Sean’s Story

Editor’s note (me, because it’s my website). Sean D. Hamill is a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and has been on strike with his colleagues there since October. He ran high school cross country and track at Quaker Valley, then on to Robert Morris College (teammate) and transferred to the University of Missouri to get his journalism degree. I can relate to everything Sean wrote in this post, except the Jabberwock stuff.

It was a typical afternoon in late April after our boys got home from school, other
than the fact that my 15-year-old son, Tadhg, would not look at me.
“What are we doing this afternoon?” I asked.
“Well,” Tadhg said, looking at the kitchen floor, “I was just telling mom I don’t
want to do soccer anymore. I’m going to run cross-country in the fall with my
friends. I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d be upset and you’d just try
to make me play soccer anyway.”
Upset? I wanted to jump up and down like the father in the Lewis Carroll poem
when he learned his son had slain the Jabberwock: “Come to my arms, my beamish
boy!/O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
Though Tadhg knew my own sports story, he seemed to forget that this was deja vu
for me, too.
I started out as a soccer player, good enough to letter as a freshman on my high
school team. But a best friend – like Tadhg now – lured me to running and I left
soccer behind after my sophomore year, when I didn’t letter. My sporting life was
virtually parent-free then, though. My parents were supportive, but I don’t ever
remember telling anyone I was making the change. I just went to a different
practice the next fall and no one ever said a word to me about it except our soccer
coach, who asked me once to reconsider. I then avoided him for the rest of the year
so I didn’t have to explain my 16-year-old self.
I was a half-way decent competitive distance runner in high school and college –
won a few races, played a role on a couple championship teams. And I came to
love running for all of its benefits – mental, physical and fraternal. But what really
made me make the jump in high school after my friend suggested the move, was
the realization that your time on the soccer field was determined by a coach’s
opinion, your participation in track or cross-country meets was determined by a
stopwatch. Work hard and you run faster; run a time faster than others on your team and you got to run all the races you wanted. I liked that clarity and
self-determination.
I’d long held out hope one of my two sons would be lured into the joyfulness of the
long distance runner: the spiritual bliss after a hard race or run, the friends you
bonded with over daily pain and sweat, the certainty that your effort and the clock
were the ultimate determinants of your progress.
But his older brother, Declan, took to distance running like Vladimir Putin to offers
of peace talks with Ukraine: Only at the barrel of a gun, or, in Declan’s case, the
possibility that he wouldn’t be in shape for soccer camp. There was no joy for
Declan in any part of a run that did not involve a soccer ball (though post-high
school he seems to be enjoying the wonders that a 30-minute run is a great workout
during a busy day).
I’d even sent Tadhg to a couple track club workouts when he was in elementary
school and seemed to revel in being one of the fastest sprinters in his school class.
But he came back from each track session looking like the family labrador on the
ride back from another emergency room visit after swallowing something he
shouldn’t, with a forlorn look that said: Why did you take me there father?
But I could tell from Tadhg’s voice he thought this conversation in April was a
difficult moment in our relationship. Even though I’d long told him and his older
brother that I did not care what sport they played as long as they did something –
the thought of their days being done at 3 p.m. every day after school filled me with
dread – that was not what they remembered. What they remembered was all the
time we had spent together as coach and player, thinking all that time was
somehow part of my master plan to try to turn them into the next Christian Pulisic.
I had been coaching Tadhg, like his older brother, in soccer since he was
4-years-old, not because I wanted him to play soccer, but because like so many
kids, he just seemed to like kicking a ball. We progressed through the “in-house”
3-on-3 leagues, then 5-on-5, then U9 travel soccer with 7-on7, then 9-on-9, then
full field 11-on-11, with me as his coach all the way in fall and spring outdoor
soccer, and winter indoor soccer. Hundreds of games over a decade.

