Running is an inherently individualistic pursuit. An activity that can be completed entirely alone and a sport in which performance is measured by “personal” bests. Yet all serious runners know as I do that running is a gift best shared with others. That’s why it was a great privilege to share my passion for the sport with the young runners of Gandoca, a rural Costa Rican town on the coast of the Caribbean Sea near the border of Panama.
In preparation for their upcoming race, we were invited to join the local high school runners on a hot and humid June afternoon to critique their mechanics and impart training related advice. Accompanied by my ACE teammate and fellow cross-country teammate, Alden Keller, we did our best to overcome a large language barrier and distill our combined 20+ years of competitive distance running experience into a few pithy, easily-translatable words of wisdom. Keep your shoulders relaxed and drive your knees. Do two hard workouts per week. Consistency is key. After we had done our best to convey this advice, we decided it was time to simply run together. The boys started hot out of the gates and ran freely, driven by their competitive instincts and unbridled by any sense of pacing. Alden and I exchanged a grin and accelerated to catch up, us both reminded of what it was like to run at that age before there was the weight of weekly mileage mandates and race plans and overuse injuries. The following Sunday we met Jeremi, the star runner of the group whom we had coached earlier in the week, for a 10km run which turned out be his longest ever.
I’ll always remember asking Jeremi at the end of our run that hot and humid June afternoon whether he wanted to run to the other side of the field at eighty or ninety percent of our maximum effort. “Cien percento” he responded.
Though Jeremi came up short in his race the next week, when he returned home he went out of his way to personally thank us for the time we had spent coaching him. What was a small act to us meant a lot to him. Our local host and guide, Andre, added that in our interactions with the local school children, our group of Duke student-athletes had inspired them to “make something of themselves” by showing them that athletics could open doors to college education and international travel.
But the local kids were not the only ones to benefit from our interaction. With no track to train on, an unattractive climate for aerobic exercise, and only one dirt road littered with ankle-turning stones to run on, I learned from the young Gandocan runners that you can either succumb to your circumstances or defy them. I’ll always remember asking Jeremi at the end of our run that hot and humid June afternoon whether he wanted to run to the other side of the field at eighty or ninety percent of our maximum effort. “Cien percento” he responded. As I head into my last year of collegiate running at Duke, I’ll remember Gandoca and carry with me Jeremi’s attitude towards running: always give it one hundred percent.