big way ahead of the biggest race of my life. He praised my efforts to prepare, while reigning in (those) ideas.”

Independent of one another, Ward and Young mention another Eyestone trait that is in play.

“We could write a book on Ed’s leadership style,” says Ward. “If you asked most of his athletes why he is so good, I venture that most would have to stop and think. I think this is one aspect of his magic. … It’s certainly not about him. It’s about doing something great and staying true to yourself in the process. It’s about positivity, life balance, constantly doing good. That is the Eyestone method. Coach makes leaders and creates incredible culture, and keeps focus on the big things that matter. … Coach asks a lot of questions and gives his athletes a lot of rope.”

To make his point, Ward recalled a team meeting during training camp prior to the 2011 cross-country season. “I watched as coach let team leaders — and anyone who wanted to participate in the discussion — argue about goals for the season. Some felt that any goal outside of winning (the NCAA championships) meant we were quitting before the season began. Others felt that an elusive podium finish was ambitious but achievable. Some thought that owing to our 17th-place finish the year before, making it back to nationals, or a top-10 finish, would be pretty good.

“It got heated. Coach let it (continue), but before it got destructive he stepped in, offered some guidance, then stepped back out. When we arrived at the conclusion he thought would best set us up for success, he stepped back in. The goal was top four, the podium. We finished fourth at nationals, and thrived in a season where at one point we were ranked No. 1. He let us learn. We thrived in that we got cocky, humbled, and succeeded all in one season. Coach is a master of culture — much of which comes naturally to him because of who he is, some of which I think is very intentional and deliberate.”

Says Young, “He is a great leader, and he creates leaders among those he coaches. He fosters an incredible amount of independence in all his athletes. This independence either makes or breaks an athlete, but of those that make it, it allows them to reach their full potential.”

‘Renaissance man’

Eyestone — the name is the literal translation of the original German name of Augenstein — comes from an accomplished, educated family. His parents, Bob and Virginia, earned postgraduate degrees, as did all five of their children, who won scholarships for writing, music, drama and athletics. They went on to become singers, architects, actors, writers, musicians, beauty queens and an Olympic runner.

Eyestone, one of six scholar-athletes to win a national NCAA postgraduate scholarship as a BYU senior, is a renaissance man whose interests run from guitar to juggling to acting (he has had several big roles in a dozen or so productions in Utah Valley), to reading. “He’s very well read,” says Lynn. “He doesn’t let time waste. He’s always listening to a good book and keeping his mind sharp.”

At the annual postseason team dinner, Eyestone usually sings lighthearted, humorous songs that he wrote about the team, accompanying himself on guitar. The Eyestones host team gatherings at their home, where they might talk shop or provide a family-room stage for guitar performances (several of the runners are accomplished players).

Sometimes he and some of his athletes bring their guitars on road trips and play in hotel rooms. It’s all part of a relaxed, yet driven, culture and is consistent with how he relates to his athletes.

“He really lets the kids lead out and organize things,” says Lynn. “They organize lots of devotionals and team events. It’s created a nice culture. I was talking to (world renown agent) Ray Flynn at the Olympics, and he said that Ed and the BYU kids are the finest people to work with. He said they’re gracious, humble, grateful, pleasant, kind, respectful and undemanding. He said it’s such a privilege hanging out with them. The reason they’re like that is the team culture. There is no entitlement.”

All of the above has resulted in one of the nation’s top distance-running programs, and that was never more apparent than in this Olympic year, when seven current or former BYU athletes were on the track in Paris. No one enjoyed it more than Eyestone, who can be seen in several online videos screaming and jumping up and down in the stands as his athletes performed. “He’s watched Kenneth’s race I don’t know how many times,” says Lynn. Notwithstanding, a week after he returned from Paris, Eyestone was back at work, ready to start another grind for an encore.