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Could juggling a soccer ball and listening to reggae be the secret ingredients to setting NCAA records and achieving Olympic standards? These activities are what you can find Harvard junior and now NCAA Champion Graham Blanks doing before a race.

This past Saturday, Harvard running superstar Graham Blanks broke the NCAA record and achieved the Olympic standard in the 5000m race at the Sharon Colyear-Danville Season Opener at Boston University with a time of 13:03.78. The former record was 13:08.28, set by Arizona’s Lawi Lalang in 2012.

This record-setting performance was a mere two weeks after Blanks became the first male runner from the Ivy League to win the individual national title at the 2023 NCAA Division I Cross Country Championships.

Coming off a phenomenal cross country season, Blanks wanted to take advantage of his stellar fitness to accomplish a few goals he had for himself:

“My first goal was to qualify for NCAAs. Secondly, there was the collegiate 5,000m record. I thought that whoever was going to win the race was going to run the collegiate record,” Blanks said. “I also knew that if I ran under 13:05, it's the Olympic standard, which is a really big step towards qualifying for the Olympics.”

“To be able to knock off so many of these goals for myself is really special.”

Blanks now has his eyes set on the Olympic trials. Blanks joked that there will be “no internships this summer.” The Harvard Cross Country and Track and Field program boasts 34 Olympians, but Blanks would be the first Harvard runner to qualify for the Olympics in the 5000m race.

“I'm probably going to be spending a lot of my summer [in Cambridge] working with my coach, Gibby,” Blanks said, noting that Olympic trials aren’t scheduled until early July.

“I'm just going to be focusing on running because it's not every day you get to be in the shape that I've been in. That I ran the Olympic standard is something I want to take very seriously and give a super good try at making the Olympic team this July. Just because I have the Olympic standard does not mean by any metric that I should qualify for the Olympics because it's very difficult to achieve in the U.S. However, I really want to rise to the opportunity I've been granted and go all in for that.”

As a junior, Blanks has been training under coach Alex Gibby for the past three years.

“Gibby is an amazing coach and I credit basically all my success to him. It's not that hard to be a successful athlete when you have an incredible coach,” Blanks said.

Additionally, Blanks attributes his success to his hardworking teammates, and to the program on the whole.

“My teammates have pushed me to new heights that I thought I'd never get to because they are so talented and want to work as hard as I do. Everything that I achieve is really an achievement for our program because it isn't just me that has reached these goals, it's everyone that's helped me get to this point.”

When asked if he had made any changes to his training or mental preparation in the past year that have helped him achieve his great success this year, Blanks responded with a firm no.

“I've just stuck to my training with Gibby. I've stuck with my teammates, and my success is the culmination of a lot of hard work. I believe that if you can be consistent with the training and the lifestyle, big things will come.”

Blanks reflected on how he once believed that it was not possible to be an elite athlete at an academically rigorous school like Harvard. However, Blanks is proud to now serve as a living testament that achieving national athletic success is actually possible at Harvard.

“I hope that if there's any high schoolers that are considering running in college they take the Ivy League seriously. Actually, they should just take Harvard seriously. Come to Harvard!”

-Staff writer Natalie T. Weiner can be reached at natalie.weiner@thecrimson.com