Niklas Rippon: Finding His Religion

 “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.”
–Dr. Wayne Dyer

Sometimes running the hurdles is not just about running the hurdles. When you head out to the track shortly after hearing of the death of a close friend, trusting that getting over some hurdles will help you get over the loss, you realize that hurdling matters more to you than anything else in this world. Niklas Rippon knows all about that. The 24-year-old, 6-7 hurdler has suffered his fair share of personal tragedy in his short life, and through it all, the hurdles have kept him going. A 2013 graduate of Oakland University in Michigan, Rippon continues to train and compete while facing all the fluctuations and uncertainties that life as a post-collegiate athlete has to offer.

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A citizen of both the United States and Germany, Rippon was born December 1, 1989 in the small town of Sindelfingen, just outside of Stuttgart. His dad was in the navy, so the family often moved. They lived in Germany for only a few months before his dad was transferred to Newport, Rhode Island in the US. After six months there, the family moved to Virginia Beach, VA. They lived there for five years then Acushnet, Massachusetts for three years. Shortly after Niklas’ ninth birthday, they moved again to Lake Orion, Michigan, where Niklas would later attend Lake Orion High School.

Rippon’s hurdling career began in the seventh grade, when students were allowed to begin participating in school sports. His mom told the lady in the front office that her son wanted to run. So when he showed up for the first day of practice and declared that he was there for track, he was told that track doesn’t start till spring. Fall was cross country season. During that initial workout, Rippon recalls that the coach “ran up next to me and said, you know you’re gonna be a hurdler right?”

But Rippon, who was very tall (6-0) and very skinny (100 pounds) for his age, wasn’t so sure. When spring practice started, a girl who had been previously coached by the Lake Orion High School coach came and demonstrated how to hurdle, then asked if anyone wanted to try. “I was scared,” Rippon says, “so I didn’t step forward. But one of my friends convinced me to come with him after practice. After the first time I went over, I couldn’t stop doing it. It’s cool when you pick up something easily like that. I was three-stepping by the second or third week. Over 33’s, 55 meter hurdles. The only regular season race I lost was to an 8th grader. That was my only regular season loss all through middle school.”

By the beginning of 8th grade he had grown four inches, up to 6-4. But he had gained only ten pounds. He played basketball and ran track, and was the gangliest kid out there. “It’s interesting,” he says, “looking at pictures from the past, how skinny I was, how huge my knees looked.”

Despite his awkward frame, Rippon excelled in the hurdles. The middle school hurdlers worked with the high school coach, Mike Hatch, every Monday during the summer, learning basic fundamentals and drills. An eager student, Rippon soaked up the knowledge and effectively applied it. Hatch emphasized the importance of mastering the details. According to Rippon, Hatch’s mantra after each rep was, “You tell me what you felt, I’ll tell you what I saw.” So he was taught early on the importance of being able to explain what he was feeling, as opposed to just running and jumping and hoping for the best. “From the beginning,” Rippon says, “when doing walk-overs, you should be able to explain what you’re feeling. By the time I was a sophomore, I really had a good understanding of what hurdling was, to the point where he basically turned me into one of the coaches. Once you can break down a drill to every little piece, you can start to do it fast.”

The tradition of those summer Monday practices is something Rippon has carried on throughout his collegiate and now post-collegiate career. “I’ve been doing Mondays since the summer of 2003,” he says, “slowly transitioning from athlete to coach. I say the same things to my kids that Coach Hatch used to say to me.”

Hatch liked what he saw so much that he tried to enter Rippon in a high school meet at Eastern Michigan University when Rippon was still an 8^th grader, but kept him out upon discovering that having the middle schooler compete would cost him a year of high school eligibility. “So I just went and watched,” Rippon says, “and got to hear my name called for the high school 110 heat. During that time I got to practice with the high schoolers every now and then, and that group of high school hurdlers was one of the best in our school history.”

By his junior year Rippon was 6-6, before reaching his current height of 6-7 heading into his senior year. While all of us know that being small presents a plethora of problems, taller hurdlers have their own set of struggles. Throughout middle school over 33’s, and then in high school over 39’s, Rippon’s coaches had taught him to “duck down” like all of the other hurdlers when attacking the barriers, but he never found this technique to be helpful, except when first adjusting to the hurdles raising from 33 to 39. By leaning deeply, he wasn’t taking advantage of his exceptional height. One summer he went to a camp at Michigan State University where the camp directors told him “that I didn’t need to squat over the hurdle. It still took some time to get that into my mindset – that I don’t really need to shrink, being a bigger guy.”

