Dylan Wykes

I'll Always Be A Runner

By InnerVoice

July 6^th, 2018

I love the sport

I think I’ll always be a runner, simply because I love the sport. The simplicity of it is something that I haven’t found in other sports I've tried, like cycling or cross-country skiing. Continuing to run also allows me to be a better coach. I can pace athletes in workouts and really get a sense for the effort they are putting in by running stride-for-stride with them. It’s also good to remain active on the local racing scene, even if I’m not as competitive as I once was. It’s good to remain somewhat relevant there for people to know me.

When we tried to build the group here in Vancouver, Rob and I did so almost solely based on our stature as athletes. I had done some coaching and had seen some good results with people, but we were promoting ourselves based on our names as elite athletes. That backfired a little bit because people were too intimidated to join the group, at least initially. They literally thought they would need to be able to keep up with us to be a part of the group. So, we had to work hard to show people that the group was inclusive, that it wasn’t a serious training group and that we wanted to coach people of all different abilities.

Initially, coaching wasn’t intended as a carer path or a business. It was simply a way to share my passion for the sport and make a little bit of extra money while I was training (the life of a professional marathon runner in Canada is not glamorous or lucrative). For most of my running career I was going under the assumption that I wouldn’t remain heavily involved in the sport after I was done competing. I have a Master’s degree in Epidemiology and I thought I would pursue a career in that area. But the more I started interacting with the running community at-large, the more online coaching I did and speaking at events, the more I thought about staying involved long-term.

figuring out my identity

Any time I have been towards the end of a marathon - honestly - I always think Why am I doing this? This is crazy. This is not fun right now! There has never been a marathon when it hasn't been super hard at the end. At the same time I think I've always had big goals I’ve wanted to achieve. They were personal goals, but they were enough to get me out of bed every day. I was always super motivated, so I never had a problem with the motivation to get up.

I think the work ethic and drive that I developed as an athlete have also helped me make Mile2Marathon something big here in Vancouver. I was very focused and determined and put a lot of time and energy into things. Not being afraid to fail is something else that has been valuable. You really have to put yourself out there as an athlete and be willing to take some risks. The same is true in business. The transition from athlete to businessman is definitely a difficult one. There are not a lot of support systems in place for athletes, especially in the less well-known and less well-funded sports in our country.

I think the hardest part for me was figuring out my identity again. I spent 15-20 years of my life as a runner, with running being the first thing on my mind when I woke up and the last thing on my mind when I went to bed. My self-worth was tied up in how I performed in training and races. That’s something that’s hard to shake. And even with an awesome and supportive wife and two young kids, it’s hard to figure out that identity piece.

“Making it to the Olympics was always the big goal for me. I never had any interest in doing triathlon, but I would hear stories of Simon Whitfield. He won in Sydney when I was 16 or so, it was a huge inspiration to see someone from my hometown win a gold medal at the Olympics.”

We've made it work

Now, it’s definitely tough because I don't have that one concrete goal in life. I’m trying to find the balance between different things. Sometimes the most important thing needs to be supporting my wife and what she is doing, other times it's the kids, and then other times it's the business. Francine's been my biggest supporter both in my running career and in building Mile2Marathon. She made a ton of sacrifices for me from 2012 to 2016 to chase after my running goals. Being a professional athlete is weird, in one respect it's great because you're not tied down to a 9-5 job, but at the same time it is all-consuming. You have to make a lot of selfish decisions to be successful at the level I was competing at. A lot of people have to put real life (relationships, kids, family) on hold to pursue that. But we've made it work. Francine had to roll with it a lot of times and I'm really grateful for that. For example: we moved to Flagstaff, Arizona for 6 months in 2015 so I could train at high altitude, and she just made it work with her PhD studies. I think at the time I just expected she'd make it work, but when I look back on that and consider all of the sacrifices, it was a huge undertaking.

After 2016 (when I didn't make the Olympics) the focus needed to shift a little for Francine to pursue her career in academics. It's been exciting and rewarding for me to see her chasing her dreams. I hope in her eyes I've been half as supportive as she was when I was pursuing my dreams.

