4 Years Later by Ben Willey

Let me introduce myself. My name is Ben Willey and I’m from a small town in Pennsylvania, I’m a junior Physics Major at Trinity, and this is the first summer I’ve been able to do actual cross country training in four years thanks to a string of a few chronic injuries. To put it into perspective, the last summer I was training I was just old enough to rent R-rated movies, and now I’m old enough to legally drink. So while I’ve matured a lot since the summer of 2011, I’m still a kid at heart, and it’s been great being able to embrace my inner 5-year old that would love to run laps around the inside of my house. Somehow I’ve almost made it all the way through summer training. Here’s what it’s looked like.

This summer one of my classmates and I obtained a paid position doing research with one of my physics professors. Not only was this a great opportunity from an academic standpoint, it was also a great opportunity to learn how to deal with the heat of a Texas summer. After going home for a few days to catch up with my parents and enjoy some 60 degree weather, I was headed back to San Antonio. My teammate and roommate for that summer, Taylor Piske, picked me up from the airport at 1:30 in the morning after I’d experienced some lengthy delays in Houston, and we set off on to the adventures of our summer.

After a long day of moving into the dorms, we got a run in and set off to do one of the hardest things a college student has to do, get groceries. We got some fairly healthy foods in addition to a half gallon of ice cream and began the grind of work and summer training. Despite the fact that Taylor was running almost twice as much as I was, we managed to do quite a bit of running together. This was very helpful for each of us. Getting out of bed over the summer is hard enough, so having a running buddy made things much more doable. While we didn’t enjoy every moment of the actual running, we definitely had a good time joking, storytelling, and gossiping during our runs. Those runs certainly did wonders for our legs and lungs, but the bond we formed during them did even more for our morale. 

Taylor and I probably spent just as much time running as we did playing RockBand. The Captain Crunch was a one time treat, though.

So I kind of skipped over it, but I have in fact been unable to run competitively for almost 4 years now. In August 2011, a week or two before school started, I noticed I had a lot of trouble swinging my right leg forward. I had strained my glute and had to take a few weeks off of running, but I did run a few races that season, although they were mediocre performances. Shortly after that season ended I developed a case of runner’s knee and was sidelined for about 7 months, so I missed that track season. As my knee began to feel better I noticed there was no pain when I ran barefoot. I then made the boneheaded move of running in Vibram 5-Fingers and a month later I had achilles tendonitis. This caused me to miss my entire senior year of running and the summer before I went to Trinity consisted of 6 hours of physical therapy every week. Upon starting my freshman year, I was doing about 20 miles of week of easy running and in all honesty my body was still a wreck. I never raced my freshman year and by that spring I had the tightest hip flexors in the world and a real stiff left hamstring. At that point I left the track team and told myself my competitive running days were over.

During my sophomore year at Trinity I began seeing a chiropractor after a friend from back home had recommended I do so. It certainly wasn’t an instance fix, but during the spring of this year I began going on a few short runs. To my surprise, my hips were loose and could produce an actual running stride. I also found I was able to pick the pace up on my runs quite a bit without doing any extra harm to my body. Shortly before finals I mentioned to Coach Daum that I was interested in running on the team again, and I only have a week left before I’ll be heading back to practice with the team.

Overall, my training this summer has gone better than I expected. At times it felt like my body was falling apart, but I’ve kept things together more or less. It’s certainly been difficult getting back into to actual mileage, although I can say that I’m much happy grinding through summer training that sitting on a couch. I realize getting back into racing will be yet another challenge, yet I’m happy to have the opportunity. Only time will tell whether or not I will make it through the season injury free, but I’m going to give it my best shot to stay on the coolest team at Trinity. GO TIGERS!

And lastly, let me share a couple of my adventures of my vacation in Colorado!!

This road was a blast to run down with these beautiful views, but at 10,000 feet above sea level it was a struggle to run up.

For the second year in a row, I road my bike to the top of Loveland Pass. This year I made it to the top five minutes faster than the year before. It’s no surprise, but it looks like running has helped me make leaps and bounds in my overall fitness.