Go Where the Hurdles Take You

Part IV: And All Shall Be Well

“… I am only a ferryman, and it is my task to ferry people across the river. I have transported many, thousands; and to all of them, my river has been nothing but an obstacle on their travels. They travelled to seek money and business, and for weddings, and on pilgrimages, and the river was obstructing their path, and the ferryman’s job was to get them quickly across that obstacle. But for some among thousands, a few, four or five, the river has stopped being an obstacle, they have heard its voice, they have listened to it, and the river has become sacred to them, as it has become sacred to me.”
-from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

I think the goal of any track coach, once having reached a certain level of success, is to coach someone to the highest level of achievement in the sport – win an Olympic gold medal, or to make an Olympic or World Championship team. During the years I was coaching Johnny Dutch, Wayne Davis, and Booker Nunley, the thought crossed my mind, though I felt no desire to leave behind my life as a teacher.

Due to the popularity of my website and the accomplishments of my athletes, I was starting to receive inquiries from post-collegians asking if I’d be willing to take them on. In 2006 I took on one – Kevin Watson, a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill with whom I had become good friends after interviewing him for a profile I had written on him for the website. We stayed together for a year before he moved back to his hometown of Richmond, VA, where he had landed a job.

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In 2008 I took on University of Alabama alum Byron Gibson, and the following year he was joined by Hector Cotto, an Eastern Carolina University alum whom I had coached during the summer after his senior year of high school, and who had most recently been training in Boston. After 2009 the athletic director at Ravenscroft informed me that I would no longer be allowed to coach athletes who had no affiliation with the school on our track.

Why? Liability issues. And we were wearing out the track. The business office was giving the AD heat for the fact that the rubber surface had only lasted five years since being laid down in 2004. I tried to argue that five years is actually pretty normal, but the AD wasn’t trying to hear it. “Our kids only,” he said.

I’d been victimized by my own success. When I was coaching only high school kids, we only met regularly during the summer. During other times of year, one or more of the club kids might come to work out with me once or twice a week, after my school team practice. But with the post-collegians we were out there every day all year long. And Hector had a lot of track friends in the area who would come and train with us. So on some days we might have four or five guys out there at a time. There were also a couple 400 hurdlers in the area who would come over on occasion.

Finally, there were a lot of professional sprinters who trained in the area, and some of them would come out and train when I wasn’t there. When the security guard would ask them who they were, they would drop my name. I’d come to work on Monday and face questions about this person or that person who claimed to know me and who said I said it would be okay for them to use the track. I’d be like, “I never heard of that dude.” These athletes dropped my name because they knew I worked there, and they knew that dropping my name could buy them some time.

It just got out of hand. To the point where I felt kind of relieved when the AD shut me down. What I learned over that period of time was that coaching post-collegians is a whole lot different from coaching high school athletes, and that I wasn’t ready to make the transition.

On more than one level, I wasn’t ready. The first thing I didn’t realize was how time-consuming it was. Coaching post-collegians, whether or not they have a professional contract, is a full-time job. Athletes in their early to mid-twenties aren’t running just to keep in shape; they’re running because they’re trying to get somewhere. They’re trying to qualify for nationals, they’re trying to achieve goals that eluded them while in college. In some cases they’ve relocated in order to train with you, so you’re the only immediate support system they have. They need you to be available at all times of day. Not just for two hours of track practice.

I already had a full-time job. I was a full-time English teacher. In that role, I routinely spent many hours outside the classroom reading essays. Everywhere I went, I brought papers with me. To faculty meetings, to restaurants, to get-togethers with friends, and yes, even to track meets. Plus I was coaching the kids on the school team. Not to mention the club kids with whom I worked on a year-round basis.

Fortunately, I’d been teaching long enough – and the same material at that – that I could perform well in the classroom without exerting much mental energy, and I didn’t need much time to prepare for my classes each day. But even with that, I couldn’t help but feel that I was cheating my students to a degree by relying so much on my old notes. That’s how it works when you have two full-time jobs: you can’t give your full attention to either of them.

Another thing I had difficulty adjusting to was the higher intensity level when it comes to coaching post-collegians. Even though I’d coached national champions at the high school level, and the intensity level could get extremely high at major meets, still, those kids knew they had college scholarships waiting for them upon graduation. With few exceptions, almost all post-collegians are either fighting to earn a contract or fighting to keep one. They’re often making huge personal sacrifices in order to continue their careers. They’re putting off finding “real” jobs while their peers are either furthering their education or entering the work force. In many cases they’re working part-time in addition to training so they can afford to travel and enter meets. (Check out last month’s profile on Niklas Rippon as a point of reference).