In addition to a few track club sessions I sent him to, I also coached him for three
years in basketball, which – in a preview of sports to come – he only did because
his best friend was on our team. But he quickly cast aside basketball after his friend
moved away. I should have paid more attention to that. (Bad dad, bad dad!)
But Tadhg, though he did not see it because some other boys his age were
progressing faster, got better at soccer each year. He played this past fall with our
local high school team, Quaker Valley, located just west of Pittsburgh, a boys high
school soccer powerhouse that not only regularly wins state and regional titles, but
sends multiple boys to play soccer in college every year. It can be a jolting
experience for freshmen boys to be on a team with so many older, taller, stronger
and faster boys for the first time after a decade of age-group play where the
physical and skill differences were only so wide. His older brother, Declan, went
through the same experience as a freshman, and it only motivated him to be better.
It didn’t hurt that Declan’s best friends were also on the soccer team. (I’m only
now sensing a pattern here.)
For Tadhg, it didn’t help that he suffered a back strain in summer that put him
behind the other boys right from the start. The result of the injury was that it
limited his minutes in the junior varsity games, where virtually all the freshmen
play. Even though his minutes increased as his fitness improved, Tadhg could only
see that others he had played with for years were playing significantly more.
But adding to his disinterest in soccer was the group of boys he had begun hanging
out with – all smart, funny and interesting kids – none of whom played soccer. But
they did all gravitate to track and cross-country, in part – it seemed from my
watching practices and meets – because, unlike soccer where goofing around
during practice was harshly discouraged, in track, the frequent downtime between
workout and race sections was a welcome place to visit with friends and crack
jokes at each other’s expense. Teenage boys will be teenage boys, but as long as
they run hard during the workouts and races, so what? At least that seemed to be
the sentiment of every track and cross-country coach I’ve ever had the joy of being
coached by, and now Tadhg’s coaches, too.

In 8th grade, his friends managed to do what I had never been able to and
convinced Tadhg to try track for a full season. He did well, running the 100 and
200 meters and doing the long jump, improving each meet in his time and distance,
but nowhere near the top three or four who would get to go to the end of season
invitational meets and regional qualifiers.
Still, I said nothing to him that these sprints and the long jump seemed a bad fit for
him, not exactly like the Belgium national women’s track team recently asking
their best shot putter to run the 100 hurdles because, well, someone had to run the
race, but obviously not his best events if compared to other boys.
I hoped he’d figure out for himself that any success he might have – particularly
given that he has proportionally longer legs than either his father or brother – might
more likely come from distance races, where hard work would pay off more
handsomely.
After his delusion with soccer this past fall, there he was again this past spring,
lured out by his friends to run high school track for the first time, but again
experiencing that maybe the sprints and long jump – and, for some reason, shot
put? – were not for him.
So when the season ended abruptly for him after just five weeks in mid-April –
thanks to a second half of the season that was just for invitational-worthy kids – it
was more than a shock when Tadhg said he was going to run cross-country.
But what he said next that April afternoon shocked me even more: “I want to get
ready. Can you run with me?”
As much as I’ve loved kicking the soccer ball, shooting hoops, and throwing a
baseball around with both boys over the years, getting to run with them was
something I’d longed for, and cherished the times we actually did.
But to get to run with a willing child every day for at least a few weeks? That was
parental nirvana to me. Even the summer before 8th grade with Declan when I ran every morning with him to get ready for soccer, leading to his repeated, tired
groans that began by the end of the first mile nearly every day, was a joy.
And so, the third week in April, 2023, I began running with Tadgh five days a
week – we didn’t want to push it – for six weeks, building up a base slowly, adding
a few minutes more each week until we got up to runs of 3 to 4 miles a day, and the
occasional 5-miler.
Truth be told, I was in horrific shape when this began. I was pushing it to have to
push him, and he was in much better general shape from having just finished five
weeks of track workouts. (And, yeah, questioning why, oh why, we didn’t have
kids in our 30s.)
But as awful as I felt, he had no idea how enraptured my soul was when he’d tell
me after we finished a 25-minute run: “I felt like I was going to die” but he had
kept going, never having left my side the entire way.
It was a small step, but, as us distance runners know, a huge one: Nothing helps
determine a distance runner’s progress as much as their ability to stick with another
runner who is running just a bit faster than they want to.
Running, we all learn, is as much about strengthening your mind, and will, as it is
your body and muscles.
Even if Tadhg could not articulate that, he seemed to understand it – or he was just
so stubborn he couldn’t let his old man drop him no matter how bad he felt, which
was fine by me!
He did seem to understand how hard his 57-year-old father was pushing himself to
push him, declaring one day after a particularly hard run in hot weather: “I think
this is better for you than me.” He wasn’t wrong.
At the end of the six weeks, with the four-day-a-week summer cross-country
workouts starting the second week in June, I asked him if we were going to
continue to run together on weekends at least?

“Oh no. No-no-no,” he said, waving his hand as if brushing the idea away. “I’ve
graduated from you.”
We haven’t run since. But, he has stayed true to his word and attended every school
workout he is able – even the ones that started for a week at 7 a.m. – and run on his
own two more days a week.
He seems to be growing into it. But he has not yet run a cross-country race. The
first race isn’t till late August. I really don’t know how that will go. But I feel like
the Jabberwock slayer’s dad again at the thought, “chortl[ing] in his joy!”
I’m just hoping one of his friends on the team is fast. I have a feeling Tadhg
wouldn’t let him drop him either.