With graduation just around the corner, senior Nathan Martin looks to keep running, something he started as a sixth grader.
The students did something called a mile in a third. He finished in a place he wasn’t happy with, somewhere along the lines of top 20 or top 30. “I was like ‘Wow that sucked.’ I wanted to get better than that,” Martin said.
At first he didn’t do anything to get better. The next year he was just faster. He started finishing first and second when they did the mile in a third.
“People started telling me ‘You should do track. You should do cross-country,” he said. “I said, ‘I don’t know if I want to do that. Maybe I’ll think about it.” It was two years later, in eighth grade after the cross-country season had already started that he decided to give competitive running a shot. He finished first on the team in their first meet. His running journey didn’t stop there.
It was during a meet in high school when Martin met Spring Arbor University’s head coach Dante Ottolini. Martin at the time wasn’t really looking to go to college, but was encouraged by his high school coach. “He told me with how well I was running that I could go a lot of different places.” And Martin ended up here.
Martin participates in cross-country and track at SAU. The 2012 season was unlike any other for the men’s cross-country team. Their story was featured in the university’s publication, “Journal.”
The story goes like this: Before leaving for a meet Coach Ottolini held a pre-race talk that allowed Martin to share the news about his mom’s battle with cancer. They bonded in the locker room over tears and prayer. Martin stayed behind from the meet and the team left with the words of “In Christ Alone” still on their lips.
For all of the season, the team was ranked. In order to make it to nationals as a team they had to place high enough at a qualifying meet or win the Crossroads League Championship to make it to nationals.
The meet the team was looking to qualify at was the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Great Lakes Challenge, but Martin’s mom had passed away and her funeral was scheduled for the same day and time of the meet.
Martin’s Teammate Kyle Anderson sums up the choice the team had to make best and as he said in the Journal, “When coach introduced the possibility of skipping the meet for the service, no one disagreed. Not one. What would seem like a difficult decision for a lot of teams seemed like a no brainer to us. We knew that if we skipped this memorial service, we would regret it.”
Anderson and Martin both traveled to NAIA Nationals as individual qualifiers and finished seventh and eleventh.
For Martin, being featured in the “Journal” is cool, but he still hasn’t seen it. “I try not to take it to my head and think on it a lot.” he said. He’s honored by it, but humbled by it as well.
There was another piece in the “Journal” about Martin and his 5,000m National Title at the NAIA indoor track and field national meet. His success in the 5,000m continued into the outdoor season.
“I thought it would be cool to break the [5,000m] record, but I was more focused on breaking 14 minutes obviously because it was faster enough, as long as I could achieve that I wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the record,” said Martin.
Martin recalls the race, in which he broke the record, as a very fast race. The field included a lot of professional runners and the top collegiate guys. “I went into trying to stick to the pack and see what happens. I pretty much hung onto the pack and lucky for me they weren’t just flat out going as hard as they could, but staying conservative which was pretty much the pace I was trying to stay on. So in the first mile and a half the race went out just the way it needed to for me.”
The leaders eventually separated from the pack, but there was a group that Martin continued to hang onto. “With a lap to go I was looking at the time, trying to figure out in my head what that put me through and I was like if I push hard I could break 14. And I finished up it was 13:52.” The SAU record, set 37 years ago, was 14:07.
At the League Championship meet Martin took first in the 800m, 1,500m and 5,000m. “I knew I could win the 1,500 and I knew I could win the 5,000, but the 800 was the only thing I was worried about,” said Martin. He didn’t need to worry as he moved up from dead last during the first 200m into first with 400m to go.
Martin’s plans for after graduation are still unknown – he has no job lined up and doesn’t know whether he’ll be joining a running club somewhere else in the country or staying near Coach Ottolini in Spring Arbor – he knows he’ll still be running.
[WRITER’S NOTE: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON WWW.SAUCOUGARS.COM]