Before last weekend, Matthew Elliott had never made an NCAA or USATF final and never broken 3:40 for 1500 meters, and you’d never heard of him unless you live in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Somehow, he eked his way into the 1500 final at the USA Track & Field Championships. In the closing meters of the tactical final, he swept past some of the top American milers to finish fourth, which, at this point, means it’s possible he may represent the United States at August's world championships in Moscow.
That was merely the second most memorable thing Elliott, 27, did in Des Moines. The first was to give Flotrack a post-race interview lasting all of 55 seconds which was, in a weekend when Mary Cain and Galen Rupp made headlines, the video that went viral, the video everyone who saw it will take away from the championships, the one that had adults joining Elliott in his unguarded tears of joy.
“That’s the best I’ve ever felt in a race,” Elliott begins, before telling of his modest credentials as a 4:42 high school miler. A full-time teacher, Elliott says, “I want kids out there to see” …and that’s as far as he gets before he breaks down. He weeps. We don’t ever see stuff this raw in the media’s “mixed zone.” And then Elliott manages to continue, “ … that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from or who’s your sponsor.” Another lachrymose moment follows, and he manages to say, ”I’m just having fun doing what I love to do.” And then he has to walk away.
You don’t expect this kind of naked emotion in such a situation, but of course, it’s uncommon for a runner as unheralded as Elliott to be in this situation. Comments on the video called it “the best 55 [seconds] of my month” and the “happiest cry I’ve ever seen,” lauding Elliott as a role model, an inspiration, and yes, “awesome.”
“I’m going to need somebody to help me reply to everybody who has contacted me through Facebook and email and Twitter,” Elliott said on Monday afternoon.
His Twitter following has tripled since the weekend. Responses came from “people who in high school as a junior ran 4:40 [for the mile] and almost had given up on the idea of running in college. But when they saw that video, they wanted to bust it their senior year, to give it a shot and see if they can make it happen.”
Along with that, notes Elliott, “coaches have told me they want to share it to motivate their teams. A lot of people have been rejuvenated, a lot of guys who’d finished running in college said they now want to make a shot at running post-collegiately. They want to give it a go and see if they can have a breakthrough kind of like I did this weekend. That’s really heartwarming for me.”
Elliott’s fledgling running credentials are even more modest than noted in the video. The 4:42 mile in high school was a highlight; his time for 3200 meters, which most high schools do instead of two miles, was just 10:50.
“And 16:59 was my best 5-K,” he remembers. “But I did split 50 [seconds] on the 4 x 400[-meter] relay. So I had a little bit of speed, but nobody really noticed that.”
In a sense, that was the biggest hint of what he would manage to do in Des Moines, where he languished in 11th place before making a move.
At Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, Elliott ran cross country, but there was no track team. He used his final year of eligibility while going for his masters in early childhood education at Winthrop in Rock Hill, where he ran indoor and outdoor track, “and that’s where I found that I had a little bit of talent,” he says. He qualified for the NCAA Championships in 2008 but did not make the 1500-meter final. Still, that was enough for him to keep running beyond college.
For a couple of years, he couldn’t progress beyond 3:43 and “questioned whether I should go ahead and start working or what the future held running-wise,” he remembers.
Then he began working with Scott Simmons, who was coaching at Queen’s University in Charlotte, “and that’s when I broke 4:00 in the mile.” When Simmons moved to Colorado Springs to work with the American Distance Project, Elliott spent some months with Team Indiana Elite, but a teaching job brought him back to Rock Hill, and he’s again working with Simmons via phone and email.
His job is as a kindergarten through third grade teacher, all in one classroom, at The Palmetto School at the Children’s Attention Home for special needs children.
“Others have emotional issues as well,” states Elliott. “They’ve all been removed from their homes because of abuse, abandonment, neglect.”
The job is “mentally draining, because a lot of them come in from very unstructured environments, and I’m doing a lot of behavior coaching as much as teaching. But you see the gains as they stay at our campus for extended periods of time. You can see the life come back to them,” Elliott observes. “They gain self-control, they become more relaxed and less fearful and less anxious. I’m one of the first adults they see” in their first time away from home.
Elliott’s duties don’t end in the classroom.
“We also serve children from a homeless shelter in town as well as a battered women’s shelter.” He and another teacher “go pick them up in our school vehicles. We’re the bus drivers, too. And then we take kids home after school.” On some days, there can be meetings back at school until 5:00 p.m.
