Michelle Renner's Run of Courage

Michelle Renner's Run of Courage. 

 On Friday May 11th at the St. Vrain Invitational in Longmont....the depth of the clouds blocking out the sun bestowed a cool and dark evening for over a hundred student athletes waiting to run their final 1600m race of the 2018 regular season. For many it was a final chance to run fast enough to make the 2018 State Championship in the coming week.

For Michelle Renner the overcast clouds and cool darkness of the evening was fitting. Standing with her coach, family and a couple of teammates, the darkness consumed her unlike anytime in her four year career. The tears welled up inside and burst from her eyes. Tears; the evidence of the pressure of the end, the evidence of the daunting task before her. Michelle had reached a breaking point, and their was nothing left of her strength to hold on to. She had reached the end.

It was a week before, May 1st... where the end had begun.

The text read...
" Hi Stenny I'm sorry it's so late, but i'm very certain I have the flu, my stomach has been bad all day long and I thought I just had a head clod but my body is aching and I have chills, I don't know what this would mean for tomorrow and I wanna see how I feel but as of right now i'm not doing well at all". 

Coaching is a lot of things. But chiefly its a counseling and decision making role. In our sport, your not deciding plays and game plans and whether to go for it on fourth down or not. Instead its managing student-athletes energy systems and emotions.

In Michelle's case...I knew the aim...Make the State meet, finish in the biggest race of the year and somehow make it under 5:10 to give her a potential bump in scholarship at the University of Wyoming in the coming fall.  After reading the text... I sat and thought about the best possible way to accomplish this.

Step one...We dropped the 3200m League race and waited to see how she felt the coming Saturday at League.

Step two...She arrived that Saturday for day 2 of the league meet in tears and frustration and terribly sick. We scratched the 1600m race, talked through the reasoning. Needing some type of workout we both settled on running the 800 and 400 in the 4x400 for the day. It wasn't pretty but she did it. I left that day wondering if she could regain confidence enough to race and make a go at getting a better qualifying time.

But also in my mind was my own story. 21 years ago...I finished my high school career sick, unable to summon the energy I wanted to write the end of the narrative that I wanted. I couldn't help but feel a very personal sense of sadness that her great career may end on the shores of despair as my had.

Step three...Where to race? With Jefferson County asking us to put our best kids in the Jeffco Elite meet, I had a decision to make. Go against the grain or stay with it? The 1600m at Jeffco Elite was not deep enough in talent for her to run what she needed. Nor was it an opportune time. The race being Wednesday allowed for no time to recover from her sickness. It was an easy no. We had one option. The St. Vrain Invite that Friday allowed for a deep and fast field of entrants and gave us the thing we needed the most...time. 

Michelle suffered through her workout that Tuesday. As her in conference rival Carley Bennett watched, Michelle gamely ran 400m in 75, rested 6 minutes...then ran 79 for 400m. She finished with two 200m reps at 30 and 31...and it was then I knew she still had something. There was still something left. She left the workout skeptical and drained though. Was her career possibly finishing with a desperate and ill advised attempt that Friday or with no race at all?
 I decided that night...no matter what I felt like she should run the race regardless of outcome. "Fight to the end" I told her that afternoon.... instead of any possible regrets and wonderings... she should "die with her boots on" instead of hoping for someone else to falter she should go out and earn what she wanted no matter the circumstances. A couple days went bye. 

Friday morning I received another text.  It was from Anne Renner. It was dire.

Michelle was in full emotional meltdown mode. The pressure too much. The fear all encompassing. The prospect of failure to large to handle. The performance anxiety crushing her athletic soul.  They wanted me to decide what to do.

I stayed the course. Die with our boots on. Fight and scratch to the end. Never Never Give up.

So there we stood under cloudy, dark and foreboding skies. Michelle melting down before my eyes.

What transpired over the next hour was was pure magic. I coached. Michelle ran. In the end it was everything we hoped for and more. We went to the brink of having a narrative of despair and regret. We stared it right in the face and neither Michelle nor I blinked. Instead, the story is one of athletic greatness and courage amidst difficult circumstances.... and it is a fitting end to an incredible career.

Her 5:11.41 1600m performance was the epitome of courage and clutch. She would have been knocked out of the State meet without it. She was more scared to actually run that race then any race I had ever seen her run in her career here. It was made all the more incredible, in that the final 500m of the race she ran with one shoe. Easily the performance of her career under the circumstances.

Michelle Renner left everything on the track to make it to State this year. 

The story of Michelle's trip to the State meet this year is one I will never forget. However, there is larger lesson to be gleaned from it.  The point might be that having courage in it's truest form, is something we need to strive for again. I find that our culture has lost courage as one of our deepest and best virtues. Michelle fought herself to the bitter end before saddling up and getting out on the line to make an attempt at finishing her career the way she wanted.

 The virtue of courage is one we need when you hate your job. When you take an exam, when you go off to college, or middle school. Or when you want a date with someone. Yeah it's mundane stuff, but it takes courage to face all sorts of general situations in life, including the aftermath of failure and sometimes even success.

But it is the really BIG things I think about when I see kids translate inner courage into their athletics and school. I think about if the student-athlete can have athletic or academic courage then hopefully that will translate to courage after losing a job, after broken relationships, after losing a loved one, after a diagnosis and after the first round of treatment and so on and so forth.

As a coach, it is my hope to see our kids make the basic and general step of being courageous in competition and classroom and know that they will then need to call on that  courage when life gets harder and has deeper meaning in the future. Michelle's race is but one anecdotal coaching story on athletic courage. Lets hope we all take it into account and use it to guide us when we need to find our own courage with the mundane and the big.