My New Family: A Family of Choice

RunningWorks Team pre Thunder Road Marathon with 5 full marathoners and 6 half marathoners

Time after time, I have written about the important role my family plays in my life. The stability I’ve always found at home has been the initial driving force for my success and happiness as a person and an athlete. That is why I am so excited to share this passion with a new family, a family I feel very much a vital part of now and who I would miss terribly on any given day just like I do my own. Now, don’t get too worried that I am abandoning my family of origin! I have simply found a purpose greater than myself with RunningWorks in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I am really looking forward to spending my first Thanksgiving with these special individuals.

For those of you who are not privy to who my RunningWorks family is, most of our men, women and children aged four to 60 years are homeless, jobless, severely impoverished or suffering from abuse, abandonment or neglect of some kind. The very fact that they choose to spend their time with us is a gift: a gift of time and trust that we will mentor them in their path to better lives. Trust is not something to be taken with a grain of salt with this population, and I am honored to among the few who get to spend time with all of them on a daily basis, let alone the upcoming Thanksgiving Holiday.

At RunningWorks, we speak often during our life skill sessions about “family of choice” since many of our men, women and children have been forsaken by those many of us hold most dear. Thanksgiving is a time I have spent in reverie with my own family grateful for what an incredible gift God has given me. Take for one moment and imagine a life on the streets, in a shelter, severely disadvantaged—or all of the above and completely estranged from your family on a day celebrated for kinship. For some, it causes depression and loneliness.

Since its inception three years ago, RunningWorks has offered a solution to the solitude of Thanksgiving for its team members with several options, which are open to everyone on the team at all its programs. I am so excited to be a part of the fourth annual Thanksgiving activities with my new family of choice. This Thursday, we have been invited to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s (UNCC) Center City campus for a homemade feast prepared by its faculty and staff for all Community Works programs from the Urban Ministry Center where our program was founded. This includes homeless men and women from RunningWorks, StreetSoccer945, as well as art, choir and gardening. From what I have heard, it is quite magical and even includes a choir, which I will love! Charlotte never ceases to amaze me with their effort to make the homeless feel “a part of” the city rather than outcasts despite what you may read.

Thanksgiving 2014 at RW's Program Director Laura Foust's soup kitchen

On Thanksgiving Day, we will have a feast at our RW Program Director Laura Foust’s regular weekly soup kitchen, where she is the chef every Thursday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. They make our team feel special each year with a huge table set for 40-plus, flowers and blue-and-white napkins, etc. (our RW colors). To give a frame of reference, Chuck, a RW regular and team member since April 2012 who recently moved to D.C. for the winter since he is not “shelter eligible” here in Charlotte, made the trek home to us so he could run the Thunder Road Marathon with eleven RunningWorks teammates this past weekend and stay to spend Thanksgiving with his “family”. Those were his priorities and he was dead set on getting here.

Chuck at "The Wall", mile 20 Thunder Road Marathon

It really made an impression. Not only did it blow me away that Chuck completed his second marathon in two consecutive years yesterday (after having run the half marathon in 2013!), but also that he is one of the key organizers of our festivities in the coming weeks. He wants it to be special. He is intent on everyone being there and cared for and loved. Upon meeting Chuck last year, I never would have thought him to be the sentimental type. He has been on the street for eight years and is kind of a loner; yet, there is a spring in his step right now making me the most grateful I have been in a long time. I am more assured than ever that running works.

Happy Thanksgiving from our Family to Yours!

#RWTeam post marathon exhausted but still loving each other in Romare Bearden Park

No Greater Joy...

CCDS Bucs State Championship XC Team

            The last 14 weeks have flown by faster than I ever imagined.  After my surgery and time completely off in the months of June and July, August came and brought a type of joy I have never experienced before—my first team coaching experience.  I have helped many individuals with their running over the years and volunteered with various teams and groups of runners.  However, working with the Charlotte Country Day School cross-country team brought a fresh, new experience for me as a runner that I will take with me for the rest of my life.

            Coaching in a team setting is a very complex, challenging task.  The amount of moving parts and pieces to the overall team puzzle that factor into daily practices and weekly competitions are very hard to explain unless you have coached a team of your own.  Luckily, I am part of a coaching staff that has a mix of personalities and skills that helped make our team a unit, and solidified opportunities for me to learn and grow virtually every day at practice.  The planning and time spent trying to help each individual athlete reach his or her full potential was a mental battle that I have never experienced myself as an athlete.  A coach can only want so much for his athlete to succeed, and the rest is left up to the individual to take it upon herself to carry the rest of the weight of the task at hand. 

            Competing is why I love being an athlete.  The races are the test that measure the product of the plan and course of action in an athlete’s daily commitment to the sport.  The coach guides this process and the product is out of the coach’s hand as the day of the race approaches.  This fact is what makes the sport of running so beautiful to me.  I can’t do anything for my athletes on the day of the race except instill the confidence in them that I know they are ready to perform.

            Our final test of this 2015 XC season was on Friday at the State Championship cross-country meet here in Charlotte, North Carolina--on our home course at McAlpine Creek Park.  We compete in the 3A division of the North Carolina Independent Schools Athletic Association (NCISAA).  There were 21 teams that competed in each of the boys and girls championship races.  The CCDS boys team was ranked 9^th and the CCDS girls team was ranked 7^th going into Friday’s meet.  Cross-Country is a very unique sport in the fact that every place in the race matters, every runner is important, and every second can make or break your teams’ success.  A prime example of this was shown in the results of our two teams at the state meet.  Our boys finished 7^th as a team with 185 points, however, both the 5^th and 6^th place teams had a score of 184.  We tied our highest finish ever as a team at the state meet, but just two points separated up from the elite top 5 spots in the state.  Our girls team finished 11^th as a team with 250 points, however the 9^th and 10^th place teams each had 247 points.  Although we had some injury and sickness that plagued our girls’ team late in the season, only 3 points separated us from a final top 10 ranking. 

Junior Ella Dunn kicking to a 3rd place overall finish with a time of 19:12.

            I cannot express or put into words how proud I am of our team.  The first time trial of the season in August had me thinking that it would have been great progress to just field a team on both sides that just finished the 5k distance, and we proved that we can compete with some of the best teams in the state by season's end.  I hope that our athletes learned about training and taking care of their bodies this season.  I hope that our athletes learned how to push themselves beyond what their minds thought they could achieve.  But most importantly, it was beautiful to see this group transformed as actual runners within a few short months--truly enjoying the sport and working towards a goal greater than themselves individually and as a team. I know I will carry this piece of the sport with me forever--these months with my fellow coaches as well as the boys and girls of Charlotte Country Day School--and I cannot wait until 2016 for XC season to kick-off once again.  The Bucs will be in force greater than ever before, and I will be lucky enough to have a front row seat. Go Bucs!