If he’s running twice a day, Elliott fits in four to seven miles before school, upping that to eight to ten during the fall’s base training. After school, “I go home for an hour or two and [decompress] because I just have to, most days,” he explains. “I’d get my lifting in and go for a second run at about 6:00 p.m. My buddy Gabe [Holguin], who was a runner at Winthrop, timed and/or ran the bike with me on every single workout I did and was holding me accountable. I rewarded him by taking him to nationals.”
Elliott laughs,”He was going absolutely nuts. We cooled down with Leo Manzano and he got a picture. We made a huge memory this weekend.”
Elliott credits weightlifting coach Greg Adamson with “giving me the strength and making me more athletic. My core has just gone through the roof. I’ve been able to train harder and recover better day-to-day because of my weight lifting.” Nutritionally, he leans toward "brown rice and sweet potatoes, chicken and tilapia filets, and anything that’s green and any fruit … everything I need to get 5000 calories a day in.”
Elliott qualified for the USATF Championships based on a 3:57.16 mile victory in Nashville on June 1. To get to Des Moines, he says, “I paid my plane ticket and my rental car and my hotel and my entry fee and everything else.” His brother Webb, who works for Hilton, got him a hotel discount.
“I was able to make all that money back,” Elliott says of his $2000 prize for fourth. He gets some gear from Brooks and can make some cash through the Brooks I.D. (Inspire Daily) program.
“I know it’s not a fluke that I competed as well as I did this weekend,” Elliott says. “I just kind of put all the pieces of a race together and was able to finally stay relaxed on the big stage. I’ve always choked on that level.”
Though the sit-and-kick races have served him best, Elliott insists, “I wasn’t going into that race scared of a fast pace either. I really think I was prepared for anything. I was living the dream, man. I could care less if we were walking the first [half] or coming through in 1:53. It didn’t matter to me.”
He was in sixth with just 30 meters to go and figures that earlier, “if I’d have maybe taken a little bit more of a risk and gone out wide to the right, I might have snagged Lopez Lomong [for third]. I was feeling that good in the last 100.”
Before last weekend, Elliott thought his immediate future would involve some races in Canada and the Falmouth Mile in Massachusetts. Now, he’s hoping to get into a small race in Belgium and “if I race well, maybe something will open up toward the latter part of that qualifying window on a bigger stage.”
The scenarios by which Elliott could make it to the world championships are complicated and will be moot if Matthew Centrowitz, Manzano, and Lomong all achieve the 1500-meter “A” standard of 3:35.0 before July 20.
Elliott’s guess is that they’ll get it, “but I just want to see how close I can get to it, because for a guy like me this is an opportunity of a lifetime,” he stresses. ”I can’t control anyone else but myself. You never know.” Before he chases any standards, Elliott will head to Colorado Springs to work on site with Simmons, who’s only seen him train in person once this year.
Thus far, he’s competed without the professional pressures that confront Centrowitz, Manzano, or Lomong.
“I run because I truly just enjoy it. I enjoy the training, I enjoy the traveling, I enjoy getting to meet people at events, and meeting other athletes,” emphasizes Elliott. “What makes this sport so special is it’s such a big community in the distance realm. I know people in probably 25 states that I could call right now to say, ‘Hey, I need a place to stay tonight, could you make that happen for me, or could you come get me from the airport,’ and that’s all because I’ve met somebody through running and formed a relationship and kept up with them over time, and that’s really a sweet and rich thing for me.”
And every Monday, after his races, he returns to the kids at The Palmetto School and shows them videos of his races.
“The major question they always ask is, ‘Mr. Matt, why don’t you win?’”notes Elliott. “You’re not going to be able to win every race, but every time you go out there, you can give your absolute best. Hopefully, when they get out on their own, they’ll take a little of the passion that I have for running and even if they never run a step, they’ll apply that to their own lives, and that could be really special.”
After his fourth place in Des Moines, Elliott had posted the comment, “it only takes one race to change your life.”
Reminded of this, he pauses. “Greg [his weight coach] said, ‘Matt, if you just live by the motto ‘the only easy day was yesterday,’ then you can accomplish anything. I know that’s so cliché, but I grind every day. I know people say that they work hard, but I really, really love the work. I see the joy that I receive in my life from running. I’m not going to give up the last 100 meters. I’m not going to let down. I eat too much brown rice, I sit in [ice baths] for too long during the week to do that.”
