Road to Running

This blog has been dedicated to telling the story of my "road to running", the story of how my running career got started. This is the last part of the story. If you want to read it from the beginning, part one can be found here: http://me.milesplit.com/articles/133589-road-to-running-a-blog-by-mitch-morris#.VBb5bkuLQTs

Hi everyone. Sorry this post is so late, the past few weeks have been some of the busiest of my life with school, college applications, testing, and cross country all heating up at once. Unfortunately, with cross country having ended for the season, this will be my last blog post, so I’ll have to wrap up my story a little faster than I expected. In order to cover everything, I’ll just give a quick overview of the events from the fall of my Sophomore year, where I left off on the last post, up to the present.

          So, where I left off I was collapsed on the soccer field having succumb to some unknown illness, effectively ending my struggle to regain the spot on the varsity soccer team I had lost while sick. It turns out the “unknown illness” I had was pneumonia. I didn’t see a doctor to get that diagnosis until February, which was four months after I had started feeling symptoms, so by that time the sickness had reached an advanced stage, and just walking, never mind running, had become very difficult.

 I received treatment in February, and soon began feeling better, but the whole experience led me to question a lot about my life, chiefly, my future on the soccer team. I still loved soccer, as I do today, but it had become clear that the sport didn’t love me back. The way I was so quickly replaced and forgotten when I was sick bothered me. It made me feel expendable, undervalued, even worthless. But still, soccer was the sport I had spent all my life developing, and being a star player on the varsity team had always been my goal. Was I willing to abandon all of that in favor of cross country, a sport and team completely foreign to me? That was the question I wrestled with for months on end. I asked everyone I knew for their input and advice, but still I was torn. So torn, in fact, that the day I finally put pen to paper and signed up for the cross country team, I also signed up for two soccer teams: an 18+ indoor men’s league team that agreed to give me a tryout despite being only 16, and a tryout for the Portland Phoenix, the premier team I had been a part of for the last few years. I ended up making both teams, both of which practiced every day, so I practiced twice a day every day with two games on weekends until, inevitably, I got hurt and my season ended. The injury didn’t bother me though; those last few weeks had allowed me to experience exactly what I loved the most about soccer, and had it gone on for too long, I might have fallen back in love with the sport and I never would have started running.

Finally, summer came, and with it the start of cross country training. I could go on at length about my experience that summer, but I’ll try to keep it brief. First off, I was enormously lucky to start cross country with the team that I had. The Cape Elizabeth cross country team in 2013 had just come off of a state championship win the year before, and the team was perhaps the greatest in our school’s history. From my very first practice I had the leadership and support of great runners and captains like Liam Simpson, Peter Doane, and Julian Peltzer, whose advice was second only to that of my dedicated coach, Derek Veilleux, in helping me become the runner I am today. I put everything I had into my cross country training, and ran my hardest every day just to keep up with Liam and the rest of the team, but, before long, I began to notice dramatic improvements in my endurance and speed.

In the fall, I started off strong in my first ever cross country season, running a 16:55 for my first 5k, and finished stronger, coming in 8^th at the state meet to help our team to the repeat state title, and securing a spot on the All-State team in the process. That fall, all the fitness I had developed, and all of the success I had enjoyed and shared with my teammates, became the launch pad for a very successful indoor season were I was able to lower my 2 mile PR every race until it reached my current best of 9:36 at the New England Championships.

At that point, I was done. In my first year of serious running, the stress and focus required to earn a new PR every week became all-consuming, and I had noticed my priorities shifting dangerously far from the things that were really most important, family, friends, health, and school. All of this was compounded by the fact that I had been contacted by many coaches about the prospect of collegiate running, something I had never before considered. My head buzzing, I declined the trip to New Balance Nationals my PR had afforded me, and took some time off to get my life back in order.

Completely exhausted by track, in the spring I capped off a disappointing outdoor track season with a DQ at the state meet, and was thoroughly relieved when cross country training began in June. From the start, my goal was to lead the cross country team to a third consecutive state championship. This goal was an ambitious one to be sure, especially given that our team had lost 5 of our top 7 from the year before, but I firmly believed that with one serious summer of training, anybody could become a capable runner, just as I had. My goal in mind, I strived to form my predominantly freshman group into a state championship caliber team.

In the end, our team’s youth and inexperience shined through, and we fell short of our goal. This came as an enormous disappointment for me. Although I won the individual Class B title that day, it meant nothing to me without a victory to share with my teammates who were going home empty handed. I felt I had let them down. As captain it was my job to get the team ready and motivated for that race. I had given advice, praise, criticism, and impassioned speeches where necessary, yet it seemed that it had not been enough. I felt like I had failed my team.

 I carried this lingering feeling for weeks, until recently, when I was contacted by several members of my team via Facebook.  They thanked me, and told me about the impact I had had on them as captain, how I had led by example, changed their way of thinking, and motivated them to be persistent and work hard for the future. That was truly the crowning moment of my running career. Looking forward, I have a lot of faith in the Cape Elizabeth cross country team, and am enormously proud to say that I have positively impacted the future of this program.

When I look to my own future, it’s impossible to overstate the impact running will have on my life. Running has taught me that I am capable of so much more than I ever thought possible, and that my ambition is limited only by my work ethic. This sport has introduced me to fantastic people, chief among them my girlfriend of over a year, and next fall, I’ll be attending a college I never could have attended had it not been for running, and I’ll be participating in collegiate athletics at a higher level than I ever could have dreamed of.

I know I’m not a typical runner. I hate talking about shoes, spikes, and PRs. I don’t know anything about the Oregon Project or the Diamond League, and I couldn’t tell you who Mo Farah is or how many meters are in a mile. I know I don’t really fit in with this sport, and don’t know if I ever will, but I do know that whether I fit the mold of “state champion runner” or not, this sport has made me feel welcomed and valued since my very first practice a year and a half ago, and has loved me back in ways that soccer never did. For that, and for all of the other wonderful things running has brought to my life, I will forever be indebted to this sport, and to the Maine running community as a whole.

Thank you all so much for welcoming me into this sport and for making Maine’s cross country community what it is today – and an extra thanks for those of you that have read this blog all the way through. I look forward to seeing you all in track and at ARC, and best of luck to you all this season, and with the rest of your running careers.

Mitch Morris