The first strides of a trip that have taken Jimmy Hearld literally around the world came on the Warren East High School track as part of conditioning for football. A former world-class distance runner, NCAA champion and U.S. Olympic Trials qualifier, Hearld has competed on most of the world’s continents and has gone stride-for-stride with the best runners on the planet.
None of that would have happened if not for those early jogs with linebackers and halfbacks and the prescience of a young elementary school teacher who happened to start a brand-new sport called cross country at Warren East in 1985.
“I played football my freshman and sophomore years at Warren East,” recalls Hearld, now 47 and living in Louisville. “We had to do a mile on the track for conditioning, and I kicked everyone’s butt. I decided I might have a little talent for running. I thought I might want to try it and drop football.”
A wise choice, and not just because Hearld weighed in the neighborhood of 120 pounds at the time. Although a novice runner, Hearld qualified for the state track meet as a sophomore and took third in the 2-mile run. Then he met that elementary school teacher, Rick Wood.
Himself a runner who had competed at Western Kentucky University, Wood immediately saw the talent in Hearld when he started the WEHS cross country program.
“The first time I ran with him, I told him: ‘The sky’s the limit for what you can do if you do what I ask you to do’,” recalls Wood, now living in the Cincinnati area. “He was a kid in the trailer park behind Warren East, just hoping to graduate from high school. I told him he could go to college through running.”
Hearld listened, and he made Wood look like a prophet. With Wood’s guidance, Hearld fashioned one of the most impressive careers of any Kentucky high school distance runner. He won the state championship in cross country his junior year and repeated the feat as a senior. He added state championships in the 2-mile run in 1986 and 1987 and a first-place showing in the mile in 1987, his senior year.
“He was just a quiet, unassuming kid, and we connected,” Wood says. “He did everything I asked him to do, and I trained him a little harder than I would the typical high school kid.”
Wood did more than that for Hearld. Thanks to his connections with coaches at Southeast Missouri State University, he was able to help Hearld get a scholarship to run track and cross country at the NCAA Division-II school.
“Coach Wood exposed me to a bigger scene at the time,” Hearld remembers. “He helped me get into college.”
Hearld made the most of that opportunity. Bumping his training up to 100-plus miles per week, he excelled at SEMO. Between track and cross country, he earned All-America honors 12 times and was the 1991 NCAA Division-II champion in the 5,000-meter run. Training with WKU standouts Ashley Johnson and Sean Dollman while back in Bowling Green helped Hearld during his college years and also helped prepare him for the world of international competitive distance running.
After college, Hearld became essentially a professional runner, with his focus on reaching the Olympics. He enjoyed more success, competing for the United States in the World Half Marathon Championships and winning the U.S. 10-mile championship. He moved up to the marathon in an effort to make the U.S. Olympic Team, once running the 26.2 miles in an Olympic-quality time of 2:12.
“I was in the Olympic Trials twice,” Hearld recalls. “Probably my best chance at making the Olympic Games was in 2000, but two or three weeks before the trials I got injured and couldn’t compete. That haunts me to this day. If I had made the Olympics, that would be the one tattoo I would have — the Olympic rings.”
Rings or no rings, Hearld had a great running career that saw him post personal-best times of for 5 kilometers, 28:30 for 10 kilometers and for the half marathon. He was fourth on the elite U.S. Road Racing Circuit in 1996. With sponsorships from the likes of Asics, Brooks and Reebok and prize winnings in elite races, Hearld earned between $30,000 and $50,000 per year during eight years as a professional runner.
“It’s a tough living in a way,” he says today. “But I enjoyed what I was doing. I competed in Japan, Spain, London, all over the world. Running helped me do that.”
Married for the past 17 years to Cathy, Hearld now invests in real estate, buying and then selling or renting properties. After his competitive running days ended, he dabbled in bicycling and even did a “century” (100-mile bike ride), but he says it isn’t the same as running. He and his wife both do yoga now, and Hearld is slowly getting back into running.
“I’m trying to run more now,” says Hearld, still a svelte 145 pounds. “I’ve caught the bug again.”
Hearld has had opportunities to coach at the college level, but they never fit his schedule in the past. Now, he says: “I would consider coaching. I wasn’t ready to do that before when the opportunities were offered, but now I think I could do it.”
If he goes that route, maybe Hearld will realize the same sense of accomplishment that Wood felt when he coached a football-player-turned-distance-runner some 30 years ago.
“Coaching Jimmy is still one of my greatest accomplishments,” Wood says today. “I hope every coach has the chance to coach a kid like him during their career. It makes you think everything you’ve done is worthwhile.”
