You know you're fast when you're not satisfied with a sub-four minute mile. Jacob Boone, an Oklahoma Sooner, recently ran 3 minutes, 59.44 seconds at the Washington Husky Invitational for his second career sub-four mile and is looking for more. The junior has a team Big 12 Championship on the top of his list of goals for this indoor season and looks to make the NCAA Meet in March. Let's see how he wraps up his indoor season!

Congrats on your second-career sub-four mile. How are you feeling about it a few days later?

It definitely feels pretty good. I'm not completely satisfied with my race, but it was definitely good to break it again, yeah.

Why aren't you completely satisfied with it?

I felt like I had a little bit more in me and that I didn't compete quite as well as I wanted to.

Is it more the time or the place that's not sitting well with you?

The place. I wasn't really focused on the time. I just wanted to pretty much place as high as I could and that's about it.

When is the next time you'll get to run a fast mile indoor? Any more chances?

That was probably the last time because Conference is in about two weeks at Iowa State. There we're just competing for high place. Hopefully we can score quite a bit of points in the distances and hopefully carry our team to a conference championship. Then, at Notre Dame's Last Chance Meet, we're going to try to qualify as a DMR.

Big 12s is usually a pretty tactical race?

Yeah. Usually. Besides German going out last year and going 3:55, I think second place was about 4:03.

This past weekend you had a teammate with you breaking four minutes as well. Do you know what his previous PR was in the mile?

Yeah, Eric Harasyn. I'm really glad he came here. He's a great training partner. He came here from a junior college with a 4:06 coming into the season. He's been PRing every, single race. I think his PR before his sub-four was at the Razorback Invitational and at 4:03. He was pretty happy and I was really happy for him.

That must make things a lot easier on you, having someone on your team to push you?

He definitely helps out a lot. We tend to push each other a lot in practice when we do our ab workouts and our track workouts for distance stuff we do.

Some friendly competition?

Yeah. We're teammates that like to compete and stuff. That's obvious. But we're really good friends.

You mentioned a Conference Championship as a goal for this season, but what do you have for individual goals?

For Conference, we just want to compete as a team. I don't really have a personal, individual goal. But, we do want to score about 18 minimally in the mile this year and quite a few in the eight and 3K also. I'll definitely be shooting for at least a top-three finish at Big 12s.

Do you have any NCAA goals or will you just take it as it comes?

I have some goals. Hopefully—I know it's only provisional—my mile will get me into the NCAAs. If it does, I'd definitely like to medal and get into the top-eight. That's really the only goal. I'm going to try to become a two-time All American.

Can you talk about your typical week of training?

Usually Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are our easy days. We'll do anywhere from seven to nine miles. Then, Tuesdays are usually our track days, where we'll get on the track for an interval training session. Thursdays are kind of an over-distance type of run, between 10-12 miles. Then, Sundays are our long runs, unless it's a competing weekend, where it will just be a recovery run.

What does the usually add up to for mileage?

It's usually 70 miles a week.

Why did you choose Oklahoma in the first place?

Back in high school, I was visiting a lot of Big 12 schools. My coach in high school asked me if I knew a guy named Martin Smith. I honestly didn't know who he was. He told me to Google him and I Googled “Martin Smith” and it showed that the Oregon Coach was going to Oklahoma. When I found that out, I said “I'm going to Oklahoma”. That's what got me to come here. The only reason was because of Coach Smith.

What are you studying?

It actually just started at Oklahoma. It's called “Interdisciplinary Studies” and my emphasis with that is Health Sciences.

What's the ultimate job for you—running aside?

My friend, that I've known since first grade, her parents are the POs of a pharmaceutical sales company. I'm hoping to get into that after running and everything. I definitely want to keep running after college and see what happens.

You've done some redshirting, so how many seasons, exactly, do you have left?

This is my last year of indoor. Next year, I still have cross country and outdoor.

Have you looked into post-collegiate running or are you waiting to see how you can wrap up your NCAA career?

I'm waiting to see until after this outdoor season. I haven't really had a great outdoor season yet. I'm just going to go with the flow. I do want to keep running for a while and see what happens.

Are you going to stay a miler? I Googled your name and saw you talking about running the five, but haven't seen any results of that.

