Wilkinson

Harold Wilkinson was my high school track coach. He was a great coach. We referred to him as “Wilkie”, but never ever called him that. We called him Coach, or Mr. Wilkinson. Wilkinson had a thorough understanding of every event, or so it seemed to a rookie like me. I had complete confidence that the workouts he prescribed were exactly what I needed.

Wilkinson coached 9th grade football in the fall, and was the head track coach in the spring. He had an assistant coach working with the sprinters, another with the field events, and another with the distance runners. Wilkinson monitored each afternoon’s workout by moving from group to group.

I had a particular respect for Wilkinson because he lacked the usual prejudice favoring sprinters. As a distance runner I had (and still have) a special antipathy for sprinters that was fostered by the smothering newspaper coverage they got and the distance guys never got. I never saw any indication that Wilkinson had a bias for any track event over another. He personally wrote out the distance workouts and handed them off to the assistant coach for execution. Somehow that made him alright by me. I never heard anyone say a critical word to him or about him.

A good king orders his subjects to do that which they would have done anyway. Wilkinson explained the workouts to us, what they would accomplish, and we were convinced to run them as directed, not because he told us to, but because we saw the wisdom behind them. The workouts made sense. Each workout had a purpose. If Wilkinson did not state the purpose, you could still see it in the structure of the workout. He coached track, and he taught track.

By my senior year I no longer needed explanations or convincing. If he told me to do something, I did it. If he told me I could run a certain time, I believed I could do it, and often did. If I failed to run that time, I was sure that if I had run the race properly I would have run the time.

They were the best three years of my 42 years of running.