Ron Warhurst Goes to Paris

Ron Warhurst was a U-M coach for thirty-six years—cross-country and track. He was Big Ten coach of the year four times, won nine conference championships, and coached 129 All-Americans, multiple Olympians, and a winner of the Boston Marathon. 

But in 2010, a new athletic director came in. Two years later, Dave Brandon told the Ann Arbor News that eighty-one people already had “exited” the department. Warhurst was one. 

“I was asked to retire,” he says. “Brandon never spoke to any of us. He had the assistant AD do all the hatchet work for him.” Warhurst, who was sixty-seven at the time, didn’t fight it. 

“It was the best thing that ever happened,” he says now. “My son was seven at the time. I was leaving at seven in the morning and coming home at six in the evening, and Luke was in bed at eight.” His wife, Kalli Warhurst, “was taking Luke to sports practice. I was traveling with the team.” 

But Brandon’s decision to push him into retirement proved premature. Warhurst started a running program for ATI Physical Therapy, then, in 2019, signed on as an assistant to Skyline High boys track and cross-country coach Mike Kessler. 

Kessler’s wife, Serena, took over the girls teams the following year. Their son was already showing great promise as a runner, and they asked Warhurst to oversee his training. 

Hobbs Kessler set a national high school record for the indoor mile as a senior in 2021, and turned pro after graduation. He’s now one of half a dozen professionals who train with Warhurst’s Very Nice Track Club. (“Very nice” is the coach’s favorite compliment when a runner does well. In New Orleans for the Olympic trials in 1992, he had it tattooed on his right hip.) 

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Serena Kessler qualified for the Olympic trials herself, in 2012. So when Hobbs runs the 1,500-meter and 800-meter “double” for the United States in the Summer Olympics, Warhurst will share credit with his remarkable family. But Hobbs is just one of three VNTC runners who’ll be competing in Paris this month: Bryce Hoppel will run the 800 for the U.S., and Ben Flanagan the 5,000 for Canada. They’ll bring the number of Olympians Warhurst has trained to an even dozen.

Warhurst was born in 1943 in East Orange, New Jersey. His dad was an engineer and his mom a nurse; he was the middle kid between an older brother and younger sister. 

In junior college in Poughkeepsie, NY, he says he “was a runner, but not a star.” But after transferring to Western Michigan, he ran on two NCAA championship cross-country teams. 

He graduated in 1966. After a couple of years as a graduate assistant for coaches at Western and EMU, he joined the Marine Corps “just for the hell of it,” he says, sitting one early morning in Sweetwaters downtown. “I was sent to Vietnam in January 1969. I was crazy. I still am.”

He volunteered for “force reconnaissance,” which he says was “kind of like the Navy Seals except we didn’t go swimming as much.” For seven months, he “walked the point,” leading a line of infantrymen through the jungle. 

“The life expectancy of somebody walking the point is about three weeks,” Warhurst says. “I learned a lot about [how] you sometimes have to function in your life with fear all around you—but you still have to function. … You have to learn how to control it and get on with what’s going on.” 

He came home with two Purple Hearts for shrapnel wounds, neuropathy from exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange, and PTSD—though “we didn’t know about the PTSD or the neuropathy until twenty years after we left,” he says. Post-traumatic stress disorder wasn’t widely recognized until the second Gulf War, and “they didn’t understand the effect of Agent Orange.” 

He worked as a computer clerk at the U-M and ran with U-M athletes, who told him that then-AD Don Canham was looking for a cross-country coach. The notoriously frugal Canham hired him—but only after determining he wouldn’t have to pay him much.

“Ron came to Michigan at the beginning of my sophomore year,” recalls Greg Meyer. “We ran almost every morning together before class. We’d meet at 7 or 7:30 a.m.,” and if Meyer overslept, Warhurst “would cuss me out later. … 

“We talked, a little about running, but it was more about life. He had me thinking about other things. I mean, he had us reading Siddhartha!” 

Meyer got a degree in education and was planning to teach. But “Ron sat me down at the old Delta restaurant over breakfast and told me he felt there was more that I could accomplish—that I was only starting to see my potential. 

“This was before runners were getting paid,” Meyer continues, “so to my parents this was a gamble.” But he and his parents had faith in Warhurst. So Meyer stayed in Ann Arbor and kept training with him. He won the Boston Marathon in 1983.

Warhurst “did more than teach me how to run faster,” says Meyer, now chief community officer at U-M Health–West in Grand Rapids. “He changed my life. I’d never be where I am today professionally if it weren’t for Warhurst.”

Meyer is just one of hundreds of runners Warhurst has coached through their fears, insecurities, and what they thought were physical and mental limitations.

