I’m finishing a prerace stride when Frank Gagliano calls my name. He’s walking across the infield at the Princeton University track. “I’ll come to you,” he says, in a voice that was put on this earth to say “fuggeddaboutit.” I shake my legs nervously and wait on the track where the final turn meets the straightaway. Gags approaches, slowly. He’s 79 years old, with the body of a former professional football player.
Three days earlier, I had given up. With 250 meters to go in an 800-meter race, as I was attempting to qualify for 2016 Olympic Trials, I had jogged across the finish line in a time 8 seconds slower than the qualifying mark. I cooled down by myself after the race and thought about officially calling it quits.
“Maybe this is it for me,” I told my girlfriend. At 30, I had already run at the 2012 Olympic Trials, and now I was running 10 seconds slower than my bests in race after race.
Gagliano, my coach since 2010, wouldn’t let me leave—at least not yet. “You have to put your head and heart on the same page,” he wrote in a text message. “Don’t leave the sport on a sour note.”
Nutrition - Weight Loss.
Now Gagliano is coming my way, and, even though he’s already given me a prerace speech about flying home in the final 100, the doubts—the same doubts that have crept into my mind before each race in 2016—are taking over: I’m breathing too hard. My legs feel flat. I’m not ready.
He grabs me by the shoulder and peers at me from under the bill of his baseball cap, which intensifies his focus. Then he softens his eyes. He wraps his arms around me. “Have some fun out there, will ya?” he says. Gags—or Gag—as he’s known throughout the track world, smiles, and I can’t help but smile, too.
“Sounds good, Coach,” I say and jog back toward the start line. It’s a simple gesture, but the nerves are gone, and, for the first time in more than a year, I feel ready to race.
* * *
Gagliano’s favorite spot on every track is where the final turn meets the straightaway. That’s where he was standing—up against the fence of Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon—when Nick Symmonds roared to the front of the 800-meter final at the 2008 Olympic Trials. Gags was in the same place when Julie Culley shocked the crowd to win the 5,000 meters at the 2012 Trials.
In Des Moines, Iowa, Gagliano staked out that spot when Ashley Higginson (my aforementioned girlfriend) jumped into the stands to hug him after making the 2013 world championships team in the 3,000-meter steeplechase.
It’s the mark where his athletes hear him yelling, “Hit it!” and “Thadda baby!” in a booming voice when they’re finishing a workout or a race on any track across the country.
It’s where he’ll be during the 2016 Olympic Trials starting Friday, back at Hayward. It will be his 10th Olympic Trials as a coach.
Gagliano made college coaching stops earlier in his career at Manhattan College, Rutgers, and Georgetown. Then he moved on to professional teams like the Reebok Enclave, the Nike Farm Team, the Oregon Track Club, and his current group, the New Jersey-New York Track Club.
A former professional football player—he played in the Canadian Football League for one year in 1960—he took a job coaching track at Roselle Catholic High School in New Jersey in 1960 only because he was promised he would get the football coaching job. Over more than five decades, he has guided 14 Olympians, multiple national champions, and a world championships medalist.
He’s heading into this year’s Trials for the final time. Gagliano says he’s taking a step back from coaching next year.
It was enough to get me out on the track at least one more time.
* * *
One of those is Vin Lananna. Before Lananna was famous as a coach and organizer of Eugene’s bid to host the 2021 world championships, he was a collegiate runner at C.W. Post College on Long Island. It was the early 1970s, and that’s when he got his first impression of Gagliano.
“He was coaching the throwers and I heard this bellowing voice yelling at somebody out on the field,” Lananna says of Gagliano—who was an assistant coach at Manhattan College at the time. “And, um, he was intense.”
Ron Spiers, who ran for Gagliano at Rutgers and would go on to become his first sub-4:00 miler in 1977, echoes Lananna. “He was one scary character,” he says. He remembers racing up at the New York City Armory in the late 1960s and not knowing what to make of this thunderous guy shouting across the lanes.
“The first time I ever saw Gag he was screaming splits to Joe Savage, basically telling his guy he was going slower than he was,” Spiers says. Gagliano was still at Roselle Catholic in New Jersey, and Savage, who would go on to split 1:50.1 in the 800 meters at Penn Relays in 1970, was his first star.
“His early years are the wonder years,” Spiers says. “It’s a wonder he survived.”
Gagliano’s vigor went with him to each coaching stop, and his athletes followed suit. Spiers says one word fit Gags wherever he went: compete. “Heaven forbid if you didn’t compete,” Spiers says. “You were in deep trouble. If you did, he respected you, because that’s what he does every day.”