Meanwhile, his flat speed was suspect at best. Like many hurdlers, Rippon feels that he runs fastest when there are hurdles in his lane. “Put something in my way and I can run fast.” He never ran the open 100 or in any sprint relays. “In high school I was never considered fast. I was just a tall, skinny, weak kind of guy.”

Still, he was fast enough to finish high school with personal bests of 14.39 in the 110’s and 40.7 in the 300’s, good enough for third and ninth all-time in school history. His senior year, he finished first in the 110’s and second in the 300’s at the league championships. He finished second in the 110’s in the Oakland County Championships, “which some people consider harder to win than the state meet because it’s a super athletic county.”

When it came time to choose a college, things got a bit hectic because he had been equally (if not more) successful as a basketball player. “Nobody saw me as a track athlete,” he says. “Basketball had been my focus for a long time. I was considered a center, but more a European style center. I could dribble, run, go to my left, go to my right, shoot hook shots, shoot three’s. I was fairly skilled, which helped me in the hurdles. It’s the same thing – I had to learn to break everything down, discipline myself.”

So why did his basketball career stall? “The basketball coach didn’t like me. He didn’t play me. My senior year I played six minutes total. And I was just as good as the kid who got a full ride to Oakland.” While it might have made sense for Rippon to quit the basketball team in order to get ready for spring track his senior year, he says “I don’t believe in quitting. Once a quitter, always a quitter.”

Rippon received much interest from DIII schools and a few DII schools. The two DI schools that showed interest were Cincinnati and Oakland. He had a good conversation over the phone with Cincinnati’s assistant coach Brandon Hon, who currently coaches sprinters and hurdlers at Florida State, but during his visit to the school, Hon “was on his honeymoon or something.” Things didn’t click too well with the head coach, so Cincinnati was out of the picture.

During his visit to Oakland, Rippon jibed well with head coach Paul Rice. “He said he saw potential in me, if I were to build up my body. He told me he could see me being one of the guys to lead the program into the next level.”

So on to Oakland he was. Unfortunately, he stayed injured for the majority of his first two years there. In high school he had managed to stay relatively injury-free, except for shin splints and a pinched nerve in his back after being grabbed by an opponent while clearing a hurdle (yes, it was intentional). A chiropractor was able to fix that problem, so it never grew too serious.

The real injury issues began in the summer before enrolling at Oakland, before even stepping foot on campus. Rippon explains:

“The school sent me a summer program. The way it works is, each workout earns you half a point, and you had to hit a certain point total. I took it seriously. When I got to school [in September], I found out they sent the summer program assuming people would slack off, thinking people would just do half of it. I was doing all of it. Running, swimming, lifting, biking. I got a stress fracture in my spine. During the fall the coaches told me I was making it up. Even the trainers said that. A doctor at the University told me it was a muscle issue. So I trained through indoor, then went to a different doctor who told me my vertebrae was about to break in half. He’s like, ‘Here’s a back brace for six months.’ I got to a point where I couldn’t tie my own shoes, put on my pants, couldn’t mow the lawn, take out the trash. One lucky thing was it healed itself; they didn’t have to fuse two vertebrae together.”

Emotionally, the whole ordeal took its toll. He was even told that he would probably never hurdle again. He tried to ignore it while he worked at a beach all summer. But his overall disposition had turned sour. “A lot of people thought I was a completely terrible person because I’m not nice when I’m not doing what I enjoy. I wasn’t nice. I was pissed off.”

Rippon took it upon himself to take control of his rehab program. “When the doctor let me start doing basic core exercises, I wrote down everything I did. I improved my core strength. I would do a core workout every night. When he said I’ll never hurdle again, I did some walk-overs and wrote that down. When I showed him my log book he was like, ‘What’s this?’ A year later I set the school record in the 60 meter hurdles.”

By coming back like that, by defying the doctor’s prediction that his collegiate career was over before it started, by putting in the work necessary to race again, and by breaking the school record, Rippon feels that “I proved to myself that this is what I want to do. I’m not just out here. I’m a hurdler.”

