One day at school I remember listening intently as my teacher and the priest, a man I’ll call Father McBride, tried to explain to a room full of nine year olds how the Holy Trinity worked. “Well, God is God, but God is also Jesus,” the priest droned. “But God is also the Holy Spirit, and Jesus is the Holy Spirit, too.”
My young mind struggled around this three-in-one idea. Really, none of it made any sense to me. At home, whenever I was confused about something my parents encouraged me to ask questions. I found that doing so usually alleviated my confusion and I approached the Holy Trinity this same way. In class I raised my hand and said, “This doesn’t make any sense. There is no way for one thing to be three separate things or three things to be one thing.”
With a furrow of his brow Father replied, “You must have faith that it can be so.”
I raised my hand again. “But how can I have faith that any of these three things exist if I’ve never seen them, much less that they all exist together and are separate at the same time?” I’m sure my argument wasn’t quite that well put together at the age of nine, but you get the idea.
Father’s response was simply, “Have faith, my son.”
It seemed that any time I had a question about anything in the Catholic Church, that was the default response. Have faith. I continued over the next days and weeks to ask questions during religion class as I tried to make sense out of what I was being taught, but never got anywhere.
Eventually my teacher stopped calling on me, but I still talked to my parents about what I learned in class when we sat around the dinner table. Lauren was two years behind me in school and listened intently to our discussions. “I like stories about Jesus,” I said one night. “He seemed really nice, but it doesn’t make sense to me that he was the Son of God, and at the same time God, too. And then also, at the same time, the Holy Spirit.” My parents always encouraged Lauren and me to come to our own conclusions, and to that end gave a brief history of Christianity and what it meant to be a Christian.
One day not too long after this, Father McBride visited my sister’s class and began to give the same lecture that he had given my class. When he got to the Holy Trinity part my sister raised her hand and said, “My brother doesn’t believe in the Holy Trinity.”
The priest looked my seven-year-old sister in the eyes and said, “Then pray for his soul, because he will not be going to heaven.”
You can imagine how Lauren took the news that her big brother would not be joining her in the “eternal kingdom.” She began to cry and no amount of consoling comforted her. Eventually school staff called Mom and she came to school, probably right from her own teaching job, to get Lauren to stop crying. With her arms wrapped around Mom, Lauren cried, “Nick will never go to heaven!” and explained what had happened.
Infuriated, Mom stormed into Father McBride’s office. “How dare you? Telling my daughter that her brother isn’t going to heaven!”
“Your son does not believe in the Holy Trinity and therefore is not Catholic,” he said. “Not only will he not be going to heaven, he is no longer welcome at my communion rail.”
Father’s holier-than-thou attitude was absolutely the wrong way to talk to Ma Symmonds. In a tone that could raise the hair on your neck my mother leaned over the priest’s desk and said, “My son is a baptized Catholic and if he wants to receive communion you will give it to him. We both know you do not have the power to excommunicate him. You can count on me being at mass this Friday with my son.” With that, she stormed out of his office.
It is no secret that I have always had some trouble with authority. Though I sometimes wonder when my disdain for rule makers and enforcers began, I never wonder where it came from. My mother is an extremely confident woman who calls it like she sees it, and is quick to speak out against any injustice. She raised me to do the same and has always had my back when I speak up for what I believe in.
Lauren and I remained in the Catholic school system, but our relationship with the church was never the same. A church that told a seven-year-old girl her brother was going to hell, a church that could not take time to answer a confused question from a nine-year-old, was a church we wanted no part of. Years later, as they took a hard line on women’s rights, gay marriage, and covered up dozens of child molestation cases, we were pretty pleased with our decision to distance ourselves from the Catholic Church.
2
Although my initial exposure to religion had been rough, my exposure to sports had been life changing. My parents encouraged me to try many sports and were quick to sign me up for any team I showed interest in. I tried many, and found my first real love to be soccer. Like so many kids in the United States, I grew up running around in a recreational league wearing one of those mustard/ketchup reversible jerseys.
I was fast and had decent ball handling skills, and at the age of eleven was picked up by a traveling team called the Boise Capitals. For several years I was competitive in this league, usually playing forward. I loved to score goals and lived for the breakaway. This exciting play pits a sole attacker against the goalkeeper in a one-on-one, and I loved every second of it.
Often, I parked myself at half-field and patiently waited for one of our defenders to kick the ball over everyone’s head. Then, evenly positioned with the other team’s larger, slower defenders, I’d break off in a sprint to beat them to the ball. Early on there were very few people I couldn’t beat in a footrace.
However, toward the end of middle school, that started to change. All the kids I used to be able to beat were suddenly beating me. Though I had always been small for my age, I was suddenly tiny in comparison with the kids around me. They were clearly going through puberty, and I clearly was not. I found myself getting less and less playing time in soccer games, and instead, frequently rode the bench. It infuriated me that I was working as hard or harder than my teammates and not getting equal playing time. Though I didn’t know it then, it was partly for my own safety that my four-foot-ten, ninety pound self wasn’t often allowed on the playing field.
