St.-Denis, France • The broad strokes of Grant Fisher’s path to the Paris Olympics began to take shape in October at a coffee shop in Salt Lake City.
Fisher, the American record-holder in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, had hired Mike Scannell as his coach, and, in some ways, the situation was a refreshing change for a runner in search of one. Yet the partnership also felt familiar, and for good reason: Scannell had been Fisher’s high school coach.
Every Olympian has a personal story of his or her road to the Games. A price paid. A hurdle swept aside. A once-insurmountable gap closed by miles, or money, or suffering — just so the athlete can continue moving forward.
Fisher’s story is different: To find his way to Paris, he had to go back in time.
Fisher spent most of the afternoon in the coffee shop reconnecting with Scannell, listening as his former mentor laid out a vision for how Fisher could achieve his dream: to make it onto a medal podium at the Paris Olympics.
“Hours and hours of scribbling notes and mapping out a big plan,” Fisher, 27, recalled in a recent interview.
That plan came together on Aug. 2 at the Stade de France in St.-Denis, where Fisher — blood streaming from wounds on his shin where his rivals had spiked him, and with his family cheering from the stands — won the bronze medal in the 10,000 meters.
“So many things have to go right over the course of a year to get on the podium,” said Fisher, who ran in the first round of the 5,000 meters Wednesday, placing fourth in his heat.
Fisher uprooted his life last year, moving to Park City, Utah, from Eugene, Oregon, where he had been training with the Bowerman Track Club. He knew he was taking a big chance. With Bowerman, he had developed into one of the world’s top distance runners, finishing fifth in the 10,000 meters at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
But high-profile departures had set Bowerman back after Jerry Schumacher, the team’s head coach, added to his responsibilities in 2022 by becoming the head coach at the University of Oregon.
And while Fisher remained with Bowerman through last summer, his season came unglued when an injury resulted in a fourth-place finish in the 10,000 meters at nationals. He missed the world championships.
“I can’t get onto the podium if I’m not on the team,” he said. “I need to be healthy.”
Grant Fisher, of the United States, poses after winning the bronze medal in the men's 10000 meters final at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Friday, Aug. 2, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)
By that fall, Fisher was ready to make a change. He wanted more control over his training schedule. He also wanted to live at high altitude, which had worked well for him in the past. (With less oxygen at high altitudes, the body produces more red blood cells, which increases aerobic capacity.)
Fisher spoke with several coaches as he weighed the best way forward.
“And I kept coming back to the idea of Mike,” Fisher said.
Fisher had known Scannell for most of his life. Scannell and Fisher’s father, Dan, ran and roomed together at Arizona State University. When Grant Fisher was a toddler, Scannell hired Dan Fisher at a manufacturing company in Michigan.
Grant Fisher played soccer growing up in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and picked up running in middle school to improve his fitness. For help, Dan Fisher turned to Scannell, a former triathlon coach at the U.S. Olympic Training Center.
“Grant’s dad said, ‘You have to coach Grant,’” Scannell recalled. “So I started coaching Grant.”
It was a casual arrangement at first. In fact, Fisher seemed most interested in the pole vault. (Scannell did not coach the pole vault.) Yet by the time he graduated from high school, Fisher had become the seventh U.S. high school athlete to break four minutes for the mile and was a two-time national cross-country champion.
Scannell’s philosophy with young runners hinged on the idea of building them up slowly. No heavy mileage. No all-out sprints. He did not want to burn them out. He monitored their exertion with lactate tests, an innovative concept that has since become a staple for many elite endurance athletes.
“It was quite novel,” Fisher said. “But my world was so small, and I knew nothing about running. So I thought it was normal.”
Scannell built the foundation for Fisher’s success. At Stanford, Fisher was a 12-time All-American. With Bowerman, he vied for medals on the world stage.
So when Fisher announced in October that he was switching things up, it set message boards aflame — especially the part about his returning to Scannell, who still coaches high school track in the Phoenix area. But Fisher valued Scannell’s approach, and, in an Olympic year, he did not want to start over with someone new, he said.
For his part, Scannell said he was “extremely happy” when Fisher called him.
“If he’s getting coached by someone else, I’m not going to interfere,” Scannell said. “But then he did call me, and I was honored by the phone call.”
The day after Fisher informed the staff at Bowerman of his decision, he loaded up a U-Haul with his belongings and drove to Park City for his new life.
Scannell got to work down in Arizona, producing a 10-month training plan that ran through Aug. 10 — the date of the 5,000-meter final at the Olympics.
They made their long-distance relationship work. Fisher urged Scannell to keep his high school coaching job, so Scannell hired a staff there to help when he was with Fisher. He began flying to Park City from Phoenix two or three times a week, sometimes sleeping in Fisher’s basement.
“It’s my firm belief that nobody does it alone,” Scannell said. “You need support, and you need energy — the coach’s energy — at all the primary workouts. And when I took the job on, I committed to doing whatever it took to do the job right.”
The logistics of their arrangement were easier in the winter, which Fisher spent in Flagstaff, Arizona. (Park City gets too much snow.)
“It’s sometimes nice to go and hang out with the high school kids,” Fisher said. “They’re not thinking about their contracts or anything like that. They’re just running because they love it.”
Fisher does not need Scannell to monitor his easy runs. But for a challenging workout that involves speed, Fisher wants an additional set of eyes. Not to push him, but to hold him back.
“It’s nice to know that your coach is on the same page,” Fisher said, “that you’re not trying to squeeze everything out of yourself in any given moment. There’s always a future.”
On Friday, Fisher realized that future thanks to the changes he had made. Spending much of the past year at high altitude, for example, “bumped me up one second” over the course of 10,000 meters, he said, which, based on his math, made the difference in finishing third.
And, of course, there was his embrace of the figure from his past.
“The joy I had working with Mike in high school is still there now,” Fisher said, “the joy of having someone who’s as invested in your journey as you are.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
