What Running Means to Me

My answer to this question has varied immensely throughout my years of involvement with the sport.  I have had periods of deep investment in running and periods where I felt burnt out and disinterested.  For me everything stabilized the day I started working at Palatine High School.  Running has become a way of life and a deeply important part of who I am.  It helps me to center myself on worthy effort and gives me time to think about my day and my life.  It leads me to meet great people and to challenge myself.  It fills my life with joy and difficulty.  Ultimately, it provides a large portion of the soundtrack to my life and involves me in a group experience that enriches my life on a daily basis.  I wish that I could answer this question in a simple way, but I have to let you know the whole story to explain it all.

Running has always been part of my family culture.  My father, Jeff Quick, was a cross country and track coach for more than 30 years.  Before that, he was the school record holder at Western Illinois University and a star athlete at Moline High School in Moline, Illinois.  I owe so much of who I am today to my father, and I think his experiences with running are key to unraveling why I and many others have taken the passions of our life from this sport.  As a kid, my father tried all kinds of sports – basketball, football, etc. – but he was both too slow and too small to have much of an impact.  He never really considered running until he was encouraged by Gene Shipley to try out for the track team in the spring of his junior year.  Although an athletic person, my dad had never been challenged by anyone quite as much as Coach Shipley.  Coach fought in World War II as a Marine and was a classic old-school coach.  He believed in hard work and no excuses.  By the end of his junior season, my dad had worked hard enough to run 5:00 for the 1600 meters.  He had his taste and found that he could be great at this sport.  It did not require height, tons of muscle, or lightning quickness.  It only demanded mental fortitude, hard work, a dash of competitiveness, and heart (quite literally in this case).  All of these qualities can be accessed by the common person.  Coach Shipley turned him into a running machine.  His team went to the state cross country finals in the fall of 1965, and my dad earned an All-State finish in the 1966 track season by running 4:20 in the 1600 – a 40 second drop in just one year.  He would go on to run 49 seconds in the 400 meter dash and 1:50 in the 800 while running for Western Illinois.

I have always been intrigued by my dad’s experiences in the sport.  How does one go from being a non-participant to an All-State athlete in one year?  The idea that runners can be made has always intrigued me.  Talent certainly comes in the form of blinding speed or a genetic inclination to pump large amounts of blood through the heart.  As coaches and athletes, we recognize the great ones when we see them and pay tribute to them as they run in the Olympic Games or the NCAA Division I Championships.  However, the large majority of runners have to be made.  Cross country coaches and athletes can work together to mold success in ways that are impossible in many other sports.  As a coach I know with virtual certainty that consistent application of hard effort over time will produce improved results.  Improvement can be gauged on the amount of effort an athlete is willing to put forth.  To me, that makes cross country a democratic sport.  While there are certain physiological gifts involved in being a champion, almost anyone can aspire to that role.  You need not be fast or tall or muscular.  You just have to want to win worse than the guy whom you are competing against.  Talent is parceled out in unfair doses, but effort is available to all.  The man who will wake up each morning determined to improve can reach dizzying heights.

I know that I certainly aspired to that kind of success when I started running in junior high and high school.  I wanted to be a champion runner like the guys and girls that my dad coached at Geneseo High School and Moline High School.  When I was 12 years old, my dad coached his greatest group of runners ever.  They placed 3^rd as a team in the 1988 IHSA State meet to two outstanding teams from York and Schaumburg.  In the spring, Tony Taylor, Eric Edmunds, Tauwon Taylor, and Rob Harvey won the only state title of my dad’s career in the 4 x 800 relay.  They ran a national best 7:43.69, and all four of those boys went on to run in college.  Over the years I have watched our shaky, emotion-laden video tape of this race hundreds of times.  I always wanted to feel that sense of elation and accomplishment for myself.  For my dad that race was the culmination of his dreams that started in high school and went on into his days as an 800 meter runner at Western Illinois.  Both Tony and Tauwon Taylor went down to Western on scholarship, and I think Tony broke my dad’s school record in the 800.  My dad’s life in running came full-circle with those boys as he experienced the ultimate thrill of winning a state championship.  I knew then that I wanted to some day have that feeling.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many 5’ 0” tall state champions.  I started my freshman cross country season as a midget of a runner, struggling to keep up with the older athletes and my friends.  I was a star in the classroom throughout my life, but I knew that I wanted to be a great athlete as well.  School had always come easy to me, but excelling at running seemed impossible.  I ran 19:10 for three miles that year, and I decided that I was going to get better the next season.  It wasn’t always easy being the son of a coach.  Every time I wanted to lie around all day and not run, my dad “gently” reminded me of the goals that I had set for sophomore year: breaking 5:00 in the mile and running 17:00-17:30 for three miles.  I trained quite a bit that summer, and I improved a lot over the season.  That year our team placed 5^th at state and would have been higher without an ugly fall from our fifth man in the last 400 meters of the race.  We also won the prestigious Palatine Invite, beating Elmhurst York for the first time in school history.  By junior year, I had grown nine inches and could finally look most girls in the eye.  My last two years were filled with near constant running and that elusive search for a team championship.  We failed miserably junior year, running terrible at sectionals and failing to qualify.  For my senior season, we decided to rededicate ourselves to working hard, and we ended up finishing 5^th in the state for the second time in three years.  The team finish was disappointing, and it was magnified by the injury trouble I had in the second half of the season.  I had horrible sciatic nerve problems in my back and was unable to train or race up to my ability.  After looking back on four years of hard work, I felt like I hadn’t accomplished much of anything.  We had won conference, regional, and sectional titles, but the big state trophy that we wanted to win so badly for ourselves and for my father had escaped us.  It seemed then that my participation had been a failure.

