NACAC X-C and P-K Profiles #1-- Pat McDermott
Weekend Racing--Dylan at NACAC X-C
This week, some racing to report on—Dylan’s sojourn to Jacksonville, FLA with the national X-C squad—and the first of a series of profiles on P-K athletes (see the next section below), which I think will be of interest to current members of the group in particular.
Dylan traveled with a full national team contingent to Florida this past weekend to compete at the North American, Central American, and Caribbean Athletic Association Championships. Participation at this event was meant to be a kind of dry run (dry being the operative word for an X-C race in South Florida at this time of year!) for the World Championships in Amman, Jordan at the end of the month. This championship is a relatively new one, and has been dominated, as it was again this year, by teams from the U.S. and Canada.
A midday start insured that the Senior Men’s race would be a warm one, with the temperature peaking in the low 80F range. The race started at a moderate pace before a U.S. runner made an early attempt to steal the race. Breaking alone from a chase group that included several of his Canadian teammates, Dylan caught the early leader before half way and proceeded to lead the race himself. Noticing that he was the lone red vest with four U.S. runners in tow, he settled into the group and let the Americans control the pace, hoping for strong final km to claim the championship. However, when eventual winner, American Stephen Pifer, initiated a strong push after 5k, Dylan found himself unable to cover and was forced to settle for 2nd, with the other Americans 5-20 seconds adrift in places 3 through 5. Despite feeling strong a fit during the race, Dylan felt the heat may have cost him in the final 10mins, and said he felt unwell for the rest of the day. It’s no secret to those of us who have been training at these latitudes this particular winter that conditions have not been optimal for preparing for fast race in the Floridian spring! All things considered, Dylan is well now placed to enter the next phase of his program, which will consist of a couple of more weeks of heavy sledding (figurative only, we’re hoping) here in Kingston before heading to California for the first of what we hope will be a series of 5 and 10k track races, also in California in late April/early May (much will depend on the results of this first race, as a mentioned in an earlier post). After this first race, Dylan will head to Flagstaff, Arizona for 5 weeks of warm weather/altitude training, during which he will be living and training with several other Canadians also aiming for fast track times in California. During his time in the desert, I will ask Dylan to send some posts, and perhaps some pictures, to include in this blog.
P-K Profiles #1—Pat McDermott:
Pat McDermott is 46 years old, and was a member of the club’s winning team in the men’s 40-49 division at the National X-C championships this past fall in Guelph, Ontario. He also happens to be , in a way, the group’s original member: he is the first athlete I ever coached.
Although I had known him as a competitor in high school—he at BCVCI in Belleville and me at Frontenac in Kingston— and despite our attending Queen’s University at the same time during the early/mid 80s, I did not really know Pat well, or run with him much, until we met by chance in Toronto, where we had both relocated for school in the fall of 1987—he in pursuit of a degree in Fine Art at York and I for graduate school in Political Science, also at York.
Pat had been a strong but generally under-performing high school runner, and had run for the team at Queen’s during his final year there. In between, however, he had been sidelined by a serious fracture of his kneecap, sustained in a fall while training during the summer before his entry into university. When we met in Toronto in the fall of 1987, I was struggling to make the transition from university standout to senior national team athlete and he was running casually, attempting to build on what he had started at Queen’s during his return to racing there the year before. Having been familiar with his results as an age-class runner, and having seen what he had been able to accomplish at Queen’s, in spite of several years without training following the knee injury, I suggested to him that, if he were willing to train a little harder and more systematically, he might be able to run some respectable times in the then fledgling Toronto area road race “circuit”.
Through that winter and into the spring, Pat and I ran and worked out together, with me setting the workouts for the two of us. Neither of us expected him to keep up with me in the faster sessions during those early days, but we enjoyed the company on easy runs, and talked a lot about our goals for the spring and summer, and beyond. When it came time to start the racing season I, as I so often did in the spring, found myself struggling with seasonal allergies. I decided to delay my own season, which, as it happened, gave me time to focus more on Pat’s preparation. I was able to travel to races with him, acting strictly as “coach” rather than as preoccupied competitor, and was able to observe how he dealt with the pressures of competition--which was: not well! Pat, as I say, had been a talented but underperforming high school athlete—partly, I would later learn, because of particularly poor coaching (of which a little more below), but also, I now realized, because of his debilitating pre-race nervousness (no doubt exacerbated by the poor coaching). It was only later, after a few years of working with other athletes, that I was able to realize just how much Pat had had to overcome in this respect in order to improve as much as he subsequently did.
