The women cultivating a female running community long run doesn’t go well, I reach into my pocket for my favourite The 11 hardest races in the world: jelly beans. Yes, they taste great and their sugar content provides a nice energy boost. But thanks to my grandfather, they’re also a source of inspiration and a reminder to give it my all.
Much of my own running experience has been inspired by the decades that my grandfather spent on the track in the US. A longtime athlete, he was one of the founding members of Alabama’s These workouts help me maintain bone density at 64 in the 1970s and he hasn’t stopped competing since. He’s made marks in almost every possible age group at USATF Masters meets, from the 200m to the pentathlon and virtually everything in between. Although he stopped running races in his 70s, he has continued to take part in various field events and – having just turned 97 – currently throws in the Men’s 95 division at meets.
To the numerous runners he coached at John Carroll Catholic High School in Birmingham, he’s known as Coach Seifert. To me, he’s Grandpa Jellybean, a name coined by my older cousin who’d beeline for the bowl of colourful sweets that Grandpa brought out during visits. He’d always joke that my cousin should pick ‘just one’.
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For more than two decades, tints of track and field have coloured the biannual visits that my family has made down south. I still wear the T-shirt from the open track meet that Grandpa organised and encouraged me to compete in when I was nine. Aunts and uncles have shared stories of his races, including a thrilling come-from-behind victory in the 400m at the 1988 USATF National Masters Championships in Florida that, were it not for a VHS recording, I’d have chalked up to exaggeration. And I’ll never forget cheering on Grandpa as he celebrated his 80th birthday with a series of pole vault jumps at a meet in Georgia.
One memory stands out from the rest. In the summer of 2015, as I was thinking about joining my high school’s track and field team, I learned that Grandpa would test promising runners by having them run up a daunting local hill with a 10% incline and which was just shy of 300m. If they could make it to the top in under a minute, they had strong potential.
By no means did I have to meet this threshold to keep receiving coaching tips, but I wanted to prove myself anyway. Thus, on a sweltering, humid day in July, I sent myself up the steep incline, trying to sprint as fast as I could to the top, where Grandpa and my parents awaited with a yellow handheld timer. As I proceeded to vomit at the top, my mom broke the bad news: I had missed the goal by a fraction of a second.
But it was what Grandpa said afterward that stuck with me. He didn’t care about my time, nor was he disappointed that I had thrown up – he said that it meant that I’d given it my all and doing my best was more important than the result.
Of course, this is not an endorsement of pushing oneself to the point of physical detriment. Years later, the roles reversed at the 2023 USATF Masters Outdoor Championship in North Carolina, where Grandpa was competing in the shot put and javelin. As he lined up for his second shot put throw, one of my uncles yelled, ‘Give it everything you’ve got!’ – and I saw my grandfather’s eye twinkle. He added an extra kick on his shuffle to throw, but this additional step meant that he reached the end of the circle sooner. He tumbled over the lip of the ring and onto the ground.
As medics and my family rushed onto the field, worst-case scenarios raced through my mind. But even at the age of 95, he didn’t let a fall like that stop him. After begrudgingly scratching the third throw to recover, he got back out there, pushing past any sliver of embarrassment to mark the top distance on his fifth throw.
It’s that image – him making his way back to the throwing circle, a bloodied bandage on his arm, to push past failure and hoist the shot put back into the air – that I see every time that I start to feel weak or tired on the run. It’s his voice that I hear when I’m closing a race, yelling encouragement to keep going and finish strong. And when it’s all over, if I’m sitting with a disappointing result, I think of the moment at the top of the hill and make peace with my shortcomings, knowing that I gave what I could.
It’s why I’ve always stuck with the same sugary mid-run snack. Whenever I need a boost, I just pop a couple of jelly beans into my mouth. The memories, lessons and love make the taste even sweeter.
