Running’s Class Clown Is Back—and He Wants to Be the Best in the … – Runner’s World

Craig Engels was running out of chances to meet the 2020 Olympic standard in the 1500 meters, and one of his best opportunities—the competitive Diamond League series final—was almost within reach. Engels sat one spot below the meet’s qualification cutoff, and he had just one race left to move up: the Meeting de Paris. Many runners would have channeled the high stakes and ticking clock as extra motivation, and the cards were in Engels’s favor. He was training in nearby St. Moritz, Switzerland—just a few train rides away from Paris—and he was in the best shape of his life. It seemed all he had to do to make the final and presumably hit the standard was show up.

But when the runners approached the Paris track, Engels was 4,000 miles away, trying on a suit to go with his trademark mullet and mustache. He had skipped the race to attend a friend’s wedding in Nashville. As Engels posed for photos with the other groomsmen, Uganda’s Ronald Musagala crossed the Paris finish line, and Engels’s chance at the Diamond League final seemingly disappeared. “Everyone around me was like, ‘Dude, you’re dumb,’” Engels says. But was he? The following month, he ran in the race anyway—as an alternate after another athlete dropped out—torching his way to a 3:34.04 PR and beating the Olympic standard by almost a full second.

Many of the world’s top runners seem to let the sport take over every facet of their lives, often at the expense of something resembling a fully lived life. Galen Rupp, by all accounts—he hasn’t posted on social media in a decade—maintains a hyperfocused existence of marathons and family. McDonald’s enthusiast Usain Bolt cut the simple joys of chicken McNuggets out of his diet ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games. The modern elite athlete is synonymous with 4:00 a.m. wake-ups, few nights out, and no days off. Vacation—what’s that? And forget about risky hobbies like rock climbing and snowboarding. “They’re always saying ‘no’ to things,” says Engels, who broke his clavicle snowboarding in 2017, of most professional runners. At 27, he’s determined not to miss out on anything.

But Rupp and Bolt have something Engels doesn’t: Olympic medals. After a hot start to his 2021 season, a nightmare scenario at the Olympic Trials left Engels off the team headed for Tokyo. He was crushed. Thinking back to all the days off, the missed races, the goofing around, Engels began to question whether his commitment to run/life balance was holding him back. He always thought he could achieve everything he wanted in running without giving up the spontaneous vacations, the prolonged Instagram comedy bits, or his retro hairstyles. Those things made him unique. And if he sacrificed all those things at the altar of Olympic glory, would winning be worth it?

As 2021 came to a close, Craig Engels was coming off one of the toughest stretches of his career and staring down the end of his contract with Nike. There was a way out if he wanted, an escape from all the irreconcilable, identity-shaking questions. Presumably still in the prime of his running career and on the cusp of more success than he’d ever seen, one of America’s top middle-distancers was thinking of giving it all up.

“He’s always been funny,” says Dawn Engels, Craig’s mom. “He’s always been a jokester and a free spirit. If it weren’t for track, he would probably be living in a van down by the river.”

Infinitely outgoing and personable, Engels has long been known as an athlete who needs to make time for the different sides of himself: the side that trains hard and loves competing, and the side that renovates RVs and meets a friend in Dubai—no, wait, Croatia—on a moment’s notice. His Instagram shows the requisite runner pics in his racing kit, but it also shows him lounging shirtless in a fur coat, soaking under sprays of champagne, and lip-synching to Kid Rock’s “Picture” in a blonde wig. Engels’s friends and family will assure you that this is the real Craig. Ryan Bateson remembers Engels as a “high-energy” kid. They used to TP houses together as childhood friends growing up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (Their pranks continue to this day. After the 2020 Olympic Trials, Engels stuffed his trash—including his old socks, racing bib, and various candy wrappers—in Bateson’s luggage.) Engels was named runner-up for Class Clown at Ronald W. Reagan High School, a second-place award that came with great disappointment, as he coveted the honor. “He was a really silly guy when he was younger,” says Chris Catton, Engels’s high school running coach. “And then he just stayed silly.”

Engels with friends and fellow runners (from left) Jeramy Elkaim, Kellen Manley, and Tate Schienbein at Portland’s Wallace Park.

As an adult, Engels let his personality map onto his appearance. The mustache arrived in college, according to Bateson, when Engels still wasn’t capable of covering his upper lip. With the runner on the cusp of 20 years old, he filled the patches in with greasepaint. The mullet came later in Engels’s career at Ole Miss. He asked a friend to cut his hair after he had grown it out, and after his friend had shaved the sides and was about to start on the top, Engels caught a look at himself, stopped the cut, and laughed, saying: “Keep it.” You might ask about Engels’s tattoos, while you’re at it. He mostly gives them to himself when he’s bored, he says. “It’s so stupid. Two weeks later, you’re like, ‘Why did I do that?’” The most recent one, “DUDE” on his right middle toe, has faded from running. His first, “YEET” on his index finger, was done by “some kid” at Wake Forest University. What does “YEET” mean? “Not sure,” he says.

