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84 GOLD AND BLACK ILLUSTRATE VOLUME 26, ISSUE 3 BY KYLE CHARTERS KCharters@GoldandBlack.com T here are moments when it's best to stay away from Matt McClintock. Don't tell him a story. Don't ask him a question. Don't engage him. None of that. Just let him be. "He's really very intense, a very intense competitor," fellow distance runner Caleb Kerr said. "He can be happy-go-lucky other times, but when it comes down to race time, we call it 'Matt Mode.' It comes about eight hours before the race, Matt is zoned in, you don't mess with him, you let him do his thing. He is all about the race, all about the competition, completely focused. You don't want to break the focus for him. He's getting himself mentally ready for competition." The approach works. McClintock is the best distance runner in Purdue's history, having won the Big Ten cross country cham- pionship on Nov. 1 in an 8K time of 23:12.1, breaking the Big Ten's previous best mark. He was named the league's male cross country Athlete-of-the-Year. The senior, who is competing in this winter's indoor track and field season and the outdoor in the spring, is the reigning champ in the 5K at last year's Big Ten Out- door Track and Field Championship, where he finished second in the 10K. He finished third last season at the Big Ten indoor 5K. "When you get the combination of a highly compet- itive individual who has been blessed with some great genetics from mom and dad, it makes for a pretty po- tent individual," distance coach Jeff Kent said. McClintock has big goals for 2016: Titles in the Big Ten outdoor events, top-three nationally, while also gaining a time of 28:30 in the 10K to qualify for the spring's Olympic Trials; his personal best is 28:54. To get there, he'll continue his routine, a strict set of guidelines — he treats them as unbreakable rules — that put him in the best position to succeed. The cliché is that to be great, an athlete has to eat, breathe and sleep his sport. Well, McClintock follows. He values his nutrition, sticking to his regular diet. "No desserts. No soda," he says. He trains hard, with a durability, says Kent, that al- lows him to handle a heavy workload while still recov- ering quickly. He's in the training room regularly, working on whatever might be ailing him. He stretches frequent- ly. He has a core exercise routine, strengthening his torso as much as possible. He gets rest, in bed by 9 p.m. most nights, 9:30 at the latest. No exceptions. That's caused McClintock to miss events over the years. The Maine native is a big New England Patriots fan but didn't watch the Super Bowl — he saw the Pats won in February when he glanced at his phone at 3 a.m. — and has missed too many Indiana-Purdue basketball games. Party at a teammate's apartment? He's headed home at 9. "I can never bring myself to do it," he said. "I'm more of an introverted person anyway, so if I'm not outside, the idea of going to parties at school hasn't really ap- pealed to me. I don't like being around large groups of people I don't know. I think that makes it easier, where I tend to prefer being with my small group of friends who are my teammates or being by myself." McClintock enjoys the solitude. Although cross country and track and field are team sports, they are individualist in nature. It's runner against runner, or better said, it's runner against his own body. How much abuse can he take? For McClintock, the answer is a lot. "I call it his crazy factor," Kerr said. "You have to be a little bit edgy or insane to be as good an endurance athlete as he is. He'll push himself further than most people would and put up with a greater amount of pain than I think a normal athlete can stand, because he wants it so bad and nothing else really matters to him at the time. Sometimes, he can seem a little bit psy- chotic almost, but it's really what makes him a great athlete, too. "Mainly it comes down to Matt is probably the most disciplined athlete I've ever met." It's not always been that way.