By the time I met Gags in the summer of in 2010, he had mellowed a little. I had finished graduate school at Georgetown and had decided I was going to train with him now that he was back on the East Coast after stints in Palo Alto and Eugene. Gags invited me to his house in Rye, New York, for lunch. As we sat in his living room with his wife, Robbie, he told me his coaching philosophy.
“Mondays are for strength,” he said. Something like 8 x 1K repeats. “Tuesdays we recover and run some strides,” he continued, pausing between each sentence to let it all sink in. “Wednesdays you run a pace run in the morning and go to the track for speed in the afternoon. You recover and run more strides on Thursday. Always strides.” He smiled. Fridays, we would do speed endurance, say, 6 x 600 meters at mile pace.
There’s no Church of the Sunday Long Run with Gags. You go long on Saturday and use Sunday to recover. “Then we do it all over again,” he told me.
There was a twinkle in his eye when he explained training. He loved this plan, which he had tweaked and perfected through 50 years of coaching. In reality, it wasn’t scientifically proven—“I don’t know the difference between anaerobic or aerobic,” Gags loves to say—but rather a system where runners had to work their butts off. If you could make it through a fall and winter of Gags’s training, you’d be ready to race come spring and summer.
The training sounded daunting, but I was in. Starting in the fall of 2010, nearly every Monday and Friday for two and a half years, Gags drove Delilah DiCrescenzo, who was third in the U.S. in the 3,000-meter steeplechase in 2011, and me from 168th Street in New York to Piscataway, New Jersey, for a track workout.
Shoes & Gear Tuesdays with Morrie, with a lot of four-letter words. “Inappropriate!” he’d yell every time he swore.
Sports talk kept us going for the hourlong ride in his BMW each week. He became an avid Oregon football fan during his time in Eugene, and he loves watching Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors. But over approximately 500 hours in a car together, though, sports talk runs out. We talked about everything else. As he snacked on his usual—a Baby Ruth and a Diet Dr. Pepper—Gags told us about what he calls the “chapters in his book.”
The late-night trip to the police station to pick up some of his athletes who were having a little too much fun after a meet on the road. (He never named names.)
He told us about Aimee Mullins, who called Gags in 1995 asking if she could join the Georgetown track team if she transferred from George Mason. She said she wore prosthetics below both knees. Gagliano says he didn’t even know what prosthetics were—but Mullins came to Georgetown and became the first amputee to compete in the NCAA and eventually made the 1996 Paralympic team.
When a girlfriend dumped me in 2011, I cried in the seat next to him. He patted me on the back and told me it would be okay. When he got a call in 2013 that his friend had fallen into a coma, I patted him on the back and tried to tell him the same.
In 2014, I moved from New York to Clinton, New Jersey, because I couldn’t afford the city anymore. I was only disappointed that I wouldn’t be jumping in the car with Gags twice a week.
* * *
On March 20, 1937, Perry and Clara Gagliano welcomed their only son, Francis. He grew up on East 238th Street in the Bronx playing any sport he could. He wanted to be a baseball player, but when he was cut from the Mount Saint Michael team in junior high, he moved onto football. He ended up as the quarterback, and the Gagliano household was the hangout spot for the Mount Saint Michael football team. “We grew up in an Italian household,” says Dee Lycett, Gags’s only sister, who is 10 years younger. “My mother made sure there was lots of food.”
After a successful high school career, he played football at Richmond College in Virginia. “Five years and four summers,” Gags jokes about how long it took him to get a diploma, but two of those summers he spent at Officers Candidate School in Quantico. He spent eight years as a reservist in the Marine Corps after finishing the officers program in 1956 but was never called up.
The Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats signed Gagliano in 1960, but sent him down to the London Lords—a minor league team. He was selling coffee and soda at a construction site during the day and playing football at night. When he had to start splitting time at quarterback, he decided to move back to the U.S. to coach.
He had stayed in touch with Roberta Arnold, whom he had met as a junior at Richmond, while he was away, and the two were married within a year of his return in 1961. That’s about the time he took a job coaching track at Roselle Catholic High School in Roselle, New Jersey, where he also taught English and math.
“Frank was very interested in sports from as far back as I remember,” Lycett says, with football as his main focus. So when he took the track job at Roselle Catholic, the family was surprised. “Shoes & Gear, ‘Track? What happened to football?’” Lycett remembers thinking. “That was the beginning of his career,” she says. “I always thought he would go back into football.”
It never happened. Gags built up the program at Roselle Catholic and took an assistant coaching job at Manhattan College in 1969 under famed coach Fred Dwyer. Manhattan won Couch to 5K Plan in 1973, and Gagliano took a job at Rutgers in 1974, becoming the head coach before going to Georgetown in 1983. He coached there until 1999.
