The physical demands of the collegiate heptathlon can be grueling, with seven strenuous events that run the spectrum of all things track and field spread out over two days.
But for Kansas senior Tayton Klein, who recently won a Big 12 title and set a school record in the event with 5,923 points, it was the mental side of the journey that led him to the top of the podium 10 days ago in Lubbock, Texas.
So much of his success can be traced to a bathtub of Epsom salts and big dreams.
See, Klein, one of three male captains on this year’s team — appointed by the KU coaching staff — has always had the physical tools needed to make his mark in the event. He’s an elite sprinter and long jumper and has been running track in some form or another since joining his first club at age 6.
Plus, as KU assistant Paul Thornton likes to tell anyone who will listen, Klein is as competitive as any athlete out there.
But it wasn’t until recently that the KU senior from Andover, Kansas, overcame the daunting task of tackling the mental side of the sport, a move that unlocked his full potential and unleashed a whole new Klein.
Attacking with his mind
He had been working on it for a while, studying Ancient Greek philosophers and modern-day martial arts and samurai techniques designed to conquer the mind.
But the whole thing came together this season, and Klein said he owes his Big 12 title and school record to his mental gains.
“It’s been a game-changer for me,” Klein recently told R1S1 Sports. “If you look at the heptathlon collectively beforehand, it can get overwhelming, like, all this has to go right? I like studying philosophy a lot; there’s a lot of good knowledge and mind-control there. With what I do, just being connected from your mind to your body is huge.”
Some of his tricks and techniques serve him well during the events. But it might be between days where they matter most.
On Night 1 of any meet in which he competes in the heptathlon, Klein unplugs completely in a bath of Epsom salts in the dark, with space-aged music playing quietly as he allows his mind to let go.
“It feels like you’re just always hot,” he said. “For two days straight, your adrenal glands are just pumping and you can’t cool off. You usually can’t sleep. But I’ve found a good routine of getting my mind to decompress and almost get a reset.”
The goal, he said, is not to block out the negative thoughts that often arrive disguised as fears or doubts. The goal is to let those thoughts in, process them and spit them out so they can no longer harm him.
“I try to face the part of your brain that says you can’t do it,” he said. “We all have that part, and you just have to try to take as much power away from it as you can.”
Klein has been steadily moving in that direction this season.
But it all came together for the first time this winter, during a meet at Kansas State, where he approached Thornton and uttered six words that led his coach to believe big things were coming.
“Coach, I just need to compete,” Thornton recalled Klein telling him. “And that’s what he did. He let loose of focusing on numbers and turned his attention to just competing. He’s now allowing the heptathlon to come to him, rather than forcing the issue. I see his comfort. I see his relaxation.”
Like many kids, Klein played basketball, football, a little soccer and even tried baseball in his early days, scrapping life on the diamond quickly because, as he remembers thinking, “‘My mind moves way too fast for this sport, I want to go run around that circle.’”
With the benefit of hindsight, we see now that those early thoughts were actually Klein’s first triumph on the mental side of athletics. He and track were an instant hit, a match made in heptathlon heaven.
Tracking KPIs
With all of his athletes, Thornton likes to track what he calls KPIs — Key Performance Indicators — to see when a breakthrough might be coming.
Klein’s had a few of them. One was qualifying for nationals as a freshman and again, even earlier, during his sophomore season. There was also his noticeable improvement in the pole vault this season.
All of that work, along with the support of the entire KU track team, set the stage for his major breakthrough at the Big 12 championships at Texas Tech.
The heptathlon starts out with two of his strongest events — the 60-meter dash and long jump — so it’s not uncommon for Klein to be at or near the top of the leaderboard midway through Day 1.
“When I was a freshman, if I didn’t long jump or sprint well, it was just wraps,” Klein said, noting that his development in the later events has been a great source of pride in recent years.
