Cross Country, Indoor Track, Spring Track
Favorite athlete: Jason Kelce
Favorite team: Eagles
Favorite memory competing in sports: Winning the league championship meet for track was great as well as the pasta parties the night before cross country races. There’s nothing better than hanging out with your friends all with a common goal.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: I mistook a bag with my brother’s basketball shoes in it for my spikes one race and had to borrow my friend’s pair. That race I ended up running a PR and I ended up keeping those shoes.
Music on playlist: Dani California (Red Hot Chili Peppers), The Pretender (Foo Fighters), Without Me (Eminem)
Future plans: Run cross country and track in college and become a college graduate.
Words to live by: “Greatness doesn’t come from doing 10,000 things one time. It comes from doing one thing 10,000 times.”
One goal before turning 30: Have an enjoyable well-paying job and be able to provide for a family.
One thing people don’t know about me: I used to play baseball till fourth grade, soccer till 10th grade, and was on the bowling team for a few years. I didn’t start running till seventh grade.
By Ed Morrone
Once upon a time, Jason Vogt was costing his team races due to inopportunely-timed Gatorade chugs and ran so stiff and awkward that he earned the nickname “Turtle” from coaches and teammates.
Now, he’s on the precipice of running cross country and track in college, where he hopes to study in a field that will allow him to put competitive runners like himself back together when their bodies break down due to the stress of racing.
Between these two points, there was a lot to learn about how to run. Turns out, there’s a lot more nuance to it than just sprinting as fast as you can.
Like most kids who ultimately become runners, Vogt, a senior three-sport runner (cross country, indoor track, outdoor track) at William Tennent, started his athletic career elsewhere. He tried baseball and even gave bowling a shot, but neither stuck for long. Soccer was the closest sport he had to an athletic identity, and his chosen position of sweeper served as an early preview of his running prowess, discovering he was able to continuously run up-and-down and side-to-side without tiring.
Vogt stuck with it through the end of his freshman season, but by this time, the competitive running seed had been planted. He began racing in seventh grade, and the endeavor began with some apathy.
“I was iffy,” he recalled. “I remember it being the kind of thing where my mom wanted me to do an activity at school and I said OK, fine, but I was kind of meh about it. I wasn’t very good, either.”
In his mind, Vogt didn’t do much to stand out to coaches, which could end up becoming a poison pill for runners that young simply because at that age, the coaches really only paid attention to the fastest few kids. “The favorites,” as Vogt put it.
But then suddenly, something clicked. Vogt recalled his first time trial in eighth grade as the turning point. A cerebral thinker, Vogt sometimes thought so much about the task at hand that he found he psyched himself out before he even had a chance to prove himself. Get out of his own way mentally, and he might view running differently.
“I was running the 400, and I just said to myself, I’m not going to think about this…I’m just going to go,” he said. “Turns out, I did pretty good. The coaches noticed me and paid attention to me. Suddenly, I got really competitive about it.”
Vogt had found his motivation, but he still had to endure a crash course in how to run the right way. In a race later that year that his team had a good chance to win, Vogt swigged a bottle of Gatorade, cramped up mid-race and saw his team fall to third place. Also, his stride length was way too long: to run fast, he needed to convert his strides into shorter, quicker ones. Vogt wasn’t landing properly on his feet, either; this may not seem like a big deal to casual runners, but in competitive racing when everything comes down to minutes and seconds, these details matter.
“It was a lot of little things, and me just being a clueless eighth grader,” he said. “I always stressed out before races, and not having the right mindset got me too tight and condensed to the point where it brought my shoulders all the way up and I got the nickname Turtle. It just wasn’t a very efficient way to run, and over time we fixed it. Me being more relaxed led to faster times, and I also found out that as a runner, you are never perfect. There is always something to fix that can make you faster.”
By the time Vogt enrolled at Tennent, he had two years of running under his belt but by his own admission was still pretty green. He started the cross country season by just trying to run with the other freshmen, but early on in the season, he ran a tempo run at 80 percent effort and pushed past all the kids his age, finding himself keeping pace with the upperclassmen. Vogt was surprised by how well he performed, and soon enough he was running with the varsity team. By the end of the season, he had posted his fastest time of 17:19, a good time for a freshman that placed him third on his own team.
At the same time, Vinnie Murphy was getting set to interview to become the head cross country and indoor/outdoor track coach at Tennent. Prior to that, Murphy was coaching runners at Holland Middle School as well as serving as an assistant coach at Council Rock South. His first season with Vogt would end up being the runner’s freshman indoor campaign, and even though Murphy had yet to meet Vogt, the coach was aware of who the young man was.
“I did my homework and knew his name,” Murphy recalled. “I saw that he needed a lot of work on his form, but he was so gutsy. He picked up strategy really quick.”
The thing that sets Vogt apart from others, according to Murphy, is his willingness to work. After dealing with some stress reaction injuries that slowed his progress during spring track freshman year, Vogt needed to understand how to fix it. No matter what Murphy threw Vogt’s way — specific exercises, yoga, physical therapy, working with a sports chiropractor, strength training, etc., Vogt followed the instructions verbatim almost to the point of obsession.
