Joe Vigil, a renowned coach and leading expert on distance running and altitude training who built Adams State, a little-known university in Colorado, into a dynastic cross-country and track and field power, producing 19 men’s and women’s national team titles and 425 all-Americans, died on July 19 at his home in Green Valley, Ariz. He was 95.
His death, after a brief illness, was confirmed by the university.
At the international level, Vigil (pronounced VEE-hill) helped revive America’s once moribund presence in distance running by mentoring the silver and bronze medal winners in the marathon distance at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Deena Kastor, who won bronze in the women’s race that year, described Vigil in an Instagram post as “darn tough and compassionately delicate.”
He expected his runners to be dedicated, even when they did not feel up to training. Pat Melgares, who ran for him at Adams State in the 1980s and later wrote his biography, said in an interview that a favorite saying of his was “What day do you run? Every day that ends in a ‘y.’”
From 1965 to 1993, Vigil achieved startling success at the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and N.C.A.A. Division II levels at Adams State, training his teams at an altitude of 7,500 feet while also teaching kinesiology, anatomy and physiology. His biggest star, Pat Porter, became a two-time Olympian in the 1980s and an eight-time national cross-country champion.
Porter, who died in 2012, told Sports Illustrated in 1986 that Vigil “never had the luxury of recruiting great talent, but if you could measure how far runners come under a coach regardless of where they start, there would be no one better.”
Vigil received a doctorate in exercise physiology from the University of New Mexico in 1972, but he was equally interested in the mental aspect of running. The most important distance in a marathon was not 26.2 miles, he often said, but “the nine inches above the shoulders.”
Kastor was about to quit running and open a bakery in 1996 because she was frustrated that she had never won an individual N.C.A.A. title while at the University of Arkansas. Vigil persuaded her not to. She trained with him in Colorado, and later in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., and went on to set American records from the 5K to the marathon.
“It takes one person to have an inkling of belief in you to sometimes make you have belief in yourself,” she said in an interview.
In 2000, the U.S. had a disappointing showing at the Sydney Olympics, qualifying only one man and one woman for the marathon out of a possible three each, and failing to win an individual medal in a race longer than 400 meters. U.S.A. Track & Field, the sport’s governing body, then enlisted Vigil and Bob Larsen, the personal coach of the ascendant star Meb Keflezighi, to create a training camp in Mammoth Lakes and restore some luster to American distance running.
Both coaches helped prepare Keflezighi and Kastor for the Athens Olympics. Kastor loaded her sports drinks with carbs to train her gut to handle more calories and sustain her endurance beyond 26.2 miles. Once a week, she and Keflezighi trained at an altitude of 9,000 feet to enhance the amount of oxygen their muscles could use during exertion. They also wore extra clothing to simulate the heat and humidity in Athens. Then, just before their races began, they put on ice vests to slightly lower their body temperature and delay overheating.
Keflezighi won a silver medal and Kastor a bronze.
“The key for him,” Keflezighi said of Vigil in an interview, was: “If you do the work, it becomes a mental game. You have to be smart, don’t make stupid mistakes and follow the plan.”
Joseph Isabel Vigil was born on Nov. 25, 1929, in Antonito, Colo., near the border with New Mexico, as the Great Depression was unfolding and his mother, Melinda, was divorcing her abusive husband, Augustine, according to Vigil’s biography, “Chasing Excellence: The Remarkable Life and Inspiring Vigilosophy of Coach Joe I. Vigil” (2020).
Joseph never knew his father, who died when he was 3 months old. He and his two brothers moved with their mother about 30 miles north to Alamosa, home of Adams State, where she took a job as a sales clerk in a department store, Melgares, his biographer, said, but the family struggled to put food on the table.
Joseph became an Eagle Scout and an all-state football player at Alamosa High School; he also excelled in the sport, and briefly ran track, at Adams State, where he enrolled after spending two years in the Army. After graduating with a degree in biology in 1953, he returned to Alamosa High in 1954 to teach and help resuscitate the track and field program, which had dwindled to just three boys.
He told Running Times magazine in 2015 that he raised $155 to take his three athletes to the 1955 Colorado state meet in Boulder, where they all stayed in one hotel room and made sandwiches for their meals. The boys scored among the state’s top performers in their events.
Vigil’s survivors include his wife of 47 years, Caroline (Winfield) Vigil, and two daughters, Peggy and Patti Vigil, from a previous marriage, which ended in divorce.
He was inducted into more than 10 sports halls of fame and received too many coaching awards to count.
Ever curious, he often woke up at 4 a.m. to read about running. He studied the famous Tarahumara Indigenous runners of Mexico; Russian sprinters who were forbidden to train until they could jump off a 20-foot ladder in their bare feet; and goat herders in Peru who climbed the Andes on a diet of yogurt and herbs.
As Christopher McDougall wrote in his best-selling book “Born to Run” (2009), “His head was a Library of Congress of running lore.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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