Rippon’s relationship with Coach Rice was damaged, but not beyond repair. “I accepted the fact that it was partly my fault, partly my coaches’ fault,” he says. “I talked to Coach Rice about the fact that I’m really tall. He admitted he didn’t know anything about varying workouts for taller hurdlers. The school, at the time, hired a head strength and conditioning coach, Todd Wohlfeil; before, we had a sprint coach take us to the weight room. So I just kind of needed to accept the fact that I needed to move on and this was my school.”

The year after Wohlfeil was hired, another new strength coach was brought on, Sam Brown, formerly of the Virginia Military Institute, who had a background as an offensive lineman. Though he knew what he was doing, Rippon didn’t listen to him much at first because he had grown so accustomed from his rehab days to doing his strength work on his own. “He was telling me I shouldn’t constantly add more core reps to gain strength, that I only need it from time to time. He suggested I do core strength training just three times a week instead of every day, in order to get more benefit out of the running program. Like if I did core work then went out and did a hurdle workout, the hurdle workout would suffer. He was right, but that was a tough concept for me to take in because I knew if I missed a day of core, my back hurt. The core stuff is what got me back to where I was comfortable running again.”

Also, when it came to the weight room, Rippon had to start over from scratch. Below scratch. During his time away, he had lost 30 pounds, dropping from an already light 170 to a scrawny 140. Considering that most people gain weight when they’re less active, Rippon’s weight loss was hard to explain. “I have a weird body,” he admits. “For half a year at least I didn’t eat a whole lot. I would get full easily. I don’t know if that’s normal for other athletes. I know athletes from the cross country team get real fat when they don’t run.”

When he first returned to the weight room, he  was so light and so weak he couldn’t even squat the bar. It took a while to get back to full strength, but Wohlfeil was there to start the rebuild. In all, he red-shirted the 2009 outdoor season and the 2010 indoor season, returned to competition for the 2010 outdoor season, then broke the indoor school record in 2011 with an 8.24.

In 2012 (his junior year eligibility-wise), his best time indoors was 8.30. He was definitely feeling like he could run faster, but he started running up on the first hurdle. “After my injury, when I broke the record, I had the appropriate strength for my height, but I kept getting stronger. By the outdoor season (of 2012) eight steps wasn’t working. I didn’t want to slow down before the hurdle, so I made the risk of switching to seven steps heading into my senior year. It was really frustrating getting faster and stronger, being with everyone going into the first hurdle, then my plant foot is like hell no, making me look bad.”

Without a coach experienced in the intricacies of transitioning to a seven-step approach, Rippon did a lot of experimenting on his own that summer. Brown suggested that he do three-point starts with his feet switched at the line, so he did 100 reps of those per day. Then on certain days he’d go out to the track with his dad and do standing starts with no hurdle, putting a marker where the hurdle would be. The first week, his last stride was fourteen feet away from the marker. The next week he overcompensated and was four feet away from the marker. The next week it was eight, then six.

With so much fluctuation, it became clear that a little guidance could go a long way. So his dad contacted me and arranged for the two of them to fly down to North Carolina one weekend in July. It just happened to be the hottest weekend in Raleigh history, but what can you do? Unbeknownst to me, he had never tried the seven-step approach out of blocks, so the first thing I had him do was put the blocks down and go at it. We put tape down where we wanted the first step to land, and another piece of tape down where we wanted the seventh step to land. And we put a cone where the hurdle would be.

When working with transitioning seven-steppers in the past, I had discovered that if they could get a good push off the pedals and land the first step properly, and continue to drive and dig instead of lifting their knees, steps 2-6 would fall in place naturally. I always liked including the visual cue of tape at step seven, trusting that my naked eye could see if the seventh step was too long in relation to the sixth step.

This is the approach I took with Rippon, and it worked very well. It helped that he was 6-7, and it helped even more that he was so eager to learn. He had watched YouTube videos of the handful of seven-steppers who were out there at the time, in addition to doing his own experimenting with his dad. We replaced the cone with a hurdle, starting at 30 inches. By the end of the weekend he was able to seven-step over a 42-inch hurdle with ease.

