Back in Boulder:
Wheat Ridge product knows race well, having debuted with age-group win at 11
Scott Fauble ran his first Bolder Boulder when he was only 11 years old. Monday, he will be with Team USA in the race’s pro challenge.
The first time Scott Fauble ran the Bolder Boulder, he won his age group by more than a minute and a half and finished a step ahead of his 45-year-old father, Jeff. That, and the fact that they were successful in their goal of beating his father’s age, was impressive enough.
What was even more remarkable: Scott ran the 10-kilometer race at age 11 in 42 minutes, 50 seconds.
That was in 2003. Having won a state high school cross country title for Wheat Ridge in 2009 and a 1,600-meter state track title in 2010, Fauble went on to a successful career at the University of Portland in Oregon. He turned pro in 2015, qualified for the Olympic Trials in the 10,000 meters and finished second at the U.S. Half Marathon Championships in April.
Now he gets to run in the Bolder Boulder’s international team challenge, representing the U.S., and he is thrilled. It was through the Bolder Boulder that he fell in love with running while growing up in Golden.
Eager to run in Rio
“I don’t think I could be any more excited,” said Fauble, 24. “There are very few races that are more than just another race. Bolder Boulder, it was one of the races I grew up running, looking forward to it every year. To come back run in the (elite) race I used to watch from the stadium, it’s more than I could ever expect out of a professional career. I am so excited to do it my first year on the circuit. It should be just so much fun to get to race in front of friends and family. In some ways, my experience at the Bolder Boulder will come full circle, which will be super exciting.”
Fauble now runs for Northern Arizona Elite, a training group based in Flagstaff. He was forced out of the NCAA championships last year because of a foot fracture that delayed his professional debut a few months, but he has been piling up an impressive list of accomplishments this year. At the Great Edinburgh Cross Country Challenge in Scotland, he finished third. At the Stanford Invitational in April, he ran 28:00.43 for 10K on the track, which was only half a second off the Olympic A standard.
“I’m going to go to the (Olympic) trials and try to make the team,” Fauble said. “Hopefully I’ll end my season in Rio.”
Folks in the neighborhood where he grew up remember him running the 600 meters from his home to elementary school with his little blue backpack. By the time he was ready for high school, Wheat Ridge coach Scott Chamberlin knew he was a special talent.
“He was a joy,” Chamberlin said. “A lot of times, you’ve got to get kids motivated. That was not an issue with him. He was always super pumped and motivated. Ever since he was that age, he wanted to be a full-time, big-time pro runner. It’s a treasure to have somebody like that, a joy for sure.”
Perfect fit in Flagstaff
His career hasn’t been without hardship. He feared the foot fracture he suffered this time a year ago might ruin his pro career before it started. The fifth metatarsal on his right foot broke through completely while running at NCAA regionals. He tried to run at the NCAA championships anyway, warming up on a stationary bike and running a couple of strides under the bleachers at Oregon’s Hayward Field before the race, but the pain was too intense and he dropped out after nine laps.
“I was pretty broken up,” Fauble said. “I was having all these thoughts about how this was going to hamper my ability to go pro. ‘Maybe I’ll never be able to. Maybe I won’t be able to come back.’ ”
He also worried that Northern Arizona Elite coach Ben Rosario would renege on his offer to take him on, but Rosario stood by him.
Flagstaff is one of America’s best training areas for distance runners. They can live and train at 7,000 feet, which is the ideal elevation for altitude training, but they can also go down to 3,500 feet to get good speed training on the track. It’s also beautiful. “It’s so pretty, with so many really cool dirt roads and cool trails, so many cool things to do around here, that it made my decision to go to Flagstaff pretty easy,” Fauble said.
So was his decision to pursue a professional career in distance running. There isn’t much financial support for Americans beyond those at the very top of the sport, and it takes years to develop, but that didn’t intimidate him.
“I do know a lot of very good runners from college who don’t necessarily want to go pro because they’re more interested in starting their ‘real career,’ ” Fauble said. “In addition to this not being the most lucrative profession for people straight out of college, it’s also a fickle career. It’s not guaranteed that it’s going to last very long, and it’s not guaranteed that you’re going to make a lot of money when it is going well. But none of that to me was particularly important.
“One of the beautiful things about running is that you don’t need world-class facilities, you don’t need to be getting paid millions of dollars, all you really need is enough time to do a really good job of training. Whether there is money in the sport or not, people will always try to do the best they can at it because it’s such a personal thing to so many people.”