In the Beginning

Since I don’t have a lot of other stuff to post, I thought I might do a series looking back on how I got started in running and how things developed from there. This is the first of those and basically deals with my time in high school.

I definitely didn’t have a traditional start in the sport. I’ve always been athletic, but my sports were basketball, soccer, and baseball, basically in that order. You might throw in motocross on the side as well, but running was something I did to stay in shape for other sports, not a sport in and of itself. Looking back, I was always good at it however, even though it took quite a while for me to realize it. When we would run laps in practice, I was always the one leading the way, often lapping my teammates and wondering why they saw running as being so hard. To me, it came pretty natural. I excelled at it so much, in fact, that I was actually recruited to run the distance events in some track meets simply because there was no one else to do it and I had a reputation as being a good runner. Keep in mind that I went to a couple different small, private schools, so there weren’t a lot of people to participate in sports like track and nobody wanted to run….GASP….the mile!!!

In spite of a complete lack of real training, I did quite well in my few forays into running on the track. I don’t remember what sort of times I ran, and I’m sure they were really slow, but I actually won several races from 800 meters to the mile. Again, though, you have to keep in mind that competition was poor at best. Still, I never even considered that I should actually think about seeing how good I could become at running but simply went back to my other sports once the meets were over.

Then came something that changed everything, although I still didn’t see it until a couple years later. I changed schools heading into my senior year, and being new to everything, I decided I didn’t want to try to play soccer for my new school. Instead, for whatever reason, I got the idea that I would run cross-country. I knew I’d always been decent at running and thought it would be something different I could try, so I went to the coach and told him my intentions. His response was “Great! How many miles did you run over the summer?” “Miles?!?” I responded, unsure of what he even meant (I mean , who actually kept track of how many miles they ran?!?). “I ran several here and there to stay in shape for soccer, but I have no idea how many I ran total.” This didn’t impress the coach at all, so he told me maybe I should stick to soccer. I insisted he give me a shot though, so he told me he had a time trial coming up the next day and I could take part in that and we’d go from there. I'm positive he thought I would get pummeled and see that I needed to head back to the soccer field, but I wound up finishing second in that trial (in basketball shoes no less – ha, ha), and needless to say I was on the team. By the end of the year I was running number one on the team and one of the five best runners in the conference. Again, not much competition, but the signs as to what sport I should be doing were definitely there. Still, I missed them all, and once cross country was over I hung up the running shoes (yes, I ditched the b-ball shoes and got a pair of Nike Pegasus) and didn’t put them back on until more than a year later.

My next post will deal with college and how I became a full time runner. As with high school, it basically started as an accident, but this time I got hooked and the rest is history.