But Rippon was never quite able to reap the full benefits of seven-stepping during his collegiate career. Anyone who has switched to seven steps knows that it can take a year or even longer to master it. For Rippon it was a hit or miss thing, and even when it was on, the increased speed threw him off his rhythm by causing crowding issues later in the race, which is what happened at the indoor Summit League Championship meet in February of his senior year. “That would’ve been a huge pr,” he says, “but I smacked hurdle three.”

Rippon finished his collegiate career with personal bests of 8.24 indoors and 14.72 outdoors. Not nearly good enough to earn a professional contract. But he knew, based on his increasing strength and speed (he was on the 4×100 relay team that set a new school record in 2013), along with his continued mastery of the seven-step approach, he had much more potential than his times indicated.

So along with fellow 2013 graduate Breanna Peabody (the subject of last month’s profile), he formed PRTC-Elite. He would be able to train at Oakland – where he stuck around as a volunteer assistant coach – and at nearby Avondale High School. He would also be able to continue coaching the middle school and high school kids at Lake Orion on Mondays.

He put together a spreadsheet mapping out a budget, training program, and competition schedule. To put the word out about what they were doing, Rippon and Peabody created their own website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and later on added a gofundme page. They were also able to find local sponsors to help with equipment, gear, and traveling expenses.

But perhaps the biggest problem Rippon was facing was that he still didn’t have a coach who specialized in the hurdles. He was still, in effect, coaching himself, and on some days he and Peabody were coaching each other. And not everybody was supportive of his efforts or impressed by his determination. “I had a friend tell me I should just quit,” he says. “She was like, ‘Why are you still running? You should just quit and get a job.’ And she didn’t even think she was being hurtful.”

While Rippon tried to shrug off such comments, he felt their sting. Life as a professional athlete without a contract was very demanding, to the point where he doubted himself at times. In February he started working as a vehicle test driver for Rousch Performance – an automotive company. On some days he would work from 4:30pm to as late as 3:30am, “driving freeways, back roads. I was required to get in 300-400 miles a night. I drove 15,000 miles in four months. For minimum wage. I was waking up at 7:30 for 8:30 practice, then coaching after that. I was getting about three hours of sleep a night. It got to the point where at the end of the University season I didn’t coach a whole lot. I didn’t really finish the season with the team.”

Due to pure exhaustion, along with needing to find a full-time position, Rippon quit the job on May 28^th. On the positive side of things, around the same time he had started the job – shortly after the end of the indoor season – he also found a coach. While training one day at Avondale High School, he ran into Shelby Johnson, who coached the high school team’s sprinters and hurdlers. The two of them struck up a conversation. Johnson, as it turns out, had been a star hurdler for Taylor Center High School back in the late ‘70’s, and had also been an All-American 400m hurdler for the University of Michigan. He offered to work with Rippon, and Rippon accepted.

Johnson, according to Rippon, “changed everything. Indoor, I had been smashing hurdles. His plan was to have me elevate going into the hurdle, then be quick over. Force the chest down, force the foot down. I was doing hundreds of reps of one-steps, just lead leg, then just trail. Then he started timing it the third or fourth week. He put the hurdles seven feet apart, and we got all the way up to the 42’s. By week five we put up ten hurdles. Did a hundred reps of just lead, a hundred of just trail. And that was before the start of the workout. A lot of my workouts ended up being two and a half hours. He ended up changing my entire lead arm. He had me punch forward with the fist, elbow above the head, then punch down. Recently he decided to change it again.”

With Johnson’s mentoring and encouragement, Rippon has made major improvements not only to his technique, but to his time. In June he went on a Canadian tour, competing in four meets in two weeks. The meets were in Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa, and Calgary. In Ottawa he ran 14.31, dropping almost a full six tenths from his collegiate personal best.

The last meet on the tour was the one in Calgary. In a practice session prior to that meet, he ran a 13.5 hand-timed in a time trial. He was looking and feeling like he was ready to make another huge drop to his pr. But around that time he also started working a new job, at Detroit Diesel. This job required him to wake up at 6am, work until 4:30, then go to the track to train. His training suffered, and his energy level waned. The Calgary meet ended up being a disappointment.

But the season as a whole was a success. To drop .6 in one year, with valid evidence that he can drop even further in 2014-15, Rippon has every reason to believe he can dip into the 13’s. The key, as he sees it, will be maintaining the relationship with Coach Johnson, who is a very positive guy while also being very demanding, which perfectly suits Rippon’s approach to training.

