Tyler Smith: High School Athlete of the Year 2013

How a kid who’s had to fight for everything became one of Canada’s fastest runners

Tyler Smith is doubled over outside the University of Washington’s indoor track and field complex, throwing up. The lanky, blond-haired kid wearing a yellow singlet gets congratulatory pats on the back, but standing up straight to thank his fellow competitors only makes him dizzy. He wonders whether he should go to the hospital. That he just beat one of the fastest 800-metre high-school-aged fields in North America hasn’t registered. He’s too busy concentrating on keeping his breakfast down.

The only Canadian in the race, Smith shouldn’t have run it. He was nursing a hip injury. He hadn’t been training for two weeks. But the 18-year-old from Wetaskiwin Composite High School wanted to defend his title at the Brooks PR Invitational, where last year, as an 11th-grader, he beat a field made up mostly of 12th-graders. So he ran the race again this past February—and set a meet record of 1:50.88. Smith is the fastest high schooler at 800 metres in Canada, one of the fastest in North America, and really, he shouldn’t be. He comes from Wetaskiwin, Alta., an hour’s drive south of Edmonton and home to just 12,000, a town with zero indoor tracks, where it snows seven months a year. “My body did not get me through that race in Washington,” he says from Bodywerks Gym while working the morning shift and finishing his chemistry homework. “I guess it was my mind and my heart that told my body it had to.”

Tyler’s mom, Gwen, uses the word “fighter” to describe her son. “From the very beginning,” she says, “he’s had to be.” Born three months premature at a little over three pounds, Tyler was hooked up to respirators in an Edmonton hospital for the first two months of his life. Until he was nine, hospital visits were frequent, and he caught pneumonia more times than Gwen can count. Tyler has never met his father, though he’s told he looks like him. So Gwen did her best to support him, working as a receptionist at Parkland Fertilizer while taking days off to tend to Tyler and study for her high school diploma. “We’ve had to be determined just to make it day to day,” Gwen says.

At 13, Tyler was six feet tall (he had an early spurt, and has only grown an inch since), ripping around town on his bike, spray-painting buildings and, he says, “doing stupid things with friends.” But he caught the eye of his teacher and basketball coach, Jordan Hamer. “No ball would get past the half-court line when I had Tyler on full-court press,” says Hamer. “He was crazy athletic.” Hamer says Smith “tested the waters,” code for a student you wouldn’t want in your class. But the first-year teacher was patient, and eventually the two bonded over shared circumstances—both grew up fatherless. Smith started to see the value in school. And Hamer, who played football with the kids in gym class and ran for what he thought were routine touchdowns only to be chased down by Smith—“He came at me like a raging cheetah”—eventually convinced Tyler to go to his first track meet. “He said I’d get a day off school,” says Smith, who was in Grade 8 at the time. “Done deal.”

In Harlem Globetrotters shorts and basketball shoes Gwen swears were undone, Smith won the 100-, 200- and 400-metre races that day. He’d never run the 400 before, so he blasted out of the gate and blew everyone away until the halfway mark, where he stopped to ask Hamer for direction. “Go!” Hamer yelled. “Go!” Later that year, Smith was the district sprinting champion. It was enough to convince him to seek out the closest track club he could find. Veteran coach John Bole and the Leduc Track Club were half an hour away.

Three months later, Smith was among the top high school runners in Alberta. It didn’t matter that he trained on treadmills and a circular (read: terrible for running) indoor track in the Leduc Recreation Centre, while dodging seniors going for strolls and local hockey teams doing off-ice workouts. “Tyler is a one-of-a-kind kid,” says Bole, the Irish-born founder of the club. He’s been grooming track athletes for more than 40 years, has prepared runners for Olympic and world championship stages, but says he’s never coached a boy with more promise than Smith. Last season, at 17, Smith ran a personal best of 1:47.96, good for a Canadian youth record. “He could’ve run faster,” says Bole. “He ran far too many meets last year—bang, bang, bang, one after the other, so he didn’t have time to recover.” Bole couldn’t stop Smith; the kid wanted to compete. The coach takes no credit for Smith’s success—“You can’t make racehorses out of donkeys”—but he says natural talent isn’t what sets Smith apart. It’s his attitude and effort.

Talk to Smith for five minutes and you’ll see what Bole means. In the dead of winter last year, he tried to shovel two lanes of the outdoor track in his hometown. “It dumped two minutes later,” he says, laughing. He trains and goes to school, and he also opens a gym in the morning (job No. 1) and bartends at Barney’s Pub & Grill at night (job No. 2). “I always need to be doing something productive,” he says. “If I’m sitting around at home, I’m thinking, ‘Oh man, I could be doing so much right now.’” He approaches running with that same all-or-nothing gusto. “I don’t have the fastest turnover, or the most powerful stride,” Smith says. “But when I go to practice, I do the work. I go ’til I throw up, ’til I can’t see anything, ’til there’s stars, ’til my body doesn’t function. John’s told me he hasn’t met many people that try harder than I try. That’s what gets me through track, that’s what’s got me through my whole life.”

As his track career picked up, he had a whole community backing him. Taking flights to meets in the U.S. and as far away as France and Spain has been possible thanks to Gwen’s workplace, Parkland, stepping in as a sponsor, and Sacred Heart School students and teachers putting on fundraisers. “We have been so blessed,” Gwen says, voice shaking. “I don’t know how else we could have managed to get him to those meets.”

Tyler’s talent could have bought him a full ride to an American college—Oregon, Kentucky and Florida State were among the NCAA schools that showed interest—but the kid with the maple leaf tattoo on his right shoulder is staying in Canada (his tuition here is covered, too, thanks to an academic scholarship since he’s now an honours student). In September, he’ll join the University of Victoria Vikes track team. “Supporting Canadian athletic programs is the only way we can make the CIS stronger,” Smith says. This, of course, is music to the ears of Vikes track coach Brent Fougner, who’s been recruiting Smith ever since he met him two years ago through the national youth team. “He has everything you want,” Fougner says. “He definitely should be looking at the world championships and Olympic Games as more than a dream.”

Smith can’t wait to get going at Victoria. He won’t have to work two jobs. Instead, he’ll get to focus on school and running—on proper tracks and snow-free roads. “As hard as I work, I think that next year and in my years at Victoria, I’m going to explode,” Smith says. At UVic, he’ll study education. He’s pursuing a teaching career because of Hamer. “He saved my life,” Smith says. “He totally changed me. I want to do that for someone else.”

Before he toes the line for a race, Smith listens to a song called “Help Is On The Way” by Rise Against. “I have my mother’s dreams,” the lyrics go, “you can’t take that away from me, just go ahead and try.” Says Smith, “I like to think the track is my battlefield, and I’m out there fighting for everyone who has stood behind me, getting me where I am now.” So it’s more than his heart and his mind that gets Smith’s body through those races he shouldn’t get through, let alone win. It’s his mom, it’s his coach, the Wetaskiwin community, Mr. Hamer. That’s why the kid sees stars during practice. That’s why he runs so hard that he throws up.

This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.

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