Yared Nuguse: “Running’s never been my whole life.”

Words by Matt Wisner. Photography by Joe Hale. 

This story appears in issue 4 of OFF Magazine, available here at On.com from September 4.

12 March 2020. The world might have been ending and I was on Twitter, constantly refreshing my feed, watching colleges pull their athletes out of the NCAA track and field championships the day before competition. I was all bent out of shape about it. Everybody was all bent out of shape about it. I think I cried but within five minutes had texted my friends about throwing a party because that’s the sort of thing you do when you’re 21 and you don’t know what’s going on. 

An hour later I met Yared Nuguse for the first time in a hotel room that didn’t belong to either of us. He had probably been the favorite to win the mile that day but nobody was talking about that. At that point in the night nobody really cared. Yared’s shirt was unbuttoned and he was wearing a cowboy hat and he was happy. It's only when the world could be ending that Yared was free to forget about all of that. Forget about everything. Even if only temporarily. 

Three years later, Yared ran the mile faster than any other American in history and I was in the stands losing my mind. Yared and his OAC teammate Olli Hoare were flying as the bell rang to signify 200 meters remaining in the race. Then Yared found another gear. His stride is already so much longer than everybody else’s but somehow it lengthened and he pulled away. He finished and the clock read 3 minutes, 47.38 seconds. Somebody draped an American flag over his shoulders and handed him a bouquet of flowers. Twenty photographers huddled around him. It’s like he didn’t know what to do with all the attention. He just kinda stood there and when he finally felt the staleness of the moment he threw up a peace sign. A few moments later he walked off the track. 

It’s 2023 now, and I’m on the phone with Yared while he waits in line at the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles). “It would be my dream to be really fast at running and nobody gives a f*ck about me,” he tells me moments before filing a request for a custom license plate. GOOSE, the plate will say on the back of his new yellow Mustang. Or GOOS3 if GOOSE is unavailable. G00SE if both of those are taken. He’s thought about it. But for somebody who drives a flashy car like that, the man really hates the spotlight. 

For some professional runners, high performance is social currency. Run a fast race and rack up the Instagram likes. Win something big and everybody wants to be your friend. Yared hates that bullsh*t. He resents that he sometimes wonders whether people only like him because he’s fast. 

Yared is straightforward: he doesn’t posture as something he’s not. You can tell he’s being himself because his interests are so undisguised in being nerdy and uncool (said affectionately) and Yared never tries to obscure or change them. He likes cartoonish video games and The Lego Movie. He’s multiple times DMed me sing-songy millennial cringe comedy on Instagram Reels. He reads fantasy novels. 

Yared created an Instagram account in 2018, six years after the rest of us. The older end of Gen Z grew up online, but not Yared. He finally made an account during his freshman year of college and penned the bio “I got an Instagram, stop bothering me about it”, his signature sass and slight inclination for trolling front and center on his only visible online profile. 

I ask him why he finally caved and downloaded the app and he replies, “Like the bio says…,” his cheekiness at full force, as though he felt inconvenienced that I asked a question that has a very public answer. “I’m not a big social media person and I hated the idea of Instagram,” Yared says. “But I figured if I was gonna do any social media it would be that one.” He’s not somebody who takes pictures of himself but now that he’s competing in the biggest track meets in the world, people constantly take photos of him. Easy posts. Despite his dispassion for posting he’s racked up 17,000 followers, which must make him one of the most prominent anti-prominent figures in the sport. 

Yared’s even gone so far as to mock the shallow behavior Instagram encourages. On Instagram. He transformed his pet turtle Tyro into a figure of cult fascination by subjecting him to all the cliché influencer rites of passage: fit checks, AMAs, ‘what I eat in a day’ vlogs. Yared injected his personal offbeat sense of humor to the series of Instagram Stories. He characterized Tyro as a communist revolutionary: “I am also a flagrant anarchist and will bring down all the governments of the globe to seize the means of production,” Tyro says in one Story. In the next, he’s eating a strawberry that’s half the size of his body. Yared also contrived a series of challenges for Tyro to keep his followers satisfied: obstacle courses, boxing matches with the housecat. You never know what might be next.   

“I wanted to do some kind of interaction with my followers but I’m not good with people,” Yared says. “But then I realized that Tyro’s good with people, so I let him do it for me.” 

Yared is casual about everything, even his running, which is rare for somebody as good as him. “Some people have a couple of bad races and their whole world starts falling apart and that’s dumb.” Apathy is crushing, but detachment grants you some kind of power. Yared has found the sweet spot for harnessing that detachment.

“Running very quickly becomes people’s whole life,” Yared says. “But running’s never been my whole life. That’s why I’m so good,” he says, laughing. 

His teammate and roommate Mario Garcia Romo told me that Yared’s morning routine is the same every day: he wakes up five minutes before practice, walks half-asleep into the kitchen, grabs a pre-packaged waffle from the freezer and throws it in the toaster, puts some maple syrup on it (no plate), and walks out the door. He’s always five minutes late. 

“Yared’s a very smart guy but he never thinks that hard about running,” Garcia Romo says. “When he ran his 7:28 [3,000-meter American indoor record] in Boston, what was really the first very big race of his life, it’s like he wasn’t conscious of what he’d done. He was like, ‘Yeah, I just raced. I won. I tried hard. That’s it.’” If Yared were older, people would call him wise, but he’s 23 so we dismiss it as coincidence. 

Being the fastest in the world wasn’t always the plan. Yared was very fast in college at Notre Dame—the fastest ever to run 1500 meters while in the NCAA—but he was never certain he even wanted to be a professional runner. He’s always wanted to go to dental school. Yared says it’s because he loved his orthodontist as a teenager and that’s all there is to it.

The day before Yared made his professional debut as an On athlete last summer, my friends and I did a photoshoot with him at a dentist’s office. We captioned the Instagram post “Pro running isn’t like pulling teeth when you’re on OAC”, and Yared says it’s still true. He wanted to join a team where he could be himself. A team where it felt like everybody was being themselves. He says it’s not like everybody on OAC is similar or even necessarily compatible, but they’ve created an environment where they’re encouraged to be real people with real interests who don’t have to suppress their personality for the sake of running a couple of fast laps—maybe because that’s not the way to run a couple of fast laps and even if it were, it probably wouldn’t be worth it. For Yared it wouldn’t be worth it. 

Last summer, after a run with a couple of OAC athletes on Neva Road in Boulder, Colorado, I was stretching, dragging my feet across the dirt parking lot, when their coach Dathan Ritzenhein mentioned something to me about Yared being the real deal. It was small talk but he was talking big. He casually used the words “under 3:30 in the 1500” and “medalist”. Things he wouldn’t say frivolously. Ritzenhein’s been in this game for a while—he’s an Olympian and a former American record holder. He’s competed for multiple professional teams and has encountered so many world-class athletes. And in this case, Ritz’s intuition was right: Yared really is the real deal. And he’s still just getting started.  

I ask Yared where he wants his legs to carry him. If you’re at the end of the world, the true end of the world this time, what would you have had to do to make everything worth it? “I could win the Olympics and be like ‘OK cool’ and that would be it,” he says. “I want to have fun. I want to enjoy my youth. School makes that hard, and I’ve been given the opportunity to have a lot of fun running before I go back to school again, so that’s pretty dope. Accolades are not.” The world could end and all your records turn to dust. Yared laughs. I laugh. We stay on the line for a moment. Neither of us says anything. Then I hang up the phone.