By Garrett Heath

The end of an Olympic year is always a little bit different than most and seems like the natural time to re-assess where you’re at as an athlete and what the future holds.  Although the Olympic Trials didn’t play out exactly as I may have hoped, the process of running over this last year has taught me a lot about my dedication to the sport in general and refocused me for the season ahead. 
 
As the Trials were getting closer this last spring, my sponsor, Saucony, starting doing some videos to promote their add campaign, Find Your Strong.  Although I have been active and running for what seems like forever at this point, the question behind that campaign of “How do you find your strong?” kind of caught me off guard, because I didn’t have a great answer right away.  The more I thought about it on runs though (since, for better or worse, there is really nothing to do but think on many of these), the more I realized that it was not as much about exceling at the highest level in sports for me, but more about pushing my body to limits that I’ve never achieved before.  Although these are often be one in the same, it also extends to the feeling you get when finishing a hard workout or to triumph you have in any sport when you accomplish something that you didn’t know was possible.  For me, this has meant everything from first breaking the 4-minute mile, to climbing to the top of Mt. Evans (over 14,000’) on my bike with my family, to setting a PR last season in the 1500m, to simply feeling my body getting fit again over the last many weeks of training to start this season.  Finding this passion for what I am doing has been particularly important for me this year, as the chance at that Olympic dream has passed for another 4 years and I have had to decide whether or not to re-dedicate myself to this sport and training that many would consider crazy.  For now, I’ve decided that I have too many dreams left to chase as a professional runner to give it up, but I also know that whenever it is over, this passion will continue to push me to test my limits in whatever I do going forward.

http://www.bayareatrackclub.com/speaker/959-Garrett-Heath/video/643033-Garrett-Heath-pushing-body-to-new-limits
 
Secondly, this fall, as I finished up my own European racing season, I was given the opportunity to help coach at Stanford as a distance assistant.  While I always thought that coaching could be a rewarding and exciting path to pursue somewhere down the road, this fall made me realize how addicting it really is and how much running will continue to be apart of my life even after my own career winds down.  Even though there were many pieces to coaching that I quickly found out about that I never even knew existed as an athlete, the whole process from recruiting to implementing a training strategy to racing was totally consuming (in a good way) and a ton of fun to be apart of with the staff there.  I also quickly realized through our successes and failures of the fall how quickly you as a coach can start to become more invested in the team’s running than your own.  With that, even though my own training suffered a bit this fall, it was completely worth it in the long run.  Being apart of this collegiate team atmosphere again renewed my passion for the sport and helped me re-dedicate myself more than ever to another year of competitive running.  It also made me realize that, whether or not I coach again, my interest in running will not disappear with the end of my own running career.  There will always be others to follow and support.
 
Hopefully someday I will have the opportunity to coach again, but for now, I hope to use this renewed dedication and passion to take my own running as far as I can.