Pat finished that first season of racing with a best performance of 31:25 for 10k. I still remember his incredulity when I suggested that, with a few more seasons of work, he might be able to run under 30mins. The stress and exhaustion he felt in running 90 secs slower than that made him skeptical about the possibility of going so much faster. A few more years of training and racing later—3 to be exact—he would break 30mins for 10k, and on the challenging Rosedale Valley course in Toronto, used for years by the Runner’s Choice Road Race series (now the Canada Running Series). Three years after that, he would run 29:22 for 10k, and would conclude his open career in 1996 at the age of 34 (and with 2 young children) with a top ten at the national 10k road race championships and personal bests of 14:07 for 5k and 1:05:32 for Half Marathon, to go with his 10k best. Having returned to the sport at the age of 24 following over 4 years of relative inactivity, he had forged senior elite career of which he could be proud for the rest of his life.
Pat relocated to Kingston in the summer of 2001 and now works as an art teacher at Frontenac High School. He also recently assumed the position of X-C and distance coach there. Pat and I often reflect on his experience and what we have both learned from it as coaches. In fact, Pat’s own motivation as a coach of school–age athletes is in part to ensure that other young athletes are not put off, or stunted in their development, by the kind of coaching he faced in his early days. His training was inappropriate to his athletic abilities and characteristics, focusing as it did on frequent, shorter and more intense training sessions but, nonsensically, on the longer race distances, the track 3000m in particular. But, more importantly, his coaches were emotionally unsupportive and insensitive to the point of abuse at times. He was to survive in the sport only by chance, and perhaps because of an intuitive sense of his own longer term potential, and has pledged to do his part to ensure that others have an easier road to success (or, simply, that they graduate with fonder memories of high school running). What I learned from Pat’s experience is that there is probably a wealth of latent talent sleeping in the bodies and minds of hundreds of disillusioned or unfortunate young former high school and university athletes, and that it is almost never too late or too difficult to coax that some of that talent into fruition. Neither of us believes that he was particularly rare in terms of his physical potential; many other athletes, some with perhaps much more talented than he, could, given the right opportunity, overcome their early experiences and likewise enjoy long and successful running careers.
This week, some racing to report on—Dylan’s sojourn to Jacksonville, FLA with the national X-C squad—and the first of a series of profiles on P-K athletes (see the next section below), which I think will be of interest to current members of the group in particular.
Dylan traveled with a full national team contingent to Florida this past weekend to compete at the North American, Central American, and Caribbean Athletic Association Championships. Participation at this event was meant to be a kind of dry run (dry being the operative word for an X-C race in South Florida at this time of year!) for the World Championships in Amman, Jordan at the end of the month. This championship is a relatively new one, and has been dominated, as it was again this year, by teams from the U.S. and Canada.
A midday start insured that the Senior Men’s race would be a warm one, with the temperature peaking in the low 80F range. The race started at a moderate pace before a U.S. runner made an early attempt to steal the race. Breaking alone from a chase group that included several of his Canadian teammates, Dylan caught the early leader before half way and proceeded to lead the race himself. Noticing that he was the lone red vest with four U.S. runners in tow, he settled into the group and let the Americans control the pace, hoping for strong final km to claim the championship. However, when eventual winner, American Stephen Pifer, initiated a strong push after 5k, Dylan found himself unable to cover and was forced to settle for 2nd, with the other Americans 5-20 seconds adrift in places 3 through 5. Despite feeling strong a fit during the race, Dylan felt the heat may have cost him in the final 10mins, and said he felt unwell for the rest of the day. It’s no secret to those of us who have been training at these latitudes this particular winter that conditions have not been optimal for preparing for fast race in the Floridian spring! All things considered, Dylan is well now placed to enter the next phase of his program, which will consist of a couple of more weeks of heavy sledding (figurative only, we’re hoping) here in Kingston before heading to California for the first of what we hope will be a series of 5 and 10k track races, also in California in late April/early May (much will depend on the results of this first race, as a mentioned in an earlier post). After this first race, Dylan will head to Flagstaff, Arizona for 5 weeks of warm weather/altitude training, during which he will be living and training with several other Canadians also aiming for fast track times in California. During his time in the desert, I will ask Dylan to send some posts, and perhaps some pictures, to include in this blog.
P-K Profiles #1—Pat McDermott:
Pat McDermott is 46 years old, and was a member of the club’s winning team in the men’s 40-49 division at the National X-C championships this past fall in Guelph, Ontario. He also happens to be , in a way, the group’s original member: he is the first athlete I ever coached.
