NOT MANY PEOPLE can watch old videos of Lasse Viren falling in the ’72 Olympic 10,000 and bouncing up to win in a World Record and say, “I did something like that.”
BYU’s Kenneth Rooks now officially has our dispensation to do so, after tumbling over a barrier midway through the USATF steeplechase, then getting up and not just working his way back into team contention, but also amazing the crowd with the victory in a new PR.
It wasn’t a move the 23-year-old had looked forward to, but he says the crucial fact was that he had, in effect, already prepared a game plan for that moment. “I’d thought about — before the race — what I would do if I fell. That made it a little bit easier to make that decision after I fell, because I already knew what I would do. I knew that I would decide to keep going, and I would get up and try and work my way back slowly to the front pack.
“Having planned beforehand and thinking about that definitely made it easier. I mean, you’re not expecting to fall. It’s not what you hope for, but in the steeplechase sometimes, you can just mess up and fall, or sometimes you may fall because someone else does something that messes you up.
“I just really wanted, at the end of the day, I wanted to be able to say that I’d given my best effort, that I’d given my all regardless of the outcome. When I caught back up to the pack and reattached myself and started racing, I recognized that I might be able to still get a top-3 spot. And so, I was pushing myself, putting myself in it.”
The victory, the PR 8:16.78, all of it puts Rooks into a great spot heading into Budapest, which will be his first national team experience. It comes after a year of revelations. The Cougar junior was not exactly unknown coming into the season. He had finished 6th at NCAAs last year with a PR 8:22.56 in his first year back from a pandemic-lengthened church mission.
In his cross country season last fall — his first since high school — he placed 12th in the West Coast Conference and then 22nd in the ultra-fast Mountain Regional. Indoors he set PRs of 3:59.65 and 7:55.44, then earned All-America honors with his 2:56.67 distance medley leadoff for an 8th-place BYU squad.
All good stuff, but none of that particularly scared his steeple rivals. Then, in early May, he ran his third…
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