While he was at Georgetown, Gags started his first official professional team in 1992, the Reebok Enclave, with runners like Steve Holman, Bryan Woodward, and Rich Kenah, who won bronze at the world championships in 1997 in the 800 meters. In 2000, Lananna, who was coaching at Stanford, called him with an offer to coach the Nike Farm Team in Palo Alto, California. With their four children grown and out of the house with kids of their own, Gagliano and Robbie moved to the West Coast for a new adventure. Six years later, Lananna talked them into moving to Eugene so Gags could coach the Oregon Track Club.
He thought he would be in Eugene for the rest of his life. In 2009, his daughter-in-law Meighan fell ill. She had stage IV cancer, and she wouldn’t make it through the year. Gagliano’s son Dave had two young daughters to care for, so Gags and Robbie moved back east, buying a house across the street from their son and two granddaughters.
But he couldn’t stop coaching. In 2010, he began working with Erin Donohue, who ran 1:59.99 for 800 meters under Gags. By 2011, he was 74 and he had a full team with a new name: New Jersey-New York Track Club.
Each year since the team’s inception at least one Gags athlete has finished in the top three in the U.S. DiCrescenzo was third in the steeplechase in 2011, Culley won the 5,000 at the 2012 Olympic Trials, Higginson was second in the steeplechase in 2013 and ’14, Donn Cabral was third in the steeplechase in 2014 and second in ’15, and Nicole Tully won the 5,000 at the 2015 national championships.
* * *
Gagliano’s accomplishments coaching women aren’t new—Nicole Teter broke the American record in the 800 meters indoors under Gags in 2002—but he’s struck a chord with the women of NJNYTC. And he’s done it with women who weren’t stars in college.
“Sometimes people will say, ‘I’m coach of the men, and I coach the women also.’ I don’t think that enters Gags’s mind space,” Lananna says. “He genuinely appreciates and values the performances of an athlete, period.”
“He’s not going to sugarcoat it,” Culley says. “Gags was always going to treat me as an athlete, not a female first.”
Culley joined NJNYTC the same year I did, 2010. A 5,000-meter specialist, she was coming back from injury, but Gags asked her to show up to one of the team’s first practices that fall. She jogged around the infield with a limp as the team worked out. “There’s no way in hell you ran 15:21,” he laughed at her when she finished her run.
But he pulled her aside and talked about the process. It was about being ready for 2012, he told her, and he would constantly remind her of that.
Culley took fifth in the 5,000 at the 2011 national championships in 15:21, equaling her PR. A year later, she pulled away from American record holder Molly Huddle to win the 2012 Olympic Trials in 15:13.77.
“There’s this class of women who are grinders and hard workers in running,” Culley says. “I think that his model is so good for someone who doesn’t need to be coddled. And I think that’s why if you get the combination of the talent and the work ethic, those individuals are not only good post collegiately, they’re making [U.S.] teams.”
Gagliano laughs when asked about his success coaching women, as if there’s a secret to it. “I just treat them as human beings,” he says. “It’s the same for men and women: workouts and communication and motivation.”
* * *
It’s not always perfect. Not everything Gags touches turns to gold. For every Culley, there are three or four runners who stagnate. He wears his emotions on his sleeve and can fly off the handle in an instant.
Loyalty is big with Gags. And if you cross him, he might never talk to you again. When one athlete walked out on Gagliano during a lunch in 2012, he was immediately kicked off the team.
Gags will yell if you make a mistake, but five minutes later he has his arm around you and everything is forgotten. For a former English teacher, he relies on four-letter words a little too much.
“I do curse, but that's part of the way get rid of frustration,” he says. “I couldn't curse the way I curse now in front of high school or college people, or I'd be fired. There’s motivation in my curse words.”
He’ll call you a “B.I.” if you’re not running well—a bad investment. Then he’ll laugh with you once you realize he’s joking.
Gagliano has done his best to stay up with the times. His iPhone is constantly ringing and he has coached athletes solely via email. His text messages and emails are often one word or in all caps, and his voicemails are usually five seconds: “Liam. Gag. Call me.”
Sometimes he talks a little more. Kyle Merber, who was sixth in the U.S. in the 1500 in 2015, had struggled in two low-key road races leading up to his first race on the track as an NJNYTC athlete, a mile at the Armory in January of 2014. After going through 1200 in 2:56, he imploded in the final 400 meters and finished dead last in 4:11.
Gags wasn’t at the race, but he left Merber a voicemail after watching it online.
“He wished me the best of luck in my retirement,” Merber says, laughing as he tells the story. He does a Gags impression—thick on the Bronx accent—when paraphrasing the voice message: “Merber, I just wanted to wish you the best of luck, in whatever career you go on to pick. You have a tremendous degree from Columbia, and you’ll do well. I will say you need to come by practice and hand in your jersey and shake my hand to say goodbye.”
