Running with the Buffaloes: The Book Every Runner Should Read Twice

The book that made distance running feel like literature

Some running books teach you how to train. A rare few make you feel what it costs. Running with the Buffaloes: A Season Inside with Mark Wetmore, Adam Goucher, and the University of Colorado Men's Cross-Country Team belongs firmly in the second category. Written by former Princeton runner Chris Lear, who relocated to Boulder in July 1998 to embed with the team for an entire cross country season, the book reads like a daily journal — a season captured practice by practice, from the first summer base miles to the NCAA Championships.

A season on the edge

The 1998 Colorado squad was loaded. At its center stood Adam Goucher, the team's top runner and one of the best collegiate distance men in the country, and Mark Wetmore, a coach whose high-mileage, Arthur Lydiard-inspired philosophy was already reshaping American collegiate running. Lear had extraordinary access, and he used it to document not just the workouts but the doubt, exhaustion, and fierce loyalty that bind a team chasing a national title.

Then tragedy arrived. In October 1998, mid-season, the team's number-two runner, Chris Severy, died in a bicycle accident in Boulder. The book does not flinch from the grief that followed, and it is that honesty — the way a group of young men kept training and racing through a devastating loss — that lifts the story beyond sport.

Goucher's crowning run

The season's climax is one of the most quoted finishes in running literature. Roughly a month after Severy's death, Goucher won the 1998 NCAA Division I individual cross country title, even as the Buffaloes finished third as a team. Lear renders the race with a novelist's pacing, and readers who already know how it ends still find their pulse climbing.

"There's no secrets. If you want to be that good, you're getting after it, on some level, every single day."

That line — Lear's own reflection on what he witnessed — is the thesis of the whole book. Greatness here isn't a lightning strike; it's the accumulation of unglamorous Sunday long runs on Magnolia Road, "Mags," the punishing dirt road at altitude above Boulder that became the team's proving ground.

Why it became a cult classic

When the book first appeared — self-published on demand around 2000 before The Lyons Press picked it up for a wider release in 2003 — running literature was thin on bookstore shelves. Lear filled a gap, and word spread runner to runner until the book earned near-scripture status among high school and college harriers. A few reasons it endures:

• Access you can't fake. Lear was there for every workout, every team meeting, and every hard conversation.
• Wetmore's philosophy in the wild. The book is a working illustration of Lydiard-style aerobic development — volume, patience, and trust — rather than a textbook about it. Lydiard himself reportedly predicted Wetmore would become one of the greatest coaches America had ever seen, and the years since have made that look prescient.
• Emotional truth. It treats runners as full people, wrestling with mortality, identity, and ambition, not just splits.

Should you read it?

If you run, yes — and probably twice. First-time readers come for the race-day drama; repeat readers come for the quieter passages about consistency, sacrifice, and simply showing up. It is not a training manual, and you won't close it holding a neat weekly schedule. What you'll take instead is a visceral understanding of what elite mileage actually feels like from the inside, and why the runners who chase it describe the work in almost spiritual terms.

More than two decades on, the program Wetmore built went on to win multiple NCAA men's team titles, and Goucher went on to represent the United States at the 2000 Olympics. But the book's staying power has little to do with the trophies that came after. It endures because it captures something every runner recognizes: the daily, deliberate decision to get after it — no secrets, no shortcuts, one hard mile at a time.