I honestly have no idea. Since I've been in college, I haven't race in anything over a mile. Back in high school, I was a two-miler. I don't know what I would do, honestly. I haven't really talked much to Coach Smith about it, just because I've been competing pretty well in the mile and helping our team at Conference and everything.

Are there any runners that you look up to?

Probably Matt Tegenkamp. He's actually from my city and went to my rival high school. I'll follow him now and then and some of my older friends are actually friends with Matt and will talk to him and relay a message or something. I'm not really good friends with him or anything, I just like to see how he's doing. He's really good!

I saw that you're a member of a Church. Are you a faith-based runner? Is that what propels you to compete?

Basically what drives me to run is my competitiveness. I like to compete with everything that I do. I do like to think that I do run through God and stuff. I'm pretty religious, but not...it's hard to explain.

Well, I've got time if you don't mind explaining.

I wasn't really religious back in high school. I found out that my brother had a tumor in his brain and I was diagnosed with being a narcoleptic. I would start praying for my family and my mom started having heart problems. I started getting into the religious aspect of things and started to get in touch with the church family. I started going on a pretty weekly basis and started making quite a bit of friends.

Any other distance runners?

Actually, a guy named Tony Clement, who's on our team and graduates this year, he goes to church quite a bit too. We have a lot in common and we can talk about church and talking about God and stuff. It's nice to be able to talk to a teammate about that kind of stuff sometimes.

Are you still having those sleeping problems?

Yeah, still narcoleptic. We didn't really know what was going on with me the first couple of years until like two summers ago. We found out that I was narcoleptic, because it only took me about four minutes to fall asleep. We've started to get that figured out. It's definitely helped a lot...once we figured out how to go about training and stuff with that in the equation.

Are there good weeks and bad weeks as far as it's concerned?

I have to at least get eight hours of sleep a night and then I have to be on a pretty set schedule throughout the week or I'll get exhausted pretty easily. I have to take at least a ½-hour nap before practice. Sometimes before a race, I'll have to take a ½-hour nap.

Can you do things to make it better and can you do things to make it a lot worse?

It kind of varies day-to-day. Sometimes I'll feel completely fine because I'm rested and everything. If I don't get the nap in the day, then that day tends to be pretty tough on me and I tend to drag a lot more. I'm not embarrassed about it at all, I was just really shocked about it when I found out that I was a narcoleptic.

What were the early symptoms that you told you that you should probably go and check it out?

Actually, Kevin Schwab, his godparent, Frank Lewis, he recommended that I should go see a doctor. He noticed that I sleep immediately after a run before I was diagnosed. I went and saw someone who did a bunch of tests on me. That's when I found out that I was narcoleptic.

Would you say that you know enough about it where it's getting better? Or is that hard to say?

It's definitely getting better. I've pretty much mastered how I need to go about my day to keep it at bay.

What do you and your teammates do for fun when you get free time?

We pretty much do everything together because we get along so well. We like to watch the HBO TV show Entourage. We just started the show “How I Met Your Mother”. Everyone is kind of obsessed with that show right now. We've been watching it quite a bit.

If you could have one meal, prepared by anyone, what would you have and who would make it?

I'd definitely say that it's when we have a team dinner over a Coach Smith's house every once and a while. It's not very often, but when it does, it's awesome. His wife, Renee, will make a spaghetti and her rolls and stuff. Everyone loves it. It's by far my favorite meal that I've ever had.

The way you say that makes it sound like a plea, like maybe he'll read this and maybe have team dinners a little more.

Haha, yeah! That would be great! (Laughs).

Maybe once or twice a week.

As long as it doesn't impact NCAA rules.

Can you give me a crazy running-related story?

We went to Flagstaff this past summer to train and everything. Toward the middle of the summer, we went to the Grand Canyon. We decided to hike down the entire Grand Canyon and hike back up. On our way down, we carved “OU” into the dirt. I guess one of the officers called that graffiti. Then we got lost on the trail and split up. We started yelling “Boomer Sooner” to find each other. She said that was disturbing the peace and that she didn't care to hear Oklahoma State chants and stuff. I actually corrected her and told her it was an Oklahoma chant, not an Oklahoma State chant...she got kind of mad at me and gave me a ticket for disturbing the peace. I had to do community service for that.

What did your community service entail?

I went to the dog shelter and had to do 10 hours or something like that for disturbing the peace because we yelled “Boomer Sooner”.

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