Turns out, the retirement joke was exactly what Merber needed. “It made me feel better to laugh at that than to think about my terrible race,” he says.
With at times as many as 30 athletes on the New Jersey-New York Track Club, email is Gags’s most common form of communication. He’ll email whenever a thought pops into his head. After the first workout in warm weather on April 18:
FLUIDS,FLUIDS!!!!! Me
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In December 2014, when the club was struggling to find an indoor practice facility, he told us about a sandwich shop:
…found deli around corner from armory. UNBELIEVABLE !!! pastrami sandwich still causing indigestion!!!!
Gagliano doesn’t like “the Tweeter” or Instagram, and he especially hates it when athletes share his workouts with their social media followings. Even as the world changes around him, though, the grandfather of eight connects with not only 30-year-olds, like me, but college kids looking for a place to continue their running careers.
* * *
“This is my last Trials,” Gagliano says, “but not my last stop coaching.” He’s looking forward to spending more time with Robbie and seeing his family in New Jersey and New York. “I really know it’s time to give up the full responsibility of being the head coach after all these years,” he says.
The plan is for John Trautmann and Tom Nohilly—whom Gagliano coached in D.C. in the 1990s—to take over the head coaching duties next year, with Gags coming to practice twice a week. OK, maybe three times.
But then he starts talking about some of the recent additions to NJNYTC. “Believe me, some of the milers that we have here are very young and very, very good,” Gagliano says. Guys like Johnny Gregorek and Colby Alexander, who have two of the fastest 1500 times in the U.S. in 2016. They’ll be training with Merber, who has run 3:54 under Gags.
“I love to go back down the track,” Gags says, “and time workouts and coach a couple athletes.”
Vin Lananna doesn’t think Gagliano’s plan to step aside will quite work out that way. He remembers when Gagliano moved west, taking over for Jeff Johnson, who had coached the Nike Farm Team in Palo Alto. “[Jeff] had a cast of thousands. He was coaching everybody—so many people,” Lananna says. “When Gag came out, even though Nike was very generous to us, I told him we have to pare down. I told him, ‘We can’t have all these people. Let’s try to figure out the budget.’ I had a spreadsheet and he had a yellow paper filled with names. So we had this great discussion and decided on 16.”
The Farm Team ended up with, Lananna guesses, 30 to 40 athletes. Lananna does an impression of Gags’ gravelly voice. “Don’t worry about it.”
The same thing happened when Gagliano moved up to the Oregon Track Club. Lananna tried to be firm: There has to be a development club that is different from the OTC. We don’t have the funding or the staff.
Lananna would show up for workouts on the Amazon Trail. “There’d be the ones I knew on the roster and then this pile of people. And I said, ‘Who are these people?’” Lananna goes into his Gags voice again. “That’s our development club. You don’t worry about it, they don’t show up in the financials.”
“You don’t even know what financials mean,” Lananna says he told Gagliano. “I just let it go.” There was no point in arguing. Gags was going to coach who he wanted to coach.
Gags yells, “Hit it?
Lananna exhales. “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “Think about this: When his daughter-in-law was sick, he told me he might start a little club. I said, ‘How many people?’ He said, ‘Just a couple.’ And now here we are.”
The team currently has 24 runners.
While Gags is contemplating how much coaching he’ll do next year and beyond, I know what next year looks for me when it comes to running. I won’t continue on—I only have a few races with Coach Gags left.
* * *
It’s a race in Princeton, New Jersey, in June, and Gags yells, “Hit it!” as the turn straightens out and I enter the home stretch. With 90 meters to go, I try to. I’m snarling because of the lactic acid burning throughout my body, but I’m digging.
Two teammates are pulling away from me, but I inch past two runners in the final straight. I run 1:49.05. It’s more than two seconds slower than it needs to be and well back of my 1:46.66 PR, but I don’t really care. I’m happy I didn’t give up again.
I can’t help but smile. A man who has been coaching me for six years knew that all I needed was a reminder to calm down before the race. I have two shots left at the Olympic Trials standard, and I might not get it. I’m going to keep competing for my coach, though, and I’m going to keep competing for myself.
As I walk up to Gags after the race, I tell him, “I can run the time.” That’s the Trials qualifier, of 1:46.5. Gags doesn’t care about any of that, though. He’s just happy my last 100 meters were strong.
I didn't meet the time in either of my next two attempts to qualify. And Gags didn’t mind. He cares about only one thing.
“That’s the way,” he says on that warm night in June and pumps his fist on the infield. “That’s the way we compete.”
Liam Boylan-Pett works for Sprint Step, a content creation agency, and writes about the NBA for SB Nation. He was formerly an associate editor at Running Times and Runner's World It’s a race in Princeton, New Jersey, in June, and.
