Fast learner: Mile record setter trained with Hobbs grad
PETER STEIN/NEWS-SUN
Perhaps you’ve crossed paths with Josh Kerr and didn’t realize it. If you blinked, you may have missed him.
Kerr – a native of Edinburgh, Scotland and former University of New Mexico track runner – became the world’s fastest human, at least with regard to running the mile, when he broke the world mile record last Saturday at London Stadium with his time of 3:42.66.
Right there in London’s Stratford district with Kerr was his former teammate and current coach Julian Florez, a 2011 Hobbs High graduate, who was a senior at UNM when Kerr was a freshman, and now coaches for the Brooks Beasts, a professional running team based in Seattle that trains in Albuquerque four months out of the year.
Those connections allowed Florez to be present for a landmark moment in competitive running.
“Oh man, it was an incredible experience to say the least,” Florez said Thursday by telephone from Edinburgh. “To witness history and be there trackside and be able to visualize that, see the culmination of work, was indescribable. What a day, man.”
Kerr is based out of Albuquerque, and trains regularly with Florez. “I mainly work with Josh,” Florez said, “but I am the assistant coach with the full team. I work with every athlete, but I spend a lot of my time with (Kerr). I wear a few different hats, I have a few different responsibilities. I run his social media as well as the Brooks social media. I run his Youtube channel.
“And I’m a barber,” Florez added. “I’ve been cutting his hair for 10 years.”
Long before Florez was a coach/social media manager/hair stylist, he was running the 800-, 1,600-, and 3,200-meter runs for Hobbs, competing in all three at the state meet in Albuquerque at the end of his senior season. Florez ran for legendary Eagles coach Bob Jackson, who helped navigate the direction of his life.
“My place in the world today is hugely due to that coach,” Florez said. “He saved my life for the better and instilled in me lessons that I still carry with me today, and he helped me pursue my dreams. A lot of that is due to Bob Jackson and his wife Karen Jackson. I will forever be grateful for the Jacksons and what they have given to me. I have a great relationship with them. One of the first phone calls I got after Josh broke the record was from Bob and Karen.”
After graduating from Hobbs High, Florez went on to run for the Lobos’ NCAA Division I program. “5K and 10K,” he said, “those were my primary events.”
Late in his collegiate career, Florez was Kerr’s teammate. After Florez graduated from UNM, he ran for the Brooks Beasts; Kerr, meanwhile, decided to forgo his last two years of college eligibility and started running professionally for Brooks. They would often run together.
“I was training for the marathon, he was training for the mile,” Florez said. “So we worked well together. Then I transitioned to the coach role. … Whenever you’re training in general at this level, I think a lot of it is base mileage, and we would work a lot of base mileage together, and then there were times we would do a lot of our speed work.”
There were also specific training runs on Sundays. “I put heavy emphasis on my long runs during that time period,” Florez said, noting that he would try to run 20-26 miles on those days.
“He would do 12 miles,” Florez said of Kerr. “Then he would get in his car and he would be driving alongside me and cheering me on. I’d be running in the Sandia Mountain range and he’d be in his car cheering me on.”
It would eventually be vice versa, with Kerr needing the support and backing of Florez and Brooks Running. Florez says it was about a year ago that
Kerr pitched an idea to Brooks – that he would go after the mile record, at that point held by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco, who had set the then-most recent standard of 3:43.13 in 1999.
“It’s in itself an incredible feat to take on,” Florez said. “But typically when people are trying to break the record, it’s done in secret. He did the opposite; he called the shot early and announced it to the world. And got it done.”
But there was a lot of work, a lot of preparation, in between.
“We called it Project 222,” Florez said, explaining that 222 was the number of seconds it would take to break the record. “And we did a build into that. We released an episode every week that showcased workouts. Along the way there were different avenues of how we implemented training and nutrition.”
And that wasn’t even the coolest part.
“We built an altitude chamber at his house,” Florez noted. “We wanted him to sleep at 8,500 (feet of) elevation.”
Florez said Brooks partnered with a company called Box Altitude, which specializes in altitude structures, often tents, to enhance athletes’ performances.
“Josh is actually the first athlete where we did a full bedroom,” Florez said. “They put more units in his house because we wanted to make it a little more comfortable.”
Brooks had Kerr train mostly at the UNM Track & Field and Soccer Complex, with its elevation of 5,333 feet, and on courses by the Rio Grande river, which have an elevation of 4,900 feet.
Kerr kept pursuing his goal, pounding away, literally step by step. He had already competed in the Olympics for Great Britain, winning a bronze in the 1,500-meter run at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics (delayed a year due to COVID-19) and a silver at the 2024 Paris Games, placing second only to American Cole Hocker. But the world mile record was something even more unique than that.
“It was never going to be an easy record,” Kerr told The Athletic earlier this week. “We discussed it so many times.”
When the record came to fruition, when Kerr ran the mile in those necessary 222 seconds, it was the culmination of diligence and perseverance for himself and the whole Brooks organization.
“Absolutely,” Florez said. “It comes with sacrifice, but we all knew what we were chasing after. It comes down to the individuals that you surround yourself with. I’m passionate about that aspect, and we had a common goal, and we made the sacrifices necessary to achieve that.”
Kerr broke the record in front of a frenzied crowd, 65,000 fans strong.
“When you think of what we value in America, you think about the NFL and the NBA,” Florez said. “When you go to Europe and you go to the rest of the world, it’s soccer and it’s track & field. In London you have a sold-out stadium of 65,000 people who are very knowledgable about the sport. It was an incredible experience; 65,000 people who knew that Josh was there to achieve one goal. And all eyes were on one person trying to make that possible and change history.”
For Florez, that historical moment was kind of a family thing because he and his wife Nicole are so close with Kerr and his wife Larimar.
“We’ve all known and worked with each other for over a decade,” Florez said. “My wife is Josh’s manager; she’s been managing him for the past five years now.”
It’s been a crazy ride for all involved, especially for the former Hobbs kid who never thought he would someday contribute to a world mile record.
“Yeah,” Florez said. “It’s been fun.”
