The Golden Trident

By Quinn Fisher

Photo Courtesy of Dillon Ferguson

Dillon Ferguson is a freshman athlete at Golden High, freshly breaking into our cross-country program. He has found great success in both cross-country and track at the middle school level, and even out of state competitions. With this year’s cross-country season already off to the races (no pun intended), Ferguson has made Golden’s varsity team, and competitions have already begun. 

Ferguson has been running for years. His first race he can remember was in grade 4, the Mitchell Miler. He won the race, and it helped him to first discover his love for running.

For the next three years, he split his athletic activities between soccer and running, but by grade 6, running became his primary focus. Running brought him joy, brought him a challenge, and brought him something that he naturally excelled at. 

Ferguson also recognizes the duality of his life as an athlete, dedicated to his sport: “Running at a competitive level now is pretty fun: the team atmosphere, the coaches, and the races. However it is very stressful, as every day all day you have to be chasing speed, and trying to take off seconds and that builds up over time and that’s when it stops being as fun.” 

He goes on to explain the struggles that go along with running, and that double-sided life he lives. “Throughout my running career, my biggest struggle has been trying to find balance. Spending too much of your time and thought on running leaves no time for an actual life outside of running.” He goes on to speak on how he has to dedicate his life to his sport, no matter the sacrifice that takes, saying, “No matter how hard you try, the balance between running and life is going to favor one or the other, I have chosen to favor running and I’m always struggling to find time for things I enjoy and time to relax.” 

Despite his main challenge being the mental struggle of finding balance, Ferguson experiences many physical struggles in pursuit of his sport. He has faced injuries during his athletic career from his running endeavors that interfere with his athletic activities. He has suffered from regular injuries, hindering his training and performance, and frequently taking him out of all running for months. Recently, Ferguson has suffered from a relative energy deficiency in the spring, which took him out of running for 3 months, and from any semi-intense physical activity, making him feel slower in this fall season, but he is confident in his abilities and his upcoming improvement. 

Ferguson then spoke on his further goals in his sport. He hopes to take his skill pro, running in high-level races as his life, as much as running is already his life, expressing that “Running in the Olympics and other pro meets like that has always seemed like the ultimate goal.” However, his high-school career remains pivotal, determining if he can break out into the professional running world immediately, or if he takes the path through collegiate competition first. Either way, he is confident that he can go pro, and committed to that goal. 

Ferguson dove into the work he has had to put in to get where he is now, and the work he will still have to do in order to meet his objectives. He has put in four years of dedicated training, and two of solid training every single day, sacrificing other aspects of his life, dedicated to training toward his ambitions. 

“I would say the work involved is 100% worth it, but you need to believe that. Sometimes when all that effort is not showing you start to ask why you’re doing it, and that’s when you have to love it more than ever. By that I mean you have to find the joy in doing difficult things, and see the training as its own thing and not just a means to an end.”

Ferguson thinks that so far his numbers for this season have not been spectacular. However, he still interprets them positively, believing that they show good recovery from his inability to exercise at all during the spring, and returning to his running in July. He states that based on his success in making varsity, and running PRs (despite them not being up to the speeds he had originally hoped for),  his return to running has gone well, and that he will continue to improve over the season and his high school career.