The Quiet Pulse of What Once Was

There are days. The quiet, bittersweet ones, when I miss coaching track with a kind of holy ache. Not just the whistle and making small adjustments to relay exchanges, or the monastic obsession with technique, but the entire absurd religion of it. The cathedral of the track, where sermons were preached in sweat, in muscles that felt like they pumped battery acid and PRs eked out by the grace of biomechanical nano-adjustments and sheer human will. Coaching wasn’t just work. It was devotion. A stubborn, beautiful masochism. It was my own personal evolution.

Over the years I was able to observe the athletes ridiculous optimism as well as stand by them in solidarity after tough losses. It was their unwavering trust and their savage work ethic that kept us both moving forward. They were machines, but not in the soulless way. They were sentient engines of obsession, building themselves one gear at a time, breakdown by breakdown, over months and years, just to have a chance at one transcendent moment.

It was madness.

But mostly, it was magnificent.

I miss the relationships forged in the furnace of training. The silent nods after brutal reps. The tears shed in training returning from an injury. The trust built not in words but in the shared sacred ritual of doing hard things, together, day after day. We spent years dancing with defeat, flirting with greatness, all for the opportunity to be the best. It wasn’t glamorous. It was an absurd, glorious toil.

You don’t build bonds like that by accident. You earn them in the deep end of failure, in the ragged breath of a rep no one wanted to do but everyone did anyway. There’s an intimacy in shared pursuit that most people will never experience because they’re simply unwilling to trust themselves to go for it. And when it works, when an athlete finally breaks through, it’s as if the soul steps forward, unburdened by the weight of the world, and dares to be seen. Those moments of glory are for the few. And I was blessed by the Divine to have athletes that believed enough in themselves, and in me, to see the few transform into many.

Now, as I’m on the outside looking in, I find myself in a strange kind of grief. Not the loud, obvious kind. No, this grief is subtle, steeped in gratitude, wrapped in the quiet knowing that the chapter has been closed. This grief has build a home in my soul in the way I watch athletes get in the blocks and think, “Damn. They’re leaving time on the clock. If I could only get a few sessions with them.” I still feel it. Like its the muscle memory of a passion that has no destination to land.

I miss it.

I miss all of it.

I miss seeing athletes pour all of their being into an unreasonably difficult pursuit, fueled by belief, and confidence, and something that looked a lot like love.

I miss the days watching athletes trust the process fully, no questions asked. They were steady metronomes of purpose.

I miss watching them become more than they thought they could be.

I miss being the shepherd of that chaos.

I miss my fellow coaches I was blessed to learn from and collaborate with. The ones who spoke in the same fluent obsession as I did, those who measured time in training cycles and moral victories, who knew that real mentorship often looked more like getting in the mud with them rather than pulling them out.. We were monks of athletic development in mismatched gear, trading gospel over split times and the nuances of technique. We were united not by ambition alone, but by an unspoken oath to give enough space for meaning to rise from the work. In those years we were the craftsmen behind the scenes. With them I felt accepted for who I was, in ways words never quite suffice.

Coaching lived beyond the confines of reason, fueled by something turbulent. In all of it’s beautiful madness, I found communion with athletes who gave me their trust when I had only conviction to offer. They let me into the sacred architecture of their ambition. They allowed me see them hope, break, and rebuild. Not just their bodies, but something quieter, deeper; in their belief in themselves and of each other.

And they loved me back. Not in grand gestures, but in the way they listened when it mattered, in how they showed up when it would’ve been easier not to, in how they carried the work like it meant something. Because it did.

That kind of mutual trust is rare. It forms like roots do. Under the warmth of the sun as well as storms. Tangled in the depths of the soil. Woven together by shared purpose and the quiet pull of belief.

I don’t take that lightly. I never have. That is the part that still lives in my soul today, thumping like a pulse, quiet but constant.

I am forever grateful for those years. Those days and those athletes shaped me as much as I shaped them. Chiseling away my ego, dialing in on my purpose, teaching me that dedication is a two way mirror. I am who I am today because they were vulnerable enough to allow me to walk beside their flame and in doing so, they lit my own.