WVU Aide Pushing His Players On the Field and Pushing Himself Off It

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – How many marathon runners are currently working on major college football staffs? 

That unlikely question is more apt to pop up on The Onion than it is Phil Steele’s 2025 College Football Preview, which about to hit newsstands any day now, according to my X feed. 

Well, there’s at least one marathoner for sure, and he’s working for coach Rich Rodriguez at West Virginia University.

Assistant wide receivers coach Ryan Nehlen recently competed in the Buffalo Marathon, and get this, he ran a time fast enough to qualify for next year’s Boston Marathon.

The 130th Boston Marathon will take place on Monday, April 20, 2026, and Nehlen believes he might be able to fit that into his busy football schedule.

The qualifying window for the 2026 race opened on Sept. 1, 2024, and it closes this fall in mid-September. According to the Boston Marathon website, runners can submit their qualifying times for race approval prior to the formal registration period.

Nehlen needed to cover the 26.2-mile distance in less than three hours to earn a qualifying time for the Boston Marathon. He said his time this year was a 20-minute improvement over his previous best clocking.

“The Boston Marathon basically has 30,000 slots, and it depends on the year,” Nehlen said last week. “Some years, not all those people will qualify and other years there might be a little bit more than 30,000 who qualify, and they have to make the time a little tougher, but I should be okay because I got the time by about four minutes.”

Since his days playing for coaches Bill Stewart and Dana Holgorsen at West Virginia University, the former receiver has always kept himself in great shape at the various places he’s worked during his climb up the coaching ladder.

Those stops included stints at Marshall, Glenville State, Akron, Michigan, West Virginia, McNeese State and now back to West Virginia when he rejoined Neal Brown’s staff in 2024 as a senior offensive assistant/pass game specialist.

When Rodriguez took over for Brown last December, he kept Nehlen on board and reassigned him to wide receivers, where he works with Ryan Garrett and Logan Bradley.

Back in 2020, during his first stint on Brown’s staff as an analyst, Nehlen said he really began taking running seriously when COVID shut down the country.

“Everything was shut down, and I kind of just got into running, went online and registered for (a marathon) and ran it,” he shrugged. “When you research it, sub-three hours is really a standard that a lot of (recreational) marathoners try to achieve.”

Nehlen said running was born out of a desire to maintain a healthy lifestyle and to remain competitive in some manner or form.

“I’ve always wanted to stay in shape ever since I played here,” he explained. “Between (WVU strength and conditioning coach) Mike Joseph, Darl Bauer, Kevin McCadam and Bryan Fitzpatrick, all of them are doing great now. Darl is head strength coach at Troy; Bryan is the head guy at Navy and Kevin is at Houston. Those guys instilled a work ethic in me, and I kept it going.

“I’m done with football, but I still miss the actual physical part of it and running is obviously a physical component,” Nehlen continued. “I can compete with myself or other people, and I can get better as I age. As you get older, you really can get better at it.”

As a college football player, Nehlen endured the wear and tear of a four-year playing career but not necessarily the wear and tear of a lifelong runner, so his knees and joints have remained relatively unscathed.

He’s also got outstanding upper body and core strength because of his years preparing for grueling college football seasons, which can be helpful in running. It’s just not very common to see 200-pounders out there running marathons.

“I’m a bigger runner, but me having a good strength foundation with lifting all those years has made my legs, knees and tendons strong,” he noted. “For the most part, I’ve been able to stay away from the nicks that can happen to longtime runners.”

Nehlen, the son of WVU equipment manager Danny and Janie Nehlen and the grandson of Hall of Fame Mountaineer coach Don Nehlen, said distance running can be therapeutic. He doesn’t wear headphones when he’s out running the streets early in the morning before activity begins in the Milan Puskar Center.

His preferred course takes him from the Puskar Center parking lot up and around the WVU Law School and over to the Engineering Building on the Evansdale campus. He continues to the WVU Coliseum complex where he makes the loop and continues through Suncrest back to the Puskar Center. 

He estimates the length of the course he runs is about six miles, which he does daily.

“I just get out there in the mornings and try and avoid all the potholes as much as I can,” he laughed.

Nehlen admits it will become a challenge remaining in peak shape during football season. In the meantime, he said this summer he is focusing on speed training. His University High friend Matt Schiffbauer was an NCAA qualifier at Marshall and has been giving Nehlen some helpful pointers on distance running.

“He was really close to qualifying for the Olympics, and he actually lives in the Boston area now,” Nehlen said.

Nehlen indicated his plan is to continue running marathons and see how much he can improve.

“I’m going to push my limits,” he said. “I definitely think there is room for improvement. I am still new to it and I’m still getting better. The nice thing about it is I can get better as I get older.”

Of course, coaching football pays the bills, and that remains his No. 1 priority.

“I’m a football coach, and that is my main focus, along with my family (which includes wife Micah and their daughters Penelope and Stella),” he said. “(Marathoning) is kind of my next love.”

Nehlen believes the coaching profession sometimes gets a bad rap for not always promoting healthy lifestyles.

“I’m an example of being a football coach and still choosing to live a healthy lifestyle and being in shape,” he pointed out. “In my opinion, the better shape I’m in the more energy I’m going to have to coach my players. If you lead by example, they are going to look at that and say, ‘Man, my coach is working his butt off, and I’m going to work my butt off as well.'”

Once Nehlen knows for sure that he’s qualified for the Boston Marathon, he will then begin the planning process and his training schedule to correspond with his coaching responsibilities. Fortunately, Nehlen said the spring practice calendar Rodriguez established last year should fit in nicely with the Boston Marathon.

“If we work off the same schedule as last year, we’ll be done with spring ball in early April, so it should work out for me to get up there,” he said.

When Nehlen prepared to run the Buffalo Marathon, he said he averaged about 55 miles per week. 

It’s not a race you can run in its entirety while preparing for it.

“I just try and shut it off as much as I can, miles one through 13 or 14, and then between miles 14 and 20, you’ve got to lock in a little bit because that’s when it’s going to start getting tough,” Nehlen said. “Those last miles are all about finishing and having some grit and a hard-edge about yourself.”

A “hard-edge” about yourself?

That sounds awful familiar, doesn’t it?