It might be easy for some to perceive Engels’s look as an outward sign of non-coachability, but in somewhat of a miracle, every one of his coaches—first at Reagan High School, then at North Carolina State and Ole Miss, then at Nike—has supported his eccentricities as supplements to his running. “He’s been lucky in that sense,” Catton says. “There’s always been a team of people to keep him on the straight and narrow, and let his talent and personality flourish.” Engels’s Ole Miss coach Ryan Vanhoy says Engels’s tendencies should be accommodated rather than restrained. If something isn’t fun, he says, Craig won’t do it—and that’s OK. “You have to understand that he’s a really talented person. If he’s not doing every exact single little thing you think he needs to do, he’s so good that some of that [training] isn’t as important as it might be to someone else,” Vanhoy says. While Catton says Engels could “push the envelope more” with his training, both coaches agree that Engels’s freedom goes hand in hand with his greatness.

So far, his performances have proved them right. Engels won the 1500 meters at the 2013 Pan American Junior Athletics Championships while he was in college. At the 2016 Olympic Trials, he placed fourth in the 800 and fifth in the 1500. He signed with Nike a year later, and went on to win the 1500 at the 2019 USATF Outdoor Championships. A month before the 2020 Olympic Trials, he ran 3:33:64 at the Portland Track Festival, the fastest 1500 yet by an American that year. It made him a favorite to make the team headed for Tokyo.

The delicate arrangement between Engels’s running career and personal life was holding. He was having fun, and he was winning. But then, at the most important race of Engels’s career, the winning stopped.

Engels can’t explain why he keeps the haircut: “That’s something you’d have to ask a psychologist.”

Temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit the day of the men’s 1500-meter final at the 2020 Olympic Trials, a record for Eugene, Oregon. It was a cramped, tense race, the runners clinging to each other like wet clothes in a dryer. At one point Josh Thompson, from Bowerman Track Club, ran out of room and tripped on the rail. For the first two laps, Engels was stuck on the inside of the track, surrounded.

Early in the third lap, a space opened up to Engels’s right, but he stayed where he was, aiming to make his move and kick with 500 meters to go. But the runners around him clumped again, and when it became time for Engels to accelerate, he was trapped. It was only with 100 meters to go—the final straightaway—when he found another opening. Engels charged after Notre Dame’s Yared Nuguse, who was in third place and thus occupying the final spot for Tokyo, but he ran out of track. Nuguse pulled away near the finish line to claim the final Olympic team spot by half a second. Engels watched the race footage to figure out what went wrong, but he was too down on himself to see his disadvantaged position. He just thought he hadn’t been fast enough. The race haunted him for months, looming in the back of his mind following the Trials, casting a shadow as he competed in domestic road miles. He avoided studying the race and watching it again; it was too hard. When he finally did, he saw what had happened. He got stuck, with no way out.

“I didn’t get to execute my race plan,” he said. “I had thought I wasn’t fit enough. When I finally rewatched the race, I was like, wow, I really got boxed in.”

Engels running the 1500 at the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials.

He didn’t clear himself of all the blame: He admits he took days off from training and had fun when he should have been focusing. He says he would have done better if he had been more dedicated. It’s easy to forget that for someone so laid back, Engels actually has goals. Missing out on the Olympic team was devastating. His father, Todd Engels, told reporters Craig was gutted after the race: “I’ve never seen him in shock like that.”

Engels had built his running career on the notion that he could have as much success as anyone else even if he took the time to do, well, whatever he wanted. Engels has argued he needs things outside of running “as a crutch, just in case.” He knows too many stories of runners who found themselves lost when the sport let them down. “I’ve seen athletes put themselves on top of this pyramid, and then the base crumbles,” he says. “They get hurt or they stop performing as well, and they get really depressed.” He didn’t want the same for himself, but after his loss at the Trials, he started to wonder if his crutch was actually holding him back.

Engels dialed back his running after the Trials. “I was not training hard at all,” he says. With his Nike contract set to expire at the end of 2021, he wondered if it was time to abandon his running goals if reaching them meant being unable to live a life with no stones left unturned. That, he says, was more important to him than the Olympics. “Nowadays all the top runners are these guys who are just so serious,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s worth it.”

Retiring probably would have been simple. In many ways, Engels has been preparing to retire since he turned pro. He lives part-time in a converted shed in Portland, Oregon, that’s probably not up to code (“It’s whatever temperature it is outside, inside”), and he wants to be able to leave for a trip in his refurbished 1997 Georgie Boy Pursuit RV whenever the urge strikes him, with nothing tying him down. He wants to travel the world while he’s young—before he starts a family or becomes “landlord of an RV park,” he says—and really sightsee when he does travel, not like the hotel- and track-bound trips he takes to international races. He has hopes for the world beyond himself. He wants to fight climate change. “The biggest way to leave the world a better place than I found it is to fix what humans have done,” he says. When Engels thinks about living his way, he thinks about the 2020 lockdown phase of the pandemic. During that time, Engels quarantined with a close circle of friends in Portland, working on a van restoration and flipping a house, sometimes spending 15 hours a day on his DIY projects. Running went to the back burner, and Engels says it was “one of the best times in my life. My friend group made the most of [quarantine]. We did it right.” That time gave Engels a taste of the kind of living he craved, and running was hardly in the picture. That crutch was able to support all of his enthusiasm and ideals.