So one bad workout can feel like a dream is being shattered. One bad race can feel like the end of the world.

Because the stakes are so high, and because post-collegians have so much more experience than high school athletes, a coach’s relationship with them must be much more of a partnership. Post-collegians have their own ideas and philosophies regarding what will and what won’t work in their training. They’ve had success with certain training methods and want to continue with them, they have ideas they want to implement that they were never allowed to try with previous coaches. In almost all cases they’re extremely knowledgeable, to the point where they could be excellent coaches themselves.

So for me, while it felt exhilarating to be engaged in a constant process of growth and discovery, I felt equally overwhelmed at times by how much I didn’t know. I felt it was my responsibility as coach to know everything, to provide an answer to every question, which is something I now realize is impossible.

The biggest lesson I learned was that, when it comes to the men’s high hurdles over 42’s, you have to forget everything you’ve learned, forget everything you’ve taught, forget everything you think you know, and start all over again. None of the rules that apply to the other hurdle races apply to that race. You can’t count on anything that worked at lower heights to work at that height. Male high hurdlers, over 42’s, have to be contortionists, gymnasts, martial artists, acrobats, superheroes. They have to put their bodies in ridiculous positions while moving at ridiculous speeds. There’s no margin for error.

I found that very little of the success I had coaching high school guys over 39’s could be applied to coaching post-collegians over 42’s. Over 42’s, the trail leg can’t cheat. Over 42’s, the forward lean is not a luxury. Over 42’s, the simplest flaw, like locking the knee of the lead leg, can sabotage your entire race. Standing too erect off of hurdle one can lead to the whole field passing you by at hurdle six. Too much airtime over the hurdles means you have no chance of being competitive, regardless of your flat speed. And on it goes.

Still, despite everything, two of the three post-collegians I coached regularly set personal bests while training with me. And the third and I had a great relationship and learned a lot from each other. So despite my lack of experience at that level, and despite my time constraints as a full-time teacher, I must’ve been doing something right. Which is why, even though I felt relieved when the AD shut me down, I didn’t rule out the idea of coaching post-collegians again if the opportunity were to present itself.

***

Meanwhile, I continued to have success at the high school level, particularly with kids I coached privately or in youth club track. The best of these was Kendra Harrison, currently a senior at the University of Kentucky. Keni won both hurdle races at the 4A state meet her senior year, and also won New Balance Nationals in the 100m hurdles. Most recently I coached Jacklyn Howell, who finished fifth at Nationals and has just started her freshman year at Kentucky. I’ve also coached some good males too, but none on the level of those guys I coached in the glory days.

One of those guys recently came back to me, but more on that in a minute. First let me discuss a personal tragedy I suffered in February of 2012. If you’ve followed The Hurdle Magazine since its inception, you’ll recall an article I wrote in the first issue entitled “An Ode to Life.” In that article, I wrote about the death of Cameron Akers, who committed suicide at the age of 28. Cameron, as I mentioned in Part Three of “Go Where the Hurdles Take You,” was the first athlete I’d ever coached to national caliber status. We had been very close in those days (2000-01), we had stayed in touch over the years, and we had grown very close again in the weeks prior to his death. I hadn’t seen it coming, and it really messed me up. It led me to question a lot of things – about life in general and about my life in particular. I lost my love for coaching, and for teaching. I worked robotically, out of habit, out of a sense of obligation. Gotta get paid and can’t let down these kids.

In the summer of 2013, I left behind the teaching profession and created this magazine. The magazine, in a lot of ways, is a memorial to Cameron. And it also serves as a confirmation, perhaps a re-affirmation, of my love for the hurdles. As mentioned in Part One of this series, when I was dying of aplastic anemia as a 17-year-old, the hunger to hurdle again was the only thing that helped me retain my will to live. Similarly, when Cameron’s death filled me with disillusionment and deep sorrow, the hunger to revitalize the website and my hunger to re-establish my relationship with the hurdles pulled me out of the darkness.

In the summer of 2012, about five months after Cameron’s death, I reconnected with Keare Smith. As I mentioned in Part Three of this series, Smith was the laziest but arguably the most talented of the bunch I coached back in the day that included Dutch, Davis, and Nunley. Dutch and Davis went on to have outstanding collegiate careers that included NCAA championships, and both are currently running professionally. Nunley too was on that same path, running 13.41 in his sophomore year of college before suffering significant injuries that set him back.

