A young marathoner is born

Making mom (and me!) proud

Programming note: A (very similar) version of this post has already appeared on my Marist Running blog. For those of you who read that blog AND subscribe to this one, you already know this. I have, however, slightly rewritten it for THIS audience (so it might be worth re-reading it here). OK. Here goes …

There is an athlete on my Marist College men’s cross country/track team – his nickname is Jiggy – who is an absolute workhorse. He does the highest mileage and the longest long runs. His actual name is John Ignacz (his nickname, “Jiggy,” was quickly adopted as a hybrid of his first and last name, during the beginning of his collegiate career, which coincided with the height of the Covid pandemic, in the fall of 2020). Jiggy is one of the most durable (if vexing) athletes I’ve ever coached in the past 32 years. I call him a “piece of steel” because, well, he is. During Covid, along with all that long and hard running, he biked, a lot – once, he and his teammate biked all the way to New York City from Poughkeepsie, and took the train home, just to occupy their otherwise drudgery-inducing existence of Zoom classes and online assignments. At times, he was prone to overtraining earlier in his college running career. But, we have since dialed that back and dialed that in, and now Jiggy is a role model for the type of day-to-day process we want all of our athletes to emulate. Nowadays, Jiggy trains very hard but also quite smart. And he races tough. But, admittedly, his racing performances – in cross country and in track -- have been inconsistent, spotty. We’ve talked about it frequently. He is hard on himself; I can be hard on him, too. Through it all, I’m his biggest fan and his biggest believer. I want him to succeed. I want him to have more success, more consistent performances, than he has shown. Again, his PRs are solid. But he’s capable of more. He knows it, I know it. And last Sunday in Virginia Beach, in an unlikely setting for a collegiate distance runner in the midst of a school year of training and racing, he proved it.