THE FRUSTRATIONS THAT led to a breakout 2024 season for Josh Hoey — and his mid-January American Record over 1000 in this year’s Quaker Invitational — were many. Now 25, the former high school phenomenon from Pennsylvania had struggled for years after turning pro following his senior season at Bishop Shanahan High in Downington.
Ranked the top prep half-miler of the ’18 season, Hoey had run 1:48.07, scoring a scholarship to Oregon. But then came the decision to go pro, and he bypassed NCAA competition and instead trained with his two brothers, both notable athletes in their own right.
Older brother Jaxson, 27, has run 1:46.86/3:39.40; Jonah, 23, has run 1:48.63.
Over the next four seasons, Josh improved to just 1:47.26. His only USATF final came in ’20, when he placed 6th at the indoor champs just as the pandemic hit.
By the fall of ’23, Hoey found himself reviewing his options. He says, “I had just left a coaching situation and I was sort of determined to start coaching myself. I have had like six or seven coaches over the past six years. So I was kind of thinking, ‘Man, maybe I have enough knowledge just to give this one last hurrah because it was going into my contract year.’”
Instead, he connected with Justin Rinaldi, who leads the Fast8 Track Club, coaching Australia’s Peter Bol and former NCAA champ Will Sumner, among others. “After talking it out with him,” Hoey says, “it was like, ‘Wow, this guy actually resonates with a lot of the ideas that I was going to try and implement for myself, but I trust this guy to do it better. He probably has more experience.’ We started working together and we saw some progress relatively quickly.”
At the USATF Indoor in Albuquerque last winter, Hoey PRed at 1:47.04 in the heats, then finished 3rd in the final at 1:47.41. In his first outdoor meet, he won the Florida Relays at a PR 1:45.54, skipping the 1:46s completely. Then he fell ill and lost a step in his workouts. His next outing was a 1:48.01 for 7th at the Tom Jones Memorial.
He explains, “Things weren’t really looking good and it was only like 3 weeks to the Trials. And so there was, I would say, a significant sort of gloominess in the group about how things were going to go at the Trials. I was feeling a little bit of that pressure, and I kind of just realized that it was sort of an existential threat, both to my career and even to the Fast8 Track Club group as a whole, if we didn’t really run well.
“And so I kind of spent that three weeks talking with Justin, but also doing a lot of things that I thought were going to be good for me. And [I] wasn’t even necessarily telling Justin about it, like adding a couple of different threshold runs or adding some reps to the end of the workouts.”
A 1:45.35 PR came at the NYC Grand Prix, and by the time the Trials arrived, Hoey was as ready as he could be. He won his semi in 1:45.73. In the final, he moved well on the second lap but could not quite catch Brandon Miller on the final sprint; he finished 4th in a huge PR of 1:44.12, just 0.15 away from the Paris team.
Hoey remembers, “After finishing the race — it took such like an emotional and physical buildup and we were coming from kind of so far behind. And that short 3 weeks to try and get ready for the Trials. After I got to sit down and process everything, I kind of just burst out laughing because it was just so ironic, to kind of come that far and then get that close.
“But I think it was such a tremendous learning experience, spiritually, mentally and physically, that I was able to kind of walk away from it being like, ‘I know this isn’t the end.’ So that in and of itself gave me hope and motivation.”
A brief trip to Europe followed, the first time he had competed over there. “That gave me a lot of experience in managing myself and [learning] how to kind of race under not completely ideal conditions.”
He PRed again, this time to 1:43.80. “After that, it was like, I think I want to go home now.” A week later, he won the 800 at the Holloway Pro Classic in 1:44.22. In August, he shifted his focus to the mile to prepare for the upcoming 5th Avenue Mile. He took his PR down from 4:00.57 to 3:56.38. In New York, he stunned many, clocking 3:49 to finish 2nd behind Josh Kerr.
Suddenly, the 1500 came into play as another option for Hoey heading toward Tokyo ’25. In a way, it’s a return to his roots.
“When I was in high school, I was really just a miler for the first two years. I went through a little bit of a growth spurt my junior year, and I started struggling a bit more in cross country. I started doing more speed and sort of transitioned to the 800. My dad [Fran Hoey] is my main collaborator on training and we always thought of me as an 800/miler. When I went pro, there was sort of an expectation [that I could] transition to the mile at some point over the next two to three years.
“Unfortunately, that did not happen at all, and so I struggled a lot in my early years as a pro. But I’m coming back to it. I’ve gotten older and I’ve been able to do the necessary training to build that aerobic base to become a competitive miler. That’s what we’ve been doing. For the upcoming year, I’d like to kind of mix in with both.”
Now he is back in training, with hopes for a big ’25 campaign. “I would say we haven’t changed too much with the actual weekly training cycle,” he says. “The biggest change has been we moved to Flagstaff in September. I spent the entire fall and early winter out there doing the same training.”
The results have come. In early December, he lined up for a mile race on the BU track and won in a PR 3:52.61. His next race, that 1K outing on January 18, came on Penn’s new track.
“Going in,” he says, “we were definitely looking at trying to set the American Record. And we built a race plan together. I always knew that my younger brother, Jonah, was going to be leading me, so I had talked to him a lot beforehand. We were going to try and go through in like 1:47 flat. So I heard at the 800 mark like 1:48, and I kind of knew I was in a little bit of trouble. I really tried to pick it up. At the end, I was sort of surprised by the time.”
He had run 2:14.48, crushing the old best of 2:16.16 that Shane Streich set in ’22 and winning by 5-plus seconds. “It was an enjoyable race, but otherwise we’re getting ready for the next one.” (Continued below)
And so Hoey continues down the unconventional path he has followed for years. He explains that at times it’s been tough. “It was a lot of adversity, I would say, at first. And it’s sort of difficult to explain, I guess, the intricacies of why we felt each situation wasn’t going to work out. But I would say at its core, we have always thought that we have the necessary skills and belief and motivation to run with the best. And so we’ve always tried to train as if we were the best.
“Our ideas about the training [dad is involved in the collaboration, as well] have clashed with coaches before, and it has sort of ended up, at worst as an antagonistic relationship, and at best, something that just was never going to be successful.
“I think the biggest difference with working with Coach Rinaldi now is that he’s very collaborative. He listens extremely well to sort of our ideas about the training, but he also doesn’t let that affect his knowledge base. We’re actually able to work together tremendously well. And so I respect him a lot for that.”
Hoey is laser-focused on the future: “This year, we have more objective and foreseeable goals versus last year where we were just trying to basically get as fit as possible. It’s a very interesting dynamic and it’s required a little bit of thinking differently about how to train and how to approach competitions. I’m very excited for it.”
