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On Top of the World (1984–1986) “You’re sub-4:00 but that’s nothing, kid.” —John McDonnell It is a peculiarity known only to collegiate track and field that the rest and relaxation following most seasons lasts less than the time one takes to exhale. Cross country begets indoors, indoors begets outdoors; and only those who choose to forego a summer season of competition can truly call any part of the year an off season. John McDonnell understood this somewhat dismal phenomenon better than anyone. “John built his program on middle distance and jumpers,” said David Swain. “For those of us who did cross country, it is very difficult to run a full cross-country season, a full indoor season, and a full outdoor season. Most of us would be getting pretty tired by the end of it. I think the reason he was so successful indoors was that he had many frustrated track runners who were coming off cross country and couldn’t wait to run on a track.” Many Razorbacks stayed in Fayetteville over Christmas to get a head start on their competition by training on the indoor track. “We were in a much better position than a lot of other people who may have come back out of shape,” said Reuben Reina, who joined Arkansas in 1986. “We were ready to get national qualifiers our first two meets rather than trying to just get back into shape. The rest of the indoor season we could just concentrate on training so our mentality was different.” While McDonnell had the sense not to train his teams at the pace nor the intensity during the indoor season that they typically did towards the latter part of the outdoor season, the sacrifices required of winning an indoor national championship nonetheless required a level of intensity and sharpness that was difficult to sustain throughout an entire year. True to form, the Razorbacks trained on the grass and did not race for over four weeks following the 1984 NCAA indoor meet until Texas Relays. Despite attending smaller meets at Oklahoma and a windy and rainy invitational at home—where Mike 124 7 Conley set Olympic qualifying marks in the long and triple jump—it was not until 1984 Penn Relays when the intensity truly got dialed up. Villanova still was not yet willing to cede its perch as the dominant power of the meet—capturing the 4 x 800 meter and 4 x 1,500 meter titles—but the tide was turning. Arkansas defended its distance medley relay title in 9:26.57 thanks in no small part to a 3:56.7 split from Paul Donovan. Freshman Doug Consiglio captured the steeplechase in 8:43.5, followed only a second later by Harold Smith. Weeks later the Hogs won their third consecutive Southwest Conference triple crown following a 50-point victory over second place Texas at the outdoor meet before finishing a program-best third at the 1984 NCAA Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon.1 It was a total team effort accomplished through two more NCAA titles by Conley in the long and triple, as well as his contribution to a sterling 4 x 100 meter relay. In what would become a trend, that relay team nearly saw itself disqualified when two of its members opted to wear tights in the cool Oregon air. “One of the other teams turned Arkansas in for wearing tights on the 4 x 100 meter relay,” remembered Doug Consiglio. “John told us, ‘If I ever turn someone in for something like that, let me know because it’s probably time for me to retire. That’s just hurting the kids.’” “[Someone] filed a protest saying Arkansas should be disqualified for running out of uniform,” McDonnell recalled years later. “The appeals judge looked at me and said, ‘Can you believe this shit?’”2 Suddenly in John McDonnell’s incubator of expectations, the aspirations of the program had grown from capturing the triple crown in relay meets and conference championships to the oncoming reality of accomplishing the once-unthinkable goal of winning three NCAA Championships in one season. The momentum was becoming hard to stop, and if the present was going well, the future was even brighter. After years of struggling to attract elite American distance talent, Arkansas’s success and McDonnell’s developing gravitas suddenly had the Hogs in the running for two high-school seniors from Missouri—Chris Zinn and Joe Falcon—considered among...

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