A question for competitive runners: What would you endure to set a personal record? I answered this in the fall of 1997, my senior year of high school.
Every Wednesday, the Southlake Carroll cross-country team climbed aboard a yellow school bus and rumbled over to the IBM Solana campus in the booming middle space between Dallas and Fort Worth. At a conversational pace, we’d run a warmup lap on a 2-mile, crushed granite trail that wound past architectural water features and finished on a gradual downhill through the woods. After a short break to stretch and hydrate, we’d run a second lap—for time.
Of the dozen or so boys on the team, most of us were too small for football, too uncoordinated for basketball. But we were intensely competitive. At the sound of our coach’s whistle, we took off as a pack, scattering gravel behind us. We ran shoulder to shoulder, the fastest boys up front, the slower kids settling into their own pace behind.
Running isn’t a contact sport, though I’d argue the pain inflicted during endurance sports hurts more intensely than a hit you might take on the football field. In essence, you’re suffocating yourself. The faster you run over an extended duration, the more your heart and lungs struggle to deliver oxygen to your body and brain. We all know oxygen is essential for survival. As your oxygen levels deplete, your body sends pain signals to your brain—Stop! By enduring this pain, you can keep running. By enduring more pain than anyone else, you can win.
I enjoyed the pain almost as much as I liked to win. I still do. With my feet, I could make my childhood friends suffer. Make them slow down. Force them to give up. Sports provide a safe space for such barbaric thinking. Still, some things we experience as kids, we must unspool as adults.
Lane, Derek, Aaron, the two Jacks, Kelsay, Steven, Blair, Daniel, and I all knew about the short, steep hill at about the 1-mile mark. I surged, cresting the climb alone. I looked at my Timex watch; it read around five minutes flat. I crossed Solana Boulevard and began running downhill. Our coach waited at the bottom, twirling the nylon cord of his stopwatch.
That’s when my stomach began to gurgle. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I knew it wasn’t good. I was running so fast, though, and I didn’t want to stop.
When I reached our coach, Chauncey Willingham—tall, mustache, Texas drawl—he shouted my time. What did he say? 9:30? 9:40? 9:50? The realization that this was the fastest I’d ever run was almost lost as I noticed the brown streaks running down my legs. The bottom of my shorts sagged. I was so proud, and also super embarrassed. I headed straight to the bathroom.
My teammate Daniel had driven to practice in his 1968 Ford Mustang. After I cleaned up the best I could, Coach Willingham asked Daniel if he would drive me home. Some of us had run together since middle school, but Daniel joined the team his junior year. With a black pompadour and almond skin, he looked like Ritchie Valens in La Bamba. He started running because he wanted to become a Navy Seal and defend his country. Before long, he was our team’s second-fastest runner. He seemed to enjoy the pain as much as I did.
Daniel knew where I lived because our team would gather at someone’s house for a pasta dinner on the night before each meet. My house sat on 4 acres that backed up to a chain of ponds, and the property had multiple structures—a garage for our bikes, a bathhouse, and a barn for the horses. After dinner, we’d watch an inspirational movie. Rudy, about a runty kid with a lot of heart who manages to play football for Notre Dame, was a favorite.
I didn’t know where Daniel lived, but I knew his family owned a frozen margarita machine rental business and that he sometimes helped with deliveries on the weekends. Occasionally, he and his sister would deliver to celebrity homes. We were in high school when players for the Dallas Cowboys started moving to Southlake.
Dropping me off that day after the Solana run, Daniel said, “Man, it’s just the start of the season, and you’ve already gone sub-10. That’s incredible.”
I smiled, nodded, and hurried inside. Daniel never told anyone what happened.
The author Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again”—something abundantly true when revisiting adolescent athletic glory, or trauma. But 27 years since I last wore a Carroll singlet, in the fall of 2024, I’ve returned to Southlake to watch the current cross-country team run in its first meet.
Carroll is hosting the race at Southlake’s Bob Jones Park, the same place the current team gathers most mornings to train before class. Hosting meets helps the Carroll team raise money for trips to competitions in California and Oregon. The varsity boys start their 5-kilometer race at 6:50 a.m. Driving to the meet in the cool morning dark, I cut through a newly built neighborhood where sprinklers water the bright green lawns of castle-like homes. I wonder, which of us has experienced a more profound evolution, me or my hometown? And to what extent do our stories remain intertwined?
Today, the Carroll cross-country team is dominant in the state and among the best in the nation. As a class that counts for physical education credits, the 2024 Carroll program consists of 137 kids who run year-round, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. Over the last 25 years, the boys and girls teams have won a total of 18 state championships.
Such success isn’t novel in modern-day Southlake or isolated to running. The school district excels at most things—football, academics, the fine arts. With the times I ran in high school, I probably wouldn’t make today’s varsity cross-country squad. I definitely couldn’t afford a house in Southlake, which now sell for about $1.4 million. The increasing concentration of wealth within the Carroll Independent School District made me, basically, the product of a private school in a public school setting.