Vogt got through his sophomore cross country and indoor seasons healthy, and he felt like he was really hitting his stride as a runner. As it turns out, the only thing that could slow his progress at this point turned out to be a global pandemic that shut down Vogt’s sophomore outdoor season.
However, Vogt’s response to the pandemic and cancelled season told Murphy everything he needed to know going forward. During a time when the world retreated into their homes for extended periods of isolation, Vogt refused to let apathy grab hold of his spirit. Murphy sent the team workout plans every two weeks, and set up a Tennent group on the exercise app Strava that allowed Vogt and his teammates to record every workout to measure progress.
Some took to it, while others faded. And Vogt, you ask?
“He did every single workout, everything that we asked of him,” Murphy said. “He just kept running, so that when cross country season came around in the fall, Jason was in the best shape of his life. He won every single dual meet in our conference and came in second place at the league championship despite the fact that he turned his ankle and didn’t make it to states, even though he probably should have.”
Part of sticking to all of Murphy’s designed workouts during COVID was certainly just something for Vogt to do to inject purpose to his life as the world shut down, but it was also a little deeper than that. Despite only being a sophomore, Vogt already considered himself a leader, and the responsibility and accountability were sacred to him. Not only did he want to improve himself as a runner during the time off, but he wanted to prevent his team from careening off a cliff after they had built so much over his first year-and-a-half at Tennent.
“When he sent out the schedule I did everything exactly as it said, maybe I even went a little too hard,” Vogt said. “I wanted to do everything as well as I could. Some people viewed it as there was no point to this, but not me. To me, it was eight weeks to show who cared the most and who would stick with it. Then, that cross country season I was the best runner on the team.”
There were still hurdles to clear, even with sports back. For example, Vogt endured another frustrating stress injury in his tibia that slowed his progress during cross country season, and there was not much of an indoor track season due to the fact that being inside in close quarters was still a big no-no. So, again, Vogt improvised, biking 90 miles a week in freezing winter temperatures to save his legs and feet from impact injuries stemming from running on concrete streets and sidewalks.
Vogt stayed healthy his entire junior season while Tennent went undefeated as a team, won the league and placed sixth in District 1 in the 4x800 relay, one place off qualifying for states. According to Murphy’s records, Vogt is 15-0 in his last 15 dual meets and has not been on the losing side of one since his freshman season.
“He’s so humble that I don’t even think he knows how good he is,” Murphy said. “It’s incredible to have that much success two years in a row, and leading a very strong returning spring team, he may be able to finish 20-0 with a couple district medals and possibly a state medal. It’s been a lot of hard work and talent, but it’s also the fact that good people deserve good things, and he is the epitome of what a coach wants in every one of his athletes. He does it all right and he inspires his teammates on and off the track. He’s certainly made me a better coach.”
For the rest of his senior year (both indoor and outdoor track), Vogt simply is hoping to make it to states after coming so close last season. He believes he has a chance in multiple events in both indoor and outdoor.
“Physically, I know I can do it,” he said. “With me, it’s always can I mentally get myself there to do it, and I know I can. I’m going to do it. I have to stay locked in and focused on doing everything I can do to succeed.”
This of course includes continuing to do all of those little things behind the scenes to keep his body right. The exercises, yoga, weight lifting, proper nutrition, correct amount of sleep and recovery…all of it matters, and Vogt has learned enough about what not to do to ensure he stays the course.
There’s also additional motivation to stay faithful to exercise science and physical therapy beyond keeping his own body right. Because of the injuries he’s dealt with that have periodically slowed him down, Vogt has built a desire to turn this into a career after college. He wants to be on the front lines advising athletes on how to best take care of their bodies, and when those bodies inevitably suffer breakdown and injury, how to put them back together.
“I had a history of injuries that were really annoying, and I feel like my experience can help others get through that process,” he said. “Something in that field is definitely what I’m interested in.”
Vogt hasn’t chosen a college yet, although both he and Murphy list Ursinus, DeSales and West Chester as potential landing spots. In addition to finding a school that offers his field of study, Vogt said he’s searching for a well-coached program that takes running seriously. After having to push himself so much the past few years, he wants to be around a bunch of other supremely talented collegiate runners who can push him to be his best while he offers the same back to them.
His coach has no doubt that Vogt will find success wherever he lands.
“I would love for him to experience running for a serious program,” Murphy said. “Tennent athletes tend to settle on average, and I don’t want him to settle on a school just because. I see him as a potential Division II/Division III All-American. I’m not sure anyone has had a bigger impact than he has the last four years, and he’s passing on everything he’s learned to his younger teammates.”
Vogt knows next year will be different, and he’s a little anxious about completely starting over with a new team after settling into such a nice groove at Tennent.
At the same time, running is the precise vehicle to relieve any anxiety or uneasiness. Don’t think, just run. It’s worked up until this point, and it will work again.
“I wouldn’t say running is relaxing, but it’s certainly therapeutic,” Vogt said. “If you put enough time into something, you’re going to get better. It feels like I’ve really accomplished something, and if I think back to freshman year, I’m a lot different than I was. The one thing I learned is that running here introduced me to a lot of new things and a new world, and I’m going to miss that a lot about this place.”