In Lubbock, he ran a season-best time of 6.87 seconds in the 60 and followed that up with a season-best 7.58-meter leap in the long jump. After his top two events, he sat in first place heading into shot put and high jump to close out Day 1.
That gave him confidence moving forward and his newfound mental approach gave him the discipline to sustain his success. At no point, early in the meet, did he start thinking about how the hot start might suggest that a special finish was coming.
“Historically, I’ve definitely fallen into that, like, ‘OK, I can do it here. This might happen,’” he said. “But that doesn’t really serve anything to think that way. I knew I did what I had to do so far, but, at the same time, I was only two-sevenths of the way through.”
The meat of the meet
He held his spot in first place with a massive showing in the shot put, besting his previous mark by nearly 1.5 meters.
That, too, was no coincidence.
Klein said he spent more work in the offseason on the shot put than any other event, taking nearly 10,000 reps with the 16-pound prop, sometimes while simulating an actual meet and other times with what he calls “workhorse days,” where he throws and throws to the point of exhaustion.
His Big 12 mark of 13.38 meters was just the sixth best of the day, but it was closer than normal to the other, physically bigger, competitors.
“What I did was I stayed with the field,” Klein said. “The guy who won that event (BYU’s Jaden Rosskelley, with 14.17 meters) was less than a meter farther than me. For me, it's not even necessarily about the points that I gained from throwing it better, it's just the confidence of fitting in. If you look at the field, I kind of stand out. I’m a smaller guy. And when you see the spectators’ and coaches’ eyes kind of widen when they see me throw relatively far, that’s a big confidence boost.”
Can he actually see those reactions in their eyes?
“Oh yeah,” he said. “You can feel it, too.”
“That’s what’s cool about the multi events,” he added. “You have guys who are just massive, 6-5, 200 and something pounds, and then you have me, 5-9, 165 pounds. The heptathlon really doesn’t discriminate. It’s just an event of heart.”
At the end of the third event, Klein led the field by 60 points. It was at this point, on the heels of that solid throw, that he began to pay attention to the standings.
Even though so much of Klein’s mental refinement has been about not thinking too much or too far ahead, his coach did nothing to stop him.
“He thinks one of my calling cards is my competitive nature,” Klein said of Thornton. “So, he wants me to see the field and see what’s happening. But it’s a balancing act. If you get too focused on others you lose control of yourself. He knows I’m looking, though. And even if I say I’m not, he knows I’m lying.”
Said Thornton in explaining Klein’s competitive nature: “He’s one of those guys that never loses, he just runs out of time.”
“I was ecstatic to still be in the lead after shot put,” Klein added. “Because, normally, that’s when I fall off a little bit.”
In the high jump, the final event of Day 1, Klein again finished 6th in the field, with a top jump of 1.95 meters. That dropped him into second place heading into Day 2 — 22 points behind the new leader — but he was hardly worried.
As was the case in the previous event, Klein did what he needed to do relative to the field in the high jump. The top bar cleared by anyone was 2.04 meters, and that kept Klein close with his confidence still surging.
“Truth is, it doesn’t really matter what place you’re in going into Day 2,” he said. “I knew my Day 2 was better than the other top guys in the field, and I knew I could go out there and win it.”
A dazzling Day 2
After the full-body reset and solid night of sleep, Klein came back on Day 2 ready to make history.
The push to the podium began with one of the most memorable races of his life, the 60-meter hurdles.
Thornton has been saying all season that Klein is one of the most improved hurdlers in the entire NCAA. And his times had reflected that, slowly climbing down from 8.3 seconds to 8.13 seconds over his final few indoor meets.
Running in the fifth heat, Klein got to watch rival and perennial heptathlon contender Grant Levesque, of Houston, run in the first heat. Levesque’s time of 7.81 seconds vaulted him into third place overall by the end of the event.
“I knew if Grant got a lot of points on me there and in the pole vault (Klein’s weakest event) it was gonna be tough,” he said. “My coach came up to me and said, ‘Well, you’ve got the answer to the test now. You know what you need to do.’”