Southlake officially became a town in 1956. About 200 people lived in the initial incorporated area of just 1.62 square miles. When the DFW airport opened in 1974, adjacent towns like Southlake, Grapevine, and Colleyville became magnets for developers pitching high-end, master-planned communities. The population of Southlake is now over 30,000.
My family arrived in the town from California in 1990, at the front end of a wave of white-collar transplants. My older brother enrolled as a freshman at the high school. I’d been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and repeated fifth grade. We looked like most of the other people at our schools, but we spoke a little differently. Running cross-country helped me find my place in Texas.
During my senior year at Carroll, my teammates and I became the school’s first boys team to make the state meet, held every November in Round Rock’s Pioneer Park. Before we left for the race, the school recognized us at a pep rally. Dumbfounded, we walked onto the gym floor alongside the football team.
But Daniel didn’t go with us. After the first six weeks, he became academically ineligible and couldn’t run with us due to the “no pass, no play rule.” After that, he disappeared. At our graduation ceremony, a teammate asked, “Did anyone see Daniel?”
I hear track spikes scraping across the concrete parking surface as I pull into Bob Jones Park and suddenly yearn to be back among the high schoolers warming up for their races. Little packs of young people jog in every direction. One group comes toward me. I stand still. They split, swarm me, and regroup without breaking conversation.
“My tummy hurts,” one teenage runner says.
Another tells a friend, “After this race, I’m quitting cross-country.”
I see a Carroll runner, senior Jett Jones, and ask what he likes about running. “It’s helped me build work ethic,” he says. After racing a 5K, he doesn’t worry as much about tests. Jackson Campbell calls cross-country a lifestyle. He likes to wake up early.
Within the 758-acre nature preserve connected to the park, there are more than 20 miles of trails in the cross-timber forest along the shores of Lake Grapevine. However, the cross-country course is laid out entirely on the artificial and natural turf athletic fields fronting Whites Chapel Road. When I ask the current Carroll coach, Justin Leonard, if the team ever runs in the woods, he explains, “We used to, then someone saw a snake.” If a kid got bit, Leonard wouldn’t be the first Carroll educator named in a parent’s lawsuit against the district.
The varsity boys stand on a wide starting line, looking toward the sun rising over the lake. Most of the 2,000-acre ranch once owned by Bob Jones, a formerly enslaved man, is now underwater—along with the cave where Jones was said to harbor runaways. A starter pistol fires. Carroll sprints to the front, running as a team. They race past a playground and a statue Southlake erected in 2021 of a bearded Bob Jones and his wife, Almeady. Coach Leonard’s son, Caden, a junior and the reigning state cross-country and mile champion, soon pulls away. He wins with a time of 14:37.
The first five runners to finish on a seven-person varsity cross-country team score points. The lowest cumulative team score wins. The average time for the five Carroll runners is 15:13, or just under five minutes per mile on the 3.1-mile course. Being surrounded by young people who are incredibly fast is a Carroll runner’s reality.
After every other team leaves, Leonard gathers the Carroll runners in a semicircle. He warns them: When you’re on top, others will try to tear you down. “Some of you were born on third base,” he says. “But you’re going to have to work hard to get home.” Then the Carroll kids fan out across the athletic fields and pick up all the trash that was left behind.
One day, Coach Willingham took us to a meet in Ponder, population 479. We raced kids in high-tops and ran through a freshly plowed field, navigating ankle-deep soil and softball-size dirt clods. I took an early lead and grew content. Nearing the finish, Daniel pulled beside me. We sprinted. It was the only real race I won as a runner.
It was common for the guys to lock arms after the finish—win or lose—to show unity. But not long after the Ponder race, we learned Daniel wasn’t passing and would have to quit the team. Concerned for Daniel, Coach Willingham talked with his teacher. But there wasn’t much that could be done at the time.
In my memory, Willingham asked Daniel to tell the team in person. His face red, he could barely get the words out. I didn’t know what to say. Today, a student athlete who fails can continue to practice with their team and return to competition after three weeks with a passing grade. The ’90s were less lenient.
At Weatherford Junior College, Willingham briefly held the state record in the 2-mile, “until another kid broke it that same day,” he says. He built the Carroll boys program by walking down the hallways recruiting kids. He would invent arduous courses that circled the campus and made running fun, a privilege. Once, legendary Carroll football coach Bob Ledbetter sent two players to a cross-country practice as punishment.
Willingham had watched me run in middle school. The first time I met him, as a high school freshman, he asked if I was excited for the upcoming season. “Yep,” I said, slipping back into the casual way I’d addressed adults growing up in Berkeley, California.
