It’s rare to find someone who says they enjoy running, commonly considered the most tedious of exercises, but to senior Gavin O’Meara, running is more than a chore; it’s fun. Gavin has been on the track team for all four years of high school, and through hard work, perseverance, and the friendships he’s made, it has become a community he wouldn’t trade for anything.
“I like running because there’s just a good community around it,” Gavin said. “I like running with my friends because it’s fun. And it’s also just a way to see yourself improving and being able to be proud of your improvements in an extremely visible way compared to other sports. Because you objectively get better in running when you run faster, but in a lot of other sports, it’s skill-based, and you’re against other people.”
Although Gavin enjoys running, he didn’t start out being the best at it. He picked up running when he was younger after his older sister had joined, as off-season training for basketball. But while he quickly found out that basketball was not a sport he excelled in, he continued with running.
“One of the things I’ve definitely taken out of running is you should always be confident in yourself and always be pushing yourself more than the day before,” Gavin said. “During track or cross-country, you always have to try to run faster than the previous race, and so you apply that to yourself, and you always try to be better at whatever you’re doing the next day. And even if you’re behind someone now, you can always catch up to them. Because I was a pretty bad runner during freshman year, and now I’m a good runner in my senior year.”
While track is a sport where your individual stats matter, it is also a sport that allows you to root for other people. There’s a sense of camaraderie and teamwork even when you’re not playing on a traditional team.
“You’re allowed to root for each other a lot more,” Gavin said. “You’re also allowed to create this community with other teams, as opposed to normally, where you’re rivals, and you hate each other on different teams, but you kind of support people on other teams and root for them as well, because it doesn’t affect your individual performance. It creates a community not just in the school but in the region or the conference where you’re all cheering for each other.”
Gavin’s love for running isn’t just within track but outside of it, too. He’s part of FHC’s Chocolate Milk Chuggers, a running club.
“The Chocolate Milk Chuggers is an indoor track club,” Gavin said. “Anyone’s allowed to join at any level of running; they don’t even have to be from Central. We’ve had a few Northern runners come. It’s a small track club that we made because we wanted to do some running during the winter because there’s cross country in the fall, track in the spring, and there’s no time to run during the winter, so we thought it’d be fun to have a way to run some races and focus our training during the winter.”
The Chocolate Milk Chuggers is a great community for runners of all skill levels and a place to connect with like-minded people and make friends. With less intensity and commitment than track or cross country, it lets the members run for fun and not have as much pressure.
“It gives us more opportunities to race,” Gavin said, “and it’s a lot more laid back than actual seasons like Cross Country and Track, so we kind of just mess around and have fun while running, and it allows you to have a lot of fun while running, even if you’re not going to be too serious about it.”
The community around the track is one of the main reasons Gavin loves it, and what really makes up that community is the people he’s surrounded himself with for the past four years and all of the friends he’s made. Track has been a place for him to forge friendships, have fun, and compete, all while doing something he loves.
“It’s kind of hard to pick just one [memory from track],” Gavin said, “but during one of our regionals races for our cool down, we jogged down to a convenience store and we jogged back, so it was like a four mile run after a race, which was terrible, and then we all tried to chug a quarter gallon of chocolate milk, and I remember [alum] Trevor Timmer was puking afterwards.”
Although he’s graduating, Gavin won’t forget his time at FHC, especially among his friends and community in running. And as he moves on, he takes a lot of memories and life lessons with him that he’s learned in his time here.
“As cliché as it is, I learned that you can do anything as long as you work hard enough for long enough,” Gavin said. “I never believed I would be any good at running, but somehow I have managed to rival some of the best runners our school has seen.”