And then he did it, ripping off the first sub-8-second hurdle run of his life to push his way back to the top of the leaderboard with two events remaining.
Officially, the time went down as 7.96 seconds. But the way Klein felt after finishing the race, it might as well have read 3.05.
“I had a massive emotional outpouring after that,” Klein said, noting that an MCL injury earlier in his career had hurt him in the hurdles the most and that, entering the final stages of the indoor season, he finally felt “right” again. “I was just running in a vacuum almost. I was floating. It felt like my legs were doing their own thing and my head was just focused on the line. It was an amazing feeling.”
And he wasn’t afraid to let it show through the joy on his face and the raw emotion spilling out from his soul.
It was at this point that Klein began to think about winning.
“We talk all the time inside the combined events about how you're allowed five minutes to be elated or you have five minutes to feel disappointed, because we have another challenge ahead of us in the next 30 minutes,” Thornton said.
The KU coach equated the challenge to that of a golfer, who needs a short memory to move around the course with full focus, good shot or bad.
“A lot of younger student-athletes would maybe carry that emotion over and forget about certain aspects of the next event,” Thornton said. “And Tayton didn’t do that. I think that shows both his growth and that competitive mindset.”
From there, it was on to the pole vault — KU has the No. 2-ranked pole vault team in the country, by the way — where Klein finished fourth in the field (4.75 meters) and PR’d by 5 centimeters.
'A victory lap of sorts'
If his showing in the hurdles was the concert, his strong pole vault was the encore, and he took a 128-point lead over Houston’s Levesque heading into the final event, the 1,000-meter run.
It’s no one’s favorite. Especially at the end of a grueling competition.
“It’s five gutsy laps at the end,” Klein noted. “But I enjoy it because it’s a show of courage and a show of who’s got the heart for it. So, it’s fun in that way, but that one always hurts the most.”
Klein said his big lead in the standings and stellar showing in the first six events made this one of his favorite races of all-time.
Shortly before the race, Thornton shared one final message.
“Stay on your feet and you win,” he told Klein.
“I knew I still had to run the race,” Klein said. “But if I ran anywhere close to what I normally run, it was gonna be in the bag. So it was kind of like a victory lap of sorts.”
His big lead also allowed him to run a little more conservatively, knowing he didn’t have to push as hard as he normally does to finish strong.
He ran a 2:50.08, good for ninth in the field, and finished with a school record of 5,923 points, besting current teammate John Swabik, a senior transfer from Colorado who broke the record earlier this season on the same day that Klein did. The two were separated by just three points at that meet.
“I would’ve liked to score 6,000 and break that barrier,” Klein noted. “But the goal for the meet was to win.”
Now, he gets one more crack at it, with Swabik there, by the way.
Both Jayhawks will compete at indoor nationals this weekend in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Klein is predicting another memorable day.
“Oh, we can do better,” he said. “I will beat my own record.”
How can he be so sure?
“I know the mindset that I'm in, I know the consistency that I've been competing with, and the rhythm that I have,” he said. “If I just stay within myself and control what I can control it, it'll all fall into place.”
He particularly thinks he can score more points in the long jump and 1,000-meter run. And Thornton doesn’t disagree.
“For him to achieve that goal, he's going to need to do more,” the KU assistant coach said. “And I think he's forgotten about the points and he's just going there to beat some other people. That’s when Tayton Klein is at his best. So, yeah, I feel strongly that he is going to continue to break that mark, because of those other goals. Tayton is very much a goal-driven student-athlete.”
No matter what happens from here or how high Klein pushes his marks and scores, he’ll always remember this Big 12 title and the moment he put his name next to some of the best Jayhawks to ever do it.
“It definitely adds a sweetness to it,” he said of getting the record with the win. “Being a kid from Kansas and growing up a KU fan, just being able to etch my name in those record books feels amazing, because I’ve been a part of it for so long, even before I was actually a part of it.”
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