Although I had known him as a competitor in high school—he at BCVCI in Belleville and me at Frontenac in Kingston— and despite our attending Queen’s University at the same time during the early/mid 80s, I did not really know Pat well, or run with him much, until we met by chance in Toronto, where we had both relocated for school in the fall of 1987—he in pursuit of a degree in Fine Art at York and I for graduate school in Political Science, also at York.
Pat had been a strong but generally under-performing high school runner, and had run for the team at Queen’s during his final year there. In between, however, he had been sidelined by a serious fracture of his kneecap, sustained in a fall while training during the summer before his entry into university. When we met in Toronto in the fall of 1987, I was struggling to make the transition from university standout to senior national team athlete and he was running casually, attempting to build on what he had started at Queen’s during his return to racing there the year before. Having been familiar with his results as an age-class runner, and having seen what he had been able to accomplish at Queen’s, in spite of several years without training following the knee injury, I suggested to him that, if he were willing to train a little harder and more systematically, he might be able to run some respectable times in the then fledgling Toronto area road race “circuit”.
Through that winter and into the spring, Pat and I ran and worked out together, with me setting the workouts for the two of us. Neither of us expected him to keep up with me in the faster sessions during those early days, but we enjoyed the company on easy runs, and talked a lot about our goals for the spring and summer, and beyond. When it came time to start the racing season I, as I so often did in the spring, found myself struggling with seasonal allergies. I decided to delay my own season, which, as it happened, gave me time to focus more on Pat’s preparation. I was able to travel to races with him, acting strictly as “coach” rather than as preoccupied competitor, and was able to observe how he dealt with the pressures of competition--which was: not well! Pat, as I say, had been a talented but underperforming high school athlete—partly, I would later learn, because of particularly poor coaching (of which a little more below), but also, I now realized, because of his debilitating pre-race nervousness (no doubt exacerbated by the poor coaching). It was only later, after a few years of working with other athletes, that I was able to realize just how much Pat had had to overcome in this respect in order to improve as much as he subsequently did.
Pat finished that first season of racing with a best performance of 31:25 for 10k. I still remember his incredulity when I suggested that, with a few more seasons of work, he might be able to run under 30mins. The stress and exhaustion he felt in running 90 secs slower than that made him skeptical about the possibility of going so much faster. A few more years of training and racing later—3 to be exact—he would break 30mins for 10k, and on the challenging Rosedale Valley course in Toronto, used for years by the Runner’s Choice Road Race series (now the Canada Running Series). Three years after that, he would run 29:22 for 10k, and would conclude his open career in 1996 at the age of 34 (and with 2 young children) with a top ten at the national 10k road race championships and personal bests of 14:07 for 5k and 1:05:32 for Half Marathon, to go with his 10k best. Having returned to the sport at the age of 24 following over 4 years of relative inactivity, he had forged senior elite career of which he could be proud for the rest of his life.
Pat relocated to Kingston in the summer of 2001 and now works as an art teacher at Frontenac High School. He also recently assumed the position of X-C and distance coach there. Pat and I often reflect on his experience and what we have both learned from it as coaches. In fact, Pat’s own motivation as a coach of school–age athletes is in part to ensure that other young athletes are not put off, or stunted in their development, by the kind of coaching he faced in his early days. His training was inappropriate to his athletic abilities and characteristics, focusing as it did on frequent, shorter and more intense training sessions but, nonsensically, on the longer race distances, the track 3000m in particular. But, more importantly, his coaches were emotionally unsupportive and insensitive to the point of abuse at times. He was to survive in the sport only by chance, and perhaps because of an intuitive sense of his own longer term potential, and has pledged to do his part to ensure that others have an easier road to success (or, simply, that they graduate with fonder memories of high school running). What I learned from Pat’s experience is that there is probably a wealth of latent talent sleeping in the bodies and minds of hundreds of disillusioned or unfortunate young former high school and university athletes, and that it is almost never too late or too difficult to coax that some of that talent into fruition. Neither of us believes that he was particularly rare in terms of his physical potential; many other athletes, some with perhaps much more talented than he, could, given the right opportunity, overcome their early experiences and likewise enjoy long and successful running careers.
posted by Steve at
14:19
4 Comments:
Nice profile of Pat. I knew some of his background but not the specifics (I knew he was fast, but did not realise just how fast he was). Sometimes what is not good for an athlete in terms of their own development is, in the long run, part of what makes them better coaches. Not the best for Pat while he was competing but many kids will benefit from Pat's history/experience.
You left out the part about the frustrating workouts where he drops to his knees with hands raised to the sky screaming "Faaaaaaa......."
Yes, I suppose I did. A very high-strung personality+ seasonal allergies/asthma= high drama on the beltline trail!
He also makes a mean dish of hummus.
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