“Excuse me?” Willingham corrected. “Yes, sir,” I replied, blushing.
Midway through my senior season, Willingham suggested we try incorporating something new into our training: long slow distance, known to endurance runners as LSD. On the Sunday mornings after our meets, we’d congregate at Solana and run 2.5 miles across State Highway 114 to a neighboring golf course community, Trophy Club. In crisp fall temps, we ran casually as one big group, the turning leaves crunching beneath our feet.
Before going to the state meet, my teammates and I drove to a random army surplus store in upscale North Dallas, near our district rival, Highland Park. We bought a dozen or so camouflage T-shirts and had “CC Machine” printed on the back in hunter orange. The hit ’90s Bush song, “Machinehead,” was our anthem.
Breathe in, breathe out / Breathe in, breathe out / Breathe in.
Decades later, my teammate Derek met Bush’s lead singer, Gavin Rossdale, at a beachside corporate retreat. Rossdale had finished swimming in the ocean and gotten salt water in his eyes. Handing him a towel, Derek asked, “Hey, what’s ‘Machinehead’ about?”
“Whatever you want it to be,” he replied. Maybe he didn’t run.
A blue norther came in the morning of the meet in November 1997. The grass turned to mud. The cold wind, as we ran across the levy, pushed us backward. My dad put a telescopic lens on his camera and captured the snot running off our faces.
Racing with extra-long spikes, I helped us finish eighth out of 12 teams. The Carroll girls, who we strove to emulate, finished fifth, and they’ve qualified for the state meet every year since.
At the end of the season, my dad, Don, drove me to a local tailor and paid to have a new patch sewn onto my letter jacket: State Qualifier. A federal auditor for the Dallas division of Health and Human Services, my dad had moved to Texas months before the rest of our family. He mailed home a VHS tape with a narrated tour of the house he found in Southlake, leading us through all the rooms.
In November of 2024, I put on my letter jacket and drove to Round Rock’s Old Settlers Park to cheer on Carroll in the state cross-country meet. With age, I’ve gained confidence in supporting people. I’d sent Daniel a letter. But I never heard back.
At the state championships, the Carroll team congregates in the same place almost every year. The team doesn’t use a tent like many of the other big programs. Instead, the boys and girls lounge on a tarp laid across the grass.
A pair of giggling teens from another team asks the Carroll runners to autograph their state meet T-shirts. I see Caden marching back from the bathrooms. He tells his dad some other runners started shaking the porta-potty while he was inside. Caden started running with his dad during the Covid-19 pandemic. He found he loves to win. But he gets nervous, to the point of puking.
I watch from the long gravel levy near the start of the race. The pack emerges from a plume of tan dust kicked up by a lead ATV livestreaming the race. Caden and Carroll run patiently—near the front, not at the front. As they wind over and around grassy hills, the front runners tire. Carroll begins pushing the pace. Caden kicks, leading them to another state title.
With individual and team gold medals around his neck, Caden calls his dad “the best coach in the world.”
I found the address of Daniel’s childhood home online. Before I leave Southlake, I drive by to see if anyone is there. Running meant so much to me. How would I have turned out if it had been taken away from me?
Daniel grew up in an A-frame house on a large, wooded lot at the end of a single lane road. The property sits on a bluff above Lake Grapevine and backs up to the Bob Jones Nature Center and Preserve. I walk past “No Trespassing” signs and befriend two barking dogs. A slight, older man emerges. “I’m a journalist, and a friend of Daniel’s from high school,” I say. He says his name is Paxton and invites me to take a seat on the front porch.
Though not his biological dad, Paxton helped raise Daniel from a child. He bought the house in 1973, when the bottomland around the lake was predominantly an African American community with barbecue restaurants. Paxton liked to ride dirt bikes in the public space surrounding the lake. When a house came up for sale, he figured he could make the payments. He started Margarita Express after Mobil Oil laid him off. He jokes that the only thing he learned working in the oil industry was how to drink. When the neighboring lots came up for sale, he managed to buy those for a few thousand dollars each. He wanted the privacy.
I tell Paxton I ran cross-country with Daniel and admired his talent. “Daniel, he was pretty good at whatever he did,” Paxton says. But if Daniel didn’t want to do something, he wouldn’t. I learn Daniel did graduate and worked at Texas Instruments. He married and had a son. He still runs.
Paxton says one evening Daniel’s mom asked Paxton to go find Daniel and tell him dinner was ready. So, Paxton drove a motorcycle down a trail to the lake. Paxton noticed Daniel’s footprints along the shoreline and began following them. Then, Paxton saw Daniel running, barefoot and shirtless with even strides. Daniel headed toward a cove in the lake, splashed into the water, and began swimming. When Daniel emerged on the other side of the cove, Paxton yelled, “Run, Forrest, run!”
“You know what?” Paxton smiles. “Daniel beat me home.”