Coach first, businessman second

I wouldn’t say becoming an entrepreneur was an accident, but it certainly wasn’t the main motivator in building Mile2Marathon in Vancouver and beyond. Yes, I knew I could make money coaching. But the main motivation was to build something special in the Vancouver running community. The momentum of Mile2Marathon here in Vancouver made it such that I had to decide to either make it a legitimate business and take that side of things more seriously, or really limit the size and scope of the group and services we offered. I’ve always been a coach first and businessman second, so, it’s been a pretty steep learning curve for me managing a business.

I really just threw myself into the business world. I didn’t really sit there and say ‘I want to be the next so-and-so in the business of running coaching.’ I looked at what others do locally and in different communities around the world. It’s interesting to see how different people are doing it, and it's not necessarily just the big businesses, it could be small running clubs doing some cool stuff. We chat sometimes and go through ideas, and what things should look like, and where to go next.

It's tricky to try and balance this as my passion and be able to run a business at the same time. I want to help people improve as runners, so there is definitely a lot of apprehension in trying to push the business. It’s hard to let the business side of things happen naturally, but at times you’ve got to make calls because it needs to put food on the table. I think for the most part everything has worked itself out.

We can get them close

I was not as patient as I should have been as an athlete. I have dealt with a lot of injuries that stalled my running, but had I known I might have chilled out a little. At the same time, that eagerness and ambition did help me achieve what I needed to do. Now as a coach, it’s definitely about taking a lot of the things I did in my career - I did things well but I did things wrong too - and learning from them. When you’re coaching someone, you’re trying to get this relationship where it just clicks. It might not be the same for everyone, some people I might have to push them a little more to get them to go outside their limits, and others it might be the total opposite and I have to pull them back, so it’s about being perceptive and learning a bit about each person.

One commonality, though, is that if someone is committed to their goals and they trust the process, we can get them close. Some people might need a huge giant leap to get where they want to go, but if they are committed to the process it can usually work out. You need a lot of patience because in running you can’t just show up and be like “Oh, I feel good today and I’m going to go for it.” That will mess up the rest of the week’s training. A lot of my work is about teaching patience and how to trust the process. I think it’s about picking your battles and knowing where to put your energy. When you make decisions to prioritize certain things you just need to go with it. For instance, once I had a family I had to give up a lot of training camps and be okay that I could do the training that I needed to do from my home base. I think that is true for everyone - if you can only run 4 days per week, then run 4 days a week and make the most of those 4 days.

“There are no life hacks for being a long-distance runner. It’s the opposite of that.”

It's all worth it

My family is obviously a huge part of who I am at this point, and I love being a dad and a husband. Day-to-day I'm as much dad and husband as I am coach and athlete. I take my role as a dad pretty seriously and take a lot of pride in being very present in my kids’ lives. I recognize that with the 'job' I had as a professional runner, and even now with Mile2Marathon, there was a lot of flexibility in my day-to-day schedule and I could spend a lot of time with my kids from the moment they were born. I'm grateful for those early days of their lives and not missing out on things. But it's not easy. Sometimes we make it look easy with the social media posts of our kids being angels. But it's hard. All of a sudden you go from thinking about yourself first and foremost to having these little human beings that depend on you. It's a bit terrifying, I think all parents can attest to that. I definitely had to make some compromises. I wanted to co-parent with Francine. I didn't want to put all of the parenting on her and say 'I need to do this, that, and the other thing to be a better runner'. So maybe I got a bit less sleep, less downtime, less focus on the little things. And maybe my running suffered a little because of that. But it's all been worth it.

I'm constantly in awe of the little human beings my girls are becoming, it's wonderful. Now as they are getting older it's really fun to have them involved in my coaching. Whenever my oldest sees people running, she'll ask "Daddy, are those your runners?". That's fun and rewarding for me.

Throw yourself in the fire

During my career, it was about being realistic with myself. I have had some great coaches who would be honest with me about where I was really at and what I could achieve. In marathons, if you think you’re just going to hammer, it’s not going to work out. Even if you really want to run 2:08 but you’re actually only in shape to run 2:12, you have to remember that 2:12 is pretty good.

There are so many times in running when you are unsure of yourself. You have to have a certain level of confidence to get to the start line, but once you’re there you kind of shake and think to yourself “Can I do this? Do I belong here?”. At the top of the running ranks it’s a pretty small community, you know who these guys are and what they’re capable of.