Trying to find “Florian Reichert” on the campus directory is impossible. It turns out that the 26-year-old German-teaching assistant-slash-track-team-member’s first name is Johannes, but he goes by “Flo”—quite an appropriate nickname, given that it was his first-place finish at the cross country team’s first race, the Amherst Invitational, that convinced Head Coach Erik Nedeau to bend the rules and let him on the team.
Reichert’s career in running has so far lasted 13 years, but it is a passion that he happened upon by chance. “At school, we had to run a kilometer in sixth grade, and I never trained but ended up winning it,” he explained. “So I started training and kept winning. Nowadays, though, it’s not so much about winning races. I do like competition, but it’s more like a passion or a way of life—a way to structure my day.”
In any case, Nedeau’s decision turned out to be a good one for everyone involved. Reichert has benefited greatly from training with the team. “I was fairly good back home until my senior year of high school, when I just kind of stayed at the same level,” he said. “So it’s really interesting for me to find other ways to train, especially since my third major is physical education. Back home, I was just running long distances, but Ned’s training focused more on intensity—on quality over quantity—which has been very effective.” Effective enough, at least, for Reichert to slash valuable seconds off his previous personal records.
It is the team spirit among the Amherst runners, though, that Reichert appreciates the most. “One of the most valuable experiences for me is being part of the team and running with the team,” he said. “There are few other sports as individualistic as long distance running, but the team spirit here is great.” It might be the team itself, however, that benefits more from Reichert’s presence in the end. “Flo’s unmatchable enthusiasm for the misuse of English prepositions has provided a constant source of entertainment for the team,” said teammate Mike Harbus ’07, earnestly. “His classic saying, ‘I have a song stuck to my head,’ will forever reserve a fond spot in the hearts of those who have run with him here.”
Though he might sometimes accidentally claim to have unusual appendages on his head, languages and international travels are actually a specialty of Reichert’s. This is definitely not the first time Reichert has left Germany—he talks eagerly of a semester he spent on the Canary Islands improving his Spanish during his junior year, when he went surfing every day. After high school, the German T.A. spent a year in Australia brushing up on English. “I worked and studied at the same time,” Reichert explained of his year in the Land of Oz. “I did everything—worked as a waiter, picked fruit, worked door-to-door sales selling junk. I think people bought things from me just because they felt pity for the poor German kid.” American and Spanish literature are now two of Reichert’s majors—the result of his facility with the languages. Almost as an afterthought, he mentioned that he had taken five years of French in high school, and that he can also read Latin.
In person, Reichert comes across as friendly and, as his teammates would say, enthusiastic. When asked if he shares the low opinion of America that many Europeans now have, he freely confesses to having loved America since he was a kid in Germany. “I had a huge American flag in my room,” he said. “And I had a book of the 50 states with a little box on each page so I could check off how many states I had visited—this was when I was five years old.”
His enthusiasm has won Reichert many friends on campus—and he may have made a greater impact here than even he is aware. Once the word got out that he was being profiled for these pages, information started flowing from the most unexpected sources. “I dropped by Porter House to use the bathroom on the way home from Homecoming and ended up taking a picture of Florian’s name tag on his door,” said a senior female student who insisted on anonymity. “I had no idea who he was—and no idea that I’d taken the picture in the first place until I saw it the next day! Now it’s become a tradition to visit his name tag every time we go to the bars.”
If Reichert ever finds female photographers outside his door at strange hours of the night, now he will know why.