One hot August day, just before I began my eighth grade year, I voiced my soccer frustrations to two friends as we sat by our local pool. My friends had just signed up for the cross-country team and suggested I do the same. Normally I would have laughed at the idea of “running for fun,” but these weren’t just any two friends. Rather, I was lounging poolside with the two prettiest girls in my class. I had a huge crush on one of them and would have gone out for the dance team if she had asked me to. Hormones had recently kicked in and I found the opposite sex fascinating.
As soon as I got home I told my parents that I wanted to run cross-country that fall. As always, my parents were supportive. Just as they had done with my interests in golf, hockey, and skiing, they made sure I had all the gear I needed. In hindsight, they were probably relieved to find that all I needed for cross-country was a new pair of running shoes.
From the first day of practice I could tell two things about my new sport. One, co-ed practices were awesome, and two, distance running sucked. I quickly got to know many people on the team and liked most of them, but the idea that we were going to run, for an extended period of time with no real purpose, seemed absurd to me.
We often practiced with the high school team and one afternoon, before our scheduled workout, a senior girl asked if I wanted to buy one of the T-shirts they were having made. She showed me a mock up of the shirt. On the front it read BISHOP KELLY XC (which was the name of our high school) and on the back, OUR SPORT IS YOUR SPORT’S PUNISHMENT.
Are you serious? I thought. That’s exactly what this is: punishment. Why in the world are we doing this? I was just about to say this to her when, as if on cue, the girl I had joined the team for said, “I want one.” Immediately, I echoed, “Oh, yeah, me too!”
I showed up at cross-country practice every day after school excited about the social aspect of being on the team, but dreading the athletic part. My teammates kept telling me how much fun the meets wer
e, but I secretly dreaded them. I got nervous before soccer games, but calmed my fears with the knowledge that a bad performance reflected on the entire team, not just me. On the other hand, if I ran poorly, there was no one to blame but myself. I imagined people laughing at me and asking how I could be so good at the mile in P.E. class, but so bad at cross-country running.
As the first meet neared I began to think of ways I could get out of it. Surely if I throw up during class they won’t make me run. If I twist my ankle during the warm up I bet Coach will let me out of racing.
I expressed my concerns to my mom and she told me not to worry, to just have fun with the race. “Win, lose, or draw, just make sure you are the one to shake everyone’s hand and congratulate them after the race,” she said.
Her words did little to ease my nerves, and my concerns ran through my head all the way until the moment I toed the start line. With a bang the gun went off and several hundred middle school kids took off in a sprint. Once I was running, my mind calmed and I simply ran. I keyed off the other kids and every so often did a check to see how my heart, lungs, and legs were feeling. With only a half-mile to go I found myself nearing the lead. Though my legs and lungs ached, I took off in a sprint. To my surprise, the pain didn’t increase. Instead, my legs simply went numb. This numbness quickly took over my entire body and I rigged hard in the final stretches of the race. I was passed just meters away from the finish line, but managed to hold on for second place.
Apparently, the boy who beat me had built up a pretty big name for himself as a distance runner in the southern part of the state and people were surprised to see me, a newcomer, this close to him. When I crossed the line people ran over to congratulate me. “Who is this kid?” people asked. Boys shook my hand and girls came up to talk to me.
Several years of riding the bench in soccer and struggling to figure out how to connect with the opposite sex had left my self-esteem in tatters. I felt my peers had left me behind socially and I wondered how I would ever catch up. That day, as I looked around and saw the respect and admiration I so desperately craved, I began to wonder if running could ultimately help me get all that I wanted in life.
To put this idea to the test, I knew I needed to continue with competitive running. As hard as it was for me to do so, this led me to skip tryouts for the high school soccer team my freshman year so I could run cross-country instead. Many of my friends, however, weren’t sure that was a good idea.
“Distance running is lame!” they said.
“You are a good soccer player and will have way more fun playing soccer,” my soccer teammates said.
“Soccer players are the most popular kids in school. Can’t say that for the cross-country runners,” some girls laughed.
Still, there was something about the unity of the cross-country team, the fact that everyone got equal playing time, and that all my hard work would pay me dividends. I liked that. I stuck with my gut and showed up for the first day of cross-country practice. As expected, I had a love-hate relationship with high school cross-country from day one. Of course, I still loved the coed practices and cherished being part of a team.
I also really liked our coach, Tom Shanahan. Tom was a young, energetic Irishman who had run distance for Boise State University. He was tough at times, but he loved us and never pushed us beyond our limits. I really didn’t like practice and he could tell. More often than not I sat in the back of the group as he explained the workout while I looked at the ducks or geese walking by. If I did manage to keep my attention toward practice it was only to check out the girls in their Spandex. Of course, this always led to me having no idea what the workout for the day actually was, and I invariably messed it up.
On one very memorable occasion, I recall Coach saying something about hill repeats, but tuned out how many or for how long. I started on the first repeat and ran until I was tired and then turned around and walked back down. At the bottom, waiting for me, was Coach Shanahan and his wild Irish accent.
“Ye were ’sposta run ta da green three!”
