A Lifetime Dedicated to Track

Every year, Tom Heinonen records the distance he ran and adds it to his career total. By July of this year, he will hit 70,000 miles, or approximately 2.8 times the circumference of the earth.

More than just an obsessive training log, Heinonen’s accounting of his daily practice transcends and envelops the history of track and field in Eugene, a community in which he has resided for nearly four decades.

Heinonen qualified for the Olympic Trials in the marathon in 1968 and 1972, was instrumental in founding the women’s track and field program as a varsity sport at the University of Oregon in the mid-'70s, guided dozens of athletes to collegiate championships during his nearly three decades of coaching and continues to contribute to the running community in Eugene through his coaching and activism with the UO Running Club and Eugene 08 Organizing Committee.

Heinonen’s passion for track is evident in other ways, too. In addition to his competitive accomplishments, he married Janet Heinonen, another pioneer in the history of women’s track and field in the United States, and he raised two elite runners, Erik and Liisa.

“I feel that I've done more than just be a runner who became a coach, with coaching being simply a job,” Heinonen said.

Heinonen was inspired to start running in the eighth grade because his brother ran track. He ran for his high school and continued running during his college years at the University of Minnesota.

His senior year in college, he competed in the Big-10 three-mile race, held outdoors at the University of Iowa on an unbearably hot day. Heinonen asked a University of Iowa trainer if he could borrow a baseball cap for the race and was given a black hat with “Iowa” written in large letters across the top.

Heinonen competed using his standard running tactic: He didn’t lead early, but began moving strong in the middle of the race, taking a lead far in front of the other runners more than half-way through.

Sweat dripping from his brow, his feet thumping rhythmically on the track and his heart beating loudly in his chest, he ran, winning the Big-10 title for the University of Minnesota – while wearing a baseball hat for Iowa.

“What is the worst thing you could possibly do?” he said, laughing. “Wear an Iowa hat while you’re winning a title for Minnesota.”

After the race, a coach from the University of Wisconsin approached him and asked if he would be interested in training at high altitude in Alamosa, Colo., for the rest of the summer.

The NCAA Championships would be hosted in Provo, Utah, at 4,500 feet of elevation, so the offer to train at high altitude provided an exciting and unexpected opportunity.

Heinonen walked over to his college track coach, Roy Griak, to tell him about the offer.

Griak looked at Heinonen, who, at that point, was the only All American distance winner that Griak had ever coached. Before Griak even had the chance to congratulate his “golden boy” for winning the race, he was faced with losing him for the last three weeks of his college career before the most important collegiate race of the year.

"He just said, 'That’s a great idea,'" Heinonen said, smiling as he recalled the event.

So Heinonen went to Alamosa, and by the time of the NCAA championships, he was ready. During his three weeks of training, he learned to "respect high altitude." He learned tactical approaches for high altitude races, outsmarting other runners by holding back throughout the race and coming on strong at the end.

Heinonen put everything he had learned from his high-altitude training towards the NCAA six-mile race and placed third. This, the final race of his college career, was his best NCAA performance ever.

"(The day of the Big-10 race) I just thought, 'Wow, I won a Big-10 title. I finally did it. Me, me, me,'" Heinonen says. "And the very same day, I later came to appreciate my college coach even more for having sort of let me go in this new direction that we never even thought about."

Heinonen enrolled in graduate school at the University of Oregon and applied to coach the women’s track team, which was relatively new and needed a stable coach to establish the program. He stayed on to coach the team for 28 years.

Not only did Heinonen make a significant impact in UO women's track and field as a whole, but he changed the lives of the individual runners as well.

Lisa Nye, who was on the team from '87 to '92, said she spent her first three years at UO "kinda messing around" until one day Heinonen called her into his office and told her she had to decide if she wanted to keep running.

"He just sat me down and said, 'if you want to be a runner, you have the ability to be a runner, and this is what you need to do, but you can’t succeed with what you’re doing now,'" she said.

Together, Nye and Heinonen created a new training program specifically for her. After just one year of training on what Nye calls the "Tom Heinonen Program," she went from being 99th at the NCAAs to taking third place.

Heinonen won NCAA Coach of the Year twice and has been named Pac-10 Coach of the Year eight times. In 2006, he was inducted into the U.S. Track and Field and Cross-Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

In 2003, he retired from the women's track team, but he couldn't stay away from the sport. He has been the volunteer coach for the UO Running Club ever since, and he doesn’t plan to stop any time soon.

"It's fun for me because I just get to meet kids and I hardly ever tell them what to do," he said.
"I'm the focal point. They know I'm going to be there; they know I'm going to hold their stuff; they know I'm going to ask what they're doing. We're going to talk; we're going to laugh; we're going to talk about Oregon sports and whatever's in the newspaper. I look forward to it every single day because it's a chance for me to meet with people (of college age) who are interested in what I'm interested in.”

Laura Bocko, the student coordinator for the Running Club, said that without Heinonen, the club wouldn't have any structure.

"Meeting him and being on the Running Club is the greatest thing I've done at [the University of] Oregon," she said. "We’re really fortunate to have such an elite coach."

Heinonen shares his love for track with his family. His wife was a marathon runner and a track journalist. Their children, Erik and Liisa, both ran track.

"We talk the same language and both understand the different dimensions of the sport," Janet Heinonen said. "It's nice that what's important to him is also important to me."

As a child, Erik was responsible for running up 50 steep double-steps to deliver scores to the press box during meets, while Liisa and her friends worked as the basket crew, carrying the baskets that athletes put their sweats in before they ran.

"We were always invited to their house for pizza," Nye said. "Running was just part of their life. I think it was good for all the kids who had come from other communities and saw how running was a family thing for them and what their life was built around. It really gave you a different appreciation for what running could be about just by seeing them."

To Heinonen, running has always been about more than just winning the race.

"For the people who look back on it over the years, they can't remember their (race) times, they can't remember the places, but they remember the friends and they remember the journey," Heinonen said. “Time and again, people who win look back later on say, 'Yeah, I did win and that was the goal, but really, all the work that I did and all the learning and all the friends that I made, that's really what it’s all about. That’s what I remember.'"

Published in Mosaic's Track and Field edition for the Olympic Trials