Coach Honea

Coach Honea coaches cross country and track at Watauga High School in Boone, NC.  In 2010, the Watauga girls cross country team was 2nd in the NC 4A state meet and had a 5k-best average of 18:56, the 4th best for a girls’ team in North Carolina history.  The Watauga boys placed 8th in the state meet.  Darby Middlebrook was the girls state champion and set a state meet course record (17:52).  Daniel Osborne was first-team all-state for boys.

Watauga has been one of the best teams in the state since gravity was invented, and beat Coach Honea’s team when he was in high school, and also beat the team he coached in Raleigh before he moved to Boone.  Coach Honea deserves little to no credit for any success of this program.

Before he started high school coaching at Enloe HS in Raleigh, Coach Honea was an assistant coach for five years at NC State.  He coached middle distance runners there, and they did very well, despite his own tragic inability to run any distance shorter than 5k.

Coach Honea is now old and slow, but was once younger and not quite as slow.  He was an all-American in cross country and also won the ACC 10k championship in track while in college at NC State.     He qualified for the U.S. Olympic Trials marathon in 1996 and 2000.  Coach Honea has the slowest 1500-meter PR of any of the 700+ Americans who have run under 70 seconds per lap for 10,000 meters.¹

Coach Honea did not kill a bear at age 3, or any other age.  He did, however, outrun the bear, and then later helped the bear improve it’s time at distances from 400 meters to 5k.²

Coach Honea has a resting heart rate of -7.  At rest, his heart actually sucks oxygenated blood back in from the body, so there will be more to pump out when things get serious.  This is why it takes him awhile to warm up.²

Before the internet, instead of Wikipedia people used Honeapedia.  If you needed to know something, you called Coach Honea and he told you the answer.  Honeapedia was only available in English but had over 139,000 entries.

Coach Honea has a masters degree in electrical engineering, and really should finish his masters degree in exercise science.  He teaches math whenever anyone will let him.

¹-These statements are accurate.

² – These statements are unverified at the present time.