“Huh?” I replied, trying to catch my breath. “Da green three!
Da green three!” he shouted pointing at a nice looking green tree on the side of the road about 300 meters away.
“Ahhh, you mean the green tree. Yeah, I’ll run to the tree next time, Coach.” I responded as irreverently as possible.
Though I had grown to love Coach Shanahan in just a few short weeks, my disdain for authority ran deep. I knew he was working hard to help me accomplish goals I had set for myself. However, anytime someone told me to do something it set me off inside. Needless to say, I would not have done well in the military.
Thankfully, Coach Shanahan has always been a very patient man. He often allowed me to be a part of the decision making process when it came to my races so that I felt I wasn’t being controlled or bossed around. On that particular day near the hill and the green tree, Coach Shanahan just laughed, rolled his eyes, and said, “Git yer arse movin’.”
Coach worked hard to prepare us and we worked hard to avoid running. Often, on our easy days, we left the track at Bishop Kelly High School and ran to the nearby shopping mall to get free food samples. Other days we ran to nearby Borah High School where we jumped the fence to swim in their beautiful outdoor pool. Occasionally, if we were running along the Boise River, we stopped at a rope swing to play around for a few minutes before getting back to our run. In those days, training never seemed as important as having a good time.
The camaraderie I felt on the cross-country team kept me coming back each day. I still had not gained an appreciation for distance running, but goofing around at practice with everyone made it tolerable.
I played club soccer in the spring of my freshman year of high school, but in the middle of every practice, every game, I wondered what kind of times I could be running on the track. Coach Shanahan wondered the same thing and urged me to join the track team my sophomore year. I struggled with the decision to give up soccer completely, but after my first track season all of my reservations about switching sports disappeared. In cross-country I was good, but on the track I was great.
In cross-country everyone competes at the same distance. In high school that distance is typically 5,000 meters, just over three miles, and is run over grass, dirt, and asphalt. Though I was a decent distance runner, my soccer background had developed a certain amount of explosive speed in my legs. This kind of power is better suited for hard surfaces and shorter distances. On the track, events were contested from lengths of 100 meters up to two miles––and everything in between. I quickly found several distances I was built for.
That first year, as a sophomore, I finished second at the Idaho State Championships at 800 meters. I did not it know at the time, but I would not lose another 800 meter final for seven years. That same year I finished very well in the mile and the two-mile. By the time I completed high school I had racked up nine state championships in events ranging from the 4x400 meter relay all the way up to 5,000 meter cross-country.
With this success came the attention and recognition I had always wanted. Though I was small for most of my high school career, five-foot-flat at the outset, guys now treated me with respect. And, while many of the girls were much taller, they flirted with me during and after school. I was too incompetent to do much with their attention, but I appreciated their efforts nonetheless.
Like many teenage boys, I had sex on the brain most of the time. My mind constantly wandered to girls who were in my class and at practice. I recall being absolutely tortured about finding out what breasts felt like. It was terrible to want something so badly, and to have no idea how to obtain it.
As a late bloomer, it was apparent to me that most guys in my class were more advanced than I was when it came to the opposite sex. When I did hang out with a girl, it was almost always with one who was much younger. I felt more comfortable around younger girls, because I hoped they were as inexperienced as I was. Usually we spent our time together
holding hands and watching movies. Occasionally, I worked up the nerve to kiss one goodnight. For the most part, that was the extent of my high school love life.
Fortunately, I had sports. I threw all of my teenage angst and frustration into whatever sport was in season, and usually played at least two simultaneously. In the fall I ran cross-country and hunted upland game birds with my dad. In the winter I was on both the ice hockey and ski teams. In the spring I ran track and biked. Summers were devoted to all things outdoors, as Boise is the perfect place for hiking, boating, and fishing. I was also very active in scouting and, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, had the honor of becoming an Eagle Scout.
My family has given me many things, but of all their gifts the one I will always be most grateful for is the passion they instilled in me for the outdoors. From as early as I can remember, each weekend we went out to explore the mountains and rivers of the Northwest. We hiked, biked, rafted, fished, and climbed almost every surface in southern Idaho. When I was young I appreciated all the time that I got to spend with my family and the fact that my need for adventure was satiated each weekend. However, as I got older, I began to realize that the outdoors had become much more than a playground to me. It had become my church.
Today I feel most grounded and most connected to something larger than myself when I am climbing a tall mountain or chasing a big fish. These moments remind me of my grandfather teaching me how to cast my first fly rod, and of canoe trips down the windy Snake River with my little sister giggling behind me. In times of both joy and frustration, I turn to the wilderness to calm me, and remind me of my place in this world.
Aside from providing me with the spiritual side that formal religion never could, my passion for the outdoors kept me out of trouble, helped me make friends, and gave me a sense of identity. Though distance running was intrinsically linked to the outdoors, it still ranked right at the bottom of my list of favorite things to do. However, I knew deep down that it was the sport I was best at. I didn’t love it, yet, but I was curious to see where it could take me.
Life Outside the Oval Office: The Track Less Traveled Page 2