Smith, meanwhile, struggled throughout his four years at Virginia Tech, never came close to maximizing his potential, and seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be a waste of talent.

So in that summer of 2012 he was back in town and wanted to know if I could meet for a chat. We hadn’t been in touch since he had finished high school, but a brother never stops missing a brother, so I was certainly looking forward to seeing him again.

He drove to my house one day and we took a walk around my neighborhood. He talked about how hard it had been to stay motivated in college, about how being a track star since the age of eleven had worn him out. By the time he hit college, he said, “I just wanted to be a regular person, because I didn’t know what that was like.”

He spoke with much clarity, quite aware of how he had let himself down and lost his way. He said that he realized now how much he loved the hurdles and that he wanted to get back into it. He referenced articles I had written on the website in which I had delved into the more internal aspects of being a hurdler, and spoke of how he had connected with such articles. He spoke softly, slowly, deliberately. There was a profound humility in his voice, and a deep wisdom as well.

That conversation showed me a side of Keare I had never seen before – one who really cared. I discovered that he shared my vision of hurdling as a calling, as something worth devoting one’s life to, as a vehicle for personal evolution. These qualities must have always been there, and I felt more than a bit confused as to how I had missed them before. Perhaps I had too quickly dismissed him as lazy instead of taking the time to get to know him.

Soon after our conversation he moved to New York City, but we kept open the idea that he would move back down to the Raleigh area and train with me at some point in the near future. A little over a year later, in October of 2013, he came down one weekend and we got in a couple workouts. I was amazed at how sharp and crisp he looked over the hurdles, considering how long it had been since his last race, and the fact that he wasn’t training on a regular basis. “Once you got it you never lose it,” he said.

We decided that it would make the most sense for him to get back in shape on his own for the rest of the year and then plan to make a comeback in 2014-15. He had a lot of ideas about how he was going to exercise, make changes to his diet, get his mind right, and get his body ready to meet the demands of regular training.

About a month later I received a text from Keare saying he was flying down because his younger sister had informed him that their dad was very sick. He said he’d bring his spikes with him if I had time for a workout. I texted him back to bring his spikes.

Turns out his dad, 47 years old, with whom I had also been good friends, had died unexpectedly. On Thanksgiving day, in the falling rain, Keare and I were on the track at Southeast Raleigh High School (where he was an alum and where I was now the hurdles coach), getting in a hurdle workout. The funeral would take place a couple days later, but that workout served as our memorial service. There we were, a hurdler, a coach, and a lane of hurdles. Dealing with death by embracing life.

I’ve had many moments on the track that would qualify as unforgettable, but I can’t think of one that was more special than that.

A few weeks ago, in mid-August, Keare moved back to NC and we have started practice sessions in preparation for the 2015 indoor and outdoor seasons. To say that things are going well would be an understatement. Not just because it looks like he’ll run fast once it’s time to race, but because I’m enjoying myself so much. Throughout most of my life I’ve surrounded myself – subconsciously more than consciously – with people whose personalities contrast and therefore complement mine. People who are more outgoing, talkative, assertive. I’m finding it a welcome change to be partnering with someone like Keare, whose personality reflects my own. Someone who is more introspective and reflective, who is curious in a very simple, child-like way, who doesn’t ever feel the need to prove how much he knows.

To no small degree, I feel like Keare has given me back what I lost when Cameron passed – not just someone to coach, but someone to grow with, someone to explore with, someone with whom to travel down this hurdle river. To think that Keare was the only one from the group of national caliber athletes I coached back in the day who didn’t make the most of his athletic gifts, and that I now have the opportunity to help him make that happen seven years later, makes me feel like maybe this crazy world does make some sense after all.

I don’t know what the future holds. I have no expectations. I have no goals, short-term or long-term. I have no five-year plan and I don’t know where I’ll be ten years from now. My plan is to just keep rolling with the river.

Wherever the hurdles take me, that’s where I’ll be going.

***

So ends the four-part series, “Go Where the Hurdles Take You.” Hope you enjoyed it. Part One is in the June 2014 issue, Part Two is in the July 2014 issue, and Part Three is in the August 2014 issue. If you haven’t read the previous parts, it’s best to read them in order, although reading them out of sequence shouldn’t throw you off too much.

The title of Part Four, “And All Shall Be Well,” comes from a line in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

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