As it stands now, with the new job at Detroit Diesel, it would be difficult. “I gotta make some decisions,” Rippon says. “My job is an hour away from my house. The drive from [my home in] Lake Orion to Oakland [to use their weight room facilities] is 25 minutes, then it’s another 55 minutes to my job. If I move, where do I go? Where do I lift? Where do I practice for indoor?”

There is a chance that Johnson might end up assisting at the University of Michigan next year. If that were to happen, it would simplify matters. “If he ends up at U of M, I could move closer to there, which shortens my drive to everywhere. If he doesn’t get that, then I’ll have to see. I know for sure I’ll continue to train. Johnson says I’ll be in the top ten in the world next year. I don’t know about that, but I love his optimism.”

The 13.5 time trial, even more so than the 14.31 pr, has Rippon believing big things lie ahead. The qualifying time for USA Indoors in the 60m hurdles is 7.92. He figures that if he can run in the 7.7-7.6 range, he can not only qualify, but be competitive when he gets there. The 110h outdoor qualifying time of 13.65 now also seems within reach. He feels that once he gets his touchdowns between the hurdles consistently in the 1.0 range, he’ll know he’s ready.

Rippon would love to have the opportunity to compete overseas, particularly in the land where he was born. “My overall goal is to get to race in Germany. I’m a dual citizen, so I have the opportunity to be on either national team. Just breaking 8.0, I can be in the mix in Germany. Coach Johnson keeps hitting me with the optimism, and it’s rubbing off. I haven’t had a whole lot of support. So his attitude is making a difference.”

What a lot of people are not aware of – people who question why Rippon keeps training and competing after college, people like the friend who told him he should just quit – is that his motivations run much deeper than just having the desire to be the best. Running track, and the hurdles in particular, has gotten him through the most tragic of times.

“Track,” he says, “has huge meaning for me. It saved me in some sense. When I first started out in middle school, it was just something to do. In high school I was better than most people. In college I could help build a program and share my knowledge with others. But … there was a period of my life … from my senior year of high school for about four years – from ’08 to ‘12 – about eight friends of mine died. That’ll take a toll on you. I went to a lot of funerals.”

Rippon says that half of the deaths were vehicle related. Car accidents. The other half were self-inflicted. Suicides.

The first one died September 29, 2007. A 5K was organized the following year in his memory. “Every year,” Rippon says, “no matter what I’m doing, I’m running that 5k.”

The last one was a younger kid who had been on the Lake Orion team during Rippon’s senior year, when Rippon served as team captain. “He went to community college, got a full ride to Oakland, then ended up passing away.”

Every year, from September 29th to the day of the 5k in mid-November, Rippon grows a “memorial beard” in honor of his fallen friends. “Around the end of my freshman year at Oakland, I kind of asked myself a lot of questions, and one was, Why do people do things? My best answer to that question was, No reason at all. If you want to give someone a gift, give it. If you want to donate, donate. So in a sense, growing the beard was just part of my addiction to goal setting, but it also had a deeper meaning. It was a way of answering questions like ‘Why them, why now, what am I supposed to do?’ Without an answer, I had an answer.”

After the last death, Rippon talked to his coach, who advised him to talk to the school guidance counselor before he would be allowed to return to practice. There, he was told that “as an athlete I have always tried to find solutions to problems and move on, but I was not the usual case. I should finally talk to someone about it rather than holding it all in.”

Not knowing what else to do, Rippon walked out of the office and changed into his training gear.

“I went to the track,” he says. “Some people go to the church. I had all these people die, I went to the track. Track is the thing that’s my religion. My life is track because of more than it being track. So that makes it even harder for me to be okay with people putting me down, telling me I shouldn’t be doing this anymore. People think if you’re not getting paid to do it, if you’re not making money off of it, then what are you doing it for? For me the answer is simple: I want to reach my potential, whatever that may be. I want to get everything out of it, then I want to pass it on to others. Then I’m content.”

That’s why the opening quote for this article serves as Rippon’s signature for every email he sends. He has suffered more loss than people twice or even three times his age, yet he has chosen not to be miserable. He has chosen to motivate himself. And to motivate those in his community.

That’s why every summer Monday at 6pm, he can be found at Lake Orion High School, working with the middle school kids. “My community,” he says, “is the track team.”

 

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