“He just made it fun to condition your body,” recalls former NFL player Don Dufek, who trained with Warhurst when he was on the Michigan football team back in the 1970s. “He could get you to really punish yourself and feel good about it.”

“That guy got me through a marathon, and I have no business running a marathon,” says writer and speaker John U. Bacon. He had planned to run the Boston Marathon in 2020, and when it was postponed during the pandemic, he improvised his own run through Ann Arbor. 

“It’s not all hearts and flowers,” Bacon says of Warhurst’s methods. “I believe his line to me was, ‘Bacon, you’re going so slow you’re almost in reverse.’ … Ronnie has very high standards. He’s uncompromising. But he loves his runners.”

“Ronnie can get a lot out of people,” says Dufek. “That’s the magic in his ability to connect with runners. When you’re pushing the limits of your physical endurance and what you think your capabilities are, Ronnie can take you to the next level. And then beyond that. He just inspires you to do the best you can.” 

Related: Ann Arbor on the Run

Warhurst says he learned how to do that in Vietnam. “A lot of kids are afraid to push themselves with their workouts and races,” he says. He tells them, “just have faith in yourself. You’re doing the right thing. We’ve gotten you trained. Now you have to go out there and make the right choices. … 

“With all the things I’ve gone through in my life, they develop a respect for me. And when I say something, they know it’s not bullshit.” And for his part, “when I see them running as well as they do, with the changes I’ve made in their training over the years and the things I’ve done, it’s really rewarding.”

“Ultimately Ronnie’s greatest gift is his people skills,” says Nick Willis, who came from New Zealand to U-M in the early 2000s to work with Warhurst. “During my time at Michigan, Ron taught me how to become a man both on and off the track, without which I would have never learned. He didn’t put up with any of my whining and kept me to task, and for that I’m grateful.” Willis is a two-time Olympic medalist in the 1,500 meters—he won silver at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and bronze in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“We train really hard,” says Willis. “We bust our asses. But when you know what he’s been through, it’s like, ‘Of course we’ll run through a wall for you. What you’ve done for us is way more important.’” 

When asked why his runners respect him so much, Warhurst deflects.

“I taught them all how to swear,” he says. “When I coach them, I tell them what I think. I’m pretty transparent: ‘You goddamn jackasses, quit screwing this up. Do it right the first time. How many times do we have to do this?’ And then I laugh.

“I was transparent, very flexible—with the training and how to do things with them—and I think I gave them a lot of self-confidence.” 

His runners repaid him in 2023 by advocating for his belated recognition by the U-M athletic department. Meyer says that he and Mike McGuire, the captain of Warhurst’s first Michigan cross-country team, “started the process.” Brandon was long gone—he himself had been pushed out after just four years—and Warde Manuel was AD. Warhurst was baffled and pleased when Manuel called him personally with the news.

“I don’t know how much Ron told you about how he exited U-M,” Meyer says, “but getting in the Hall of Honor was a real validation for him—that what he did at Michigan was exceptional and meaningful. We knew it would be important to him.

“Luke was there. Kalli was there. So many of Ron’s old team. They flew in for this because it was important. Ron has that gift. He loved and cared for us, and it’s reciprocated.”

After a brief early marriage, Warhurst married Kalli in 2000. Luke was born in 2002; he’ll be a senior at the U-M this fall. 

A sports marketing major, Luke “developed his own T-shirt business and sold them online,” Warhurst says. He also races “asphalt modified” stock cars. “He’s afraid of heights and bees, but put him in a car and he’s going 130 [miles an hour] on somebody’s bumper,” Warhurst says. “He wants to be a Nascar driver.” 

The Very Nice Track Club was started by runners, but Luke was the one who built it into a brand. He says he just started “making content—videos, photos, selling merchandise—getting new athletes to join, and for my dad to coach. … It kinda turned into this big thing.” 

After celebrating his eighty-first birthday in July, Warhurst was headed to Paris to watch his VNTC runners in the Olympics. Adidas, which sponsors Kessler and Hoppel, will cover his expenses. 

“He definitely never stops,” says Luke. “He wants to go, go, go, and being around all those younger people with the same mindset as him keeps him young”—despite the neuropathy, a knee replacement, and three stents in his heart. 

“Social Security is good,” Warhurst says. “Everything is good.” He’ll once again be watching runners he trained compete in the Olympics, and “after that, it’ll be for the next one and the next one… hopefully.” 

When will it be time for him to stop coaching? 

“I’ll stop when I can’t find my keys to drive to the track,” Warhurst says. “Or my wife or my son takes my keys away. Or the guys say, ‘Hey, take his keys away—we don’t need him down here for today.’” 

That’s not happening yet. “Hobbs runs the first round on August 2nd,” the coach says. “I’ll be in the stadium somewhere.”