But it would be a risky change to leave running. When Engels was younger, running was something he couldn’t live without. In high school, it gave him a structure that curbed his thrill-seeking lifestyle away from dangerous drugs and other vices he says might have killed him if he hadn’t joined track. Running changed his brain, too. Before he joined the track team, Engels had been taking ADHD medication and suffering vicious side effects. But the day he started running was his last day taking the pills. “Running just gets rid of all that extra energy,” he says.

When Engels competed in the 1500-meter final at the Olympic Trials, 25 of his closest friends showed up in Eugene to cheer him on. Some wore cropped T-shirts splashed with his likeness; others wore mullet wigs. These are Engels’s people. His Instagram is loaded with photos of the group rock climbing, bowling, pouncing on each other’s backs, and drinking PBRs in a hot tub. They love Engels. Some traveled from as far as North Carolina to watch him go for, and presumably make, the Olympic team.

Engels with Schienbein (right) and Rex, a good boy.

So when he placed fourth, Engels expected them to be disappointed. He was. “All I had imagined for the last two years was winning the Olympic Trials and doing my victory lap, just seeing them and hugging them, and it didn’t happen. It was one of the weirdest things,” he says. But even weirder was the response from his friends: “They didn’t care [that I lost],” Engels says. They celebrated him regardless. Amid questioning his professional future, Engels returned to Ole Miss in the fall of 2021 to finish his master’s degree in business and train with his old coach, Vanhoy, and the Ole Miss team. He was around kindred spirits. “Our program has a reputation for being a group of people who have a lot of fun,” Vanhoy says. Ole Miss receives a lot of transfer students—kids who, like Engels, might not fit in elsewhere because of an atypical running personality or unusual training approach. Indeed, as Engels ran alongside the students, he wasn’t the only one sporting an anachronistic mustache or mullet (though Coach Vanhoy is wont to attribute the haircuts to Engels’s legacy).

“The workouts were so much easier running in a group,” Engels says. When he was with the Nike Oregon Project in Portland, he often worked out alone. His only training partner on the team was “a speed guy,” he says. “It was tough to overlay our training sometimes. Running alone sucks so bad.”

At Ole Miss, however, Engels says he began to have fun again. He raced, of course, venturing to meets in Atlanta, San Francisco, and Portland, but he also embarked on another classic Engels jaunt: a road trip to Nebraska with his friends and their dogs. A throughline emerged between this period and the other highlights from his difficult year: fellowship. He had his friends in quarantine. He had his friends at the Trials. He had his friends while he was back at Ole Miss just trying to figure it all out. Engels decided that if he was going to renew his contract with Nike, “I needed assurance that I was going to have people to train with.”

After months of negotiations, on January 1, 2022, Engels signed a contract with Nike as part of the new Union Athletics Club, and announced that he would make a bid for the 2024 Olympic team. He trains in Portland with Charlie Hunter and Donavan Brazier, but has the freedom to return to Ole Miss and work with Coach Vanhoy and his mulleted students whenever he wants. Running is no longer a balancing act, with his racing success in one hand and his freewheeling spirit in the other; it’s a conduit to deliver what Engels has always wanted: “a sense of belonging, community, friends.”

San Luis Obispo, California, lies between the rolling, green Santa Lucia Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. An idyllic landscape dotted with high-end resorts, Engels calls it “one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.” For six weeks beginning in January, he attended his first training camp there with the Union Athletic Club. He and his teammates ran 10 miles a day, “doing everything together.” They took exploratory trips on off-days, one time stumbling upon a restricted beach where elephant seals lay out in the sun (Engels was afraid of the 5,000-pound seals at first, but after some research, he learned they boast a top land speed of just three miles per hour). The team hiked and played beach volleyball. Engels learned magic tricks and practiced them on his teammates. “They don’t seem too impressed,” he says of his audience, laughing. “I mess up a lot.”

“I don’t like having one specialty, and I think that’s where a lot of my focus issues come from in the sport. I don’t want to just be known as a runner.”

The first major test of Engels’s new approach came in February, at the 1500-meter final of the 2022 USATF Indoor Championships. The first two laps saw him boxed into the back of the pack. This time, though, he worked his way up the outside lane into the fourth spot. Into the final 200-meter lap, he hung with the lead pack of seven, but as they began to kick, Engels dropped off the back of the group to finish seventh. “A hell of a bummer,” he says. Engels is looking ahead to the outdoor season now. Paris 2024 is his long-term goal, and he feels optimistic. ​​“Maybe I’ll never be the best in the world, or maybe I will. I don’t know,” he says. “But I am for sure the best in the world at doing what I do, and still running well.” Engels’s priorities might not be the same as everyone else’s, but he doesn’t want to be like everyone else. For the first time in a while, he’s happy, running, and happy to be running. If that means being the best in the world at extracting every tiny drop of joy from life’s ups and downs instead of racking up race wins, that’s cool with him. He wants to run just like this. For him, this is how it was always supposed to be.