I quit running for seven years after that senior cross country season.  I did not run track, and I ran only 10-15 times total the entire time I was in college.  I stayed involved with the sport by volunteering as a practice assistant and manager for Gary Wieneke at the University of Illinois, but my career as an active runner felt like it was over and should be laid to rest.  School had always been my forte, and I concentrated on getting good grades and working on that side of myself.  Four years of great grades at Illinois translated into a four-year guaranteed fellowship to Northwestern University to get a PhD in American History.  I thought that my future was set.  For the first time, though, something was missing.  I did well at Northwestern and learned a lot, but my life just was not turning out the way that I wanted it to.  One day in the spring of 1999, I had this moment of reckoning.  I had been living alone and reading 1000-1500 pages of history a week for the whole year, and my intuition just told me that something was wrong.  I remember sitting down one day all alone and thinking about what would really make me happy in life.  The only consistent answer was this – a high school cross country coach.  Don’t get me wrong – I love teaching as well – but my initial impetus to switch directions had everything to do with coaching.  I simply felt a tremendous void in my life that could not be filled vicariously through my dad’s coaching experiences.  The sport had always been part of my family culture, and that year had been the first one where I didn’t attend regular practices or meets in my entire life.  I missed the fall air and the feeling of anticipation before the season and before a race starts.  I missed knowing and talking with the athletes.  In short, I was missing a part of myself.

I reflected that day on the many disappointments that I had as a competitive athlete.  I realized that part of my disappointment was derived from a warped definition of success.  As a young athlete, I focused solely on the result of the process.  After looking back, I realized that the process had been the reward all along.  To this day, my six best friends in the world are members of my high school cross country team.  When I married my wife Meredith in 2001, those guys were the best men in my wedding.  We grew up together from crazy eighth grade kids to men, and all of us are still best friends.  The success had been in the relationships I developed.  The success came in the memories and times that we shared together.  I started to realize that the soul of the sport was not in the results that a team produced, but rather in the moments experienced along the way.  Don’t get me wrong.  I want to win as much as anyone.  I just realized that much more could be gained out of the experience of being a coach or a runner than I knew when I was in high school.  My initial conception on that day of reckoning was that winning would take care of itself if I could help imbue the journey with as much meaning and fun as possible.  I started to see that I could facilitate the shaping of memories and relationships that would carry greater impact than the short-term glories derived from wins and losses.  I also recognized that I could have a powerful teaching role as a coach.  Most of the values discussed in this book are at the core of what I teach when I coach young athletes. 

I knew that day at Northwestern that I would become a coach, and I knew then that running was one of my true life passions.  Its absence indicated its presence.  I needed to be involved to stay healthy and be myself.  So, I called my mom and told her that I wanted to drop out of Northwestern after I finished my MA and give away three years of a full-fellowship.  I am sure that at least one of my parents did the math on the financial implications of this decision, but they supported me as always.  I moved back in with my parents to attend Western Illinois University and get a second M.A. in teaching.  The decision to move back home was also made easier because I was dating the woman who would eventually be my wife.  I guess you can say that I was moved by two passions at once.  With marriage and a career in teaching looming, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place when I was hired to teach and coach cross country at Palatine High School.  I interviewed and received offers from a bunch of schools, but Palatine was my number one choice all along.  My dad knew Steve Currins and Fred Miller from coaching against them for years, and I was excited to come and work with guys who had so much coaching knowledge and experience.  I found my ideal situation, and the rest of it all fell into place.

        The final reckoning that I had to make before starting at Palatine was with my own running.  I decided in June 2001 that I was not going to be a successful coach unless I shared in the joys of running with my athletes.  For me, this was an intimidating decision.  I had not run in seven years, and my last memories of running were fraught with physical pain and disappointment.  On my first day of Early Bird, I tried to go out and run with the top guys on the team.  They trounced me.  I ended up running with an incoming freshman named Matt Moss.  Matt would later go on to be a varsity runner on two state trophy teams.  I think of that day all the time as the first one where I discovered that I not only could run again, but that I could actually enjoy it.  The boys and girls on the Palatine cross country teams brought me back to the joy of running.  Now, running is not a chore.  It is something that I get to do to have fun with my athletes, to challenge myself, and to be a more effective teacher.  Two years ago, I felt like I needed to test myself in battle rather than just running to be in shape.  I chose the daunting goal of running the Chicago Marathon.  I will never forget that 2003 season as long as I live.  In October, I finished the marathon in three hours and five minutes.  In November, the boys, Fred Miller, and I won a state trophy together.  When we stood on that podium together to receive our state trophy, I thought of my friends who hadn’t been able to get up there and fulfill that dream with me.  That time around, though, I knew that the journey I had gone through with those men was more than enough reward for the time spent.  The journey would have been the reward without the trophy, but to feel that sense of brotherhood and shared satisfaction with those athletes was exactly what I had dreamed of ever since that day at Northwestern and even when I watched my dad’s teams as a youngster.  There is no more powerful feeling in athletics than working hard and succeeding with others.  We went on to duplicate our second place finish in 2004, but that first one will always be the sweetest.  It was the end result of a long process of thought that had dropped me right into the middle of my dreams.  So, what does running really mean to me?