NICK WILLIS

The long run

On Nick Willis’s last day at Hutt Valley High School, late in the year 2000, his friends and classmates flooded out the doors and headed towards Wellington’s Days Bay for a ritual end-of-year bash.

Willis didn’t go. He really wanted to, but he forced himself to stay behind. A year earlier, he would have gone – for most of his school years, he had mixed a love of competitive running with more ordinary teenage fixtures, like skateboarding or going to parties.

But the New Zealand secondary schools track champs were a week away. And a few months earlier, Willis had experienced his first serious running success – a title at the Pacific Games, beating kids from Australia, South Africa, Canada and elsewhere.

So he didn’t go. He told himself, ‘‘Right, this is it.’’

‘‘I went down to the Hutt Rec and did probably the hardest-ever workout in my life up to that point.’’

Sixteen years and a stellar professional running career later, Willis still has that same intensity.

It’s there on the track, where he is preparing a tilt at his fourth Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. It’s there in his private life, where asceticism reigns – wife Sierra explains that sleep is paramount, colds must be avoided at all costs, ‘‘and anything that is physically taxing is mercilessly cut’’.

It’s there in his religious devotion – Jesus is the ‘‘number one factor in my life’’, he says – and it’s there in a searing brand of self-reflection, applied to everything from his running misfires to a pornography addiction, which he revealed earlier this year. (After learning of the dark side of the industry, he says, ‘‘I wanted to eradicate even the smallest aspect of pornography from my life’’.)

Willis, heir to New Zealand’s storied middle-distance heritage, knows every variety of the Olympic experience by now: he has narrowly missed a 1500-metre final (Athens, 2004), clinched a medal with a surging finish (bronze at Beijing, 2008, later bumped up to silver after initial winner Rashid Ramzi was stripped of his title for doping); and dealt with scorching disappointment, when he ran out of steam in the dying seconds at London in 2012.

London was brutal. Willis had been running superb times in the lead-up to the Games, and he was well-positioned with just a lap to go in the final. When he did eventually cross the line, in ninth place, he sat down on the track, hunched over, his tall, angular frame strangely solid-looking for once, while the medallists trotted around him.

What happened? No-one knows for sure. Willis thinks he got his preparation wrong – he peaked too soon. The trick is to still have strength in the legs, after three intense races, for the last 100 metres of a final, he says. In London, he didn’t.

Being New Zealand’s flagbearer at London didn’t help much either. He got caught up in the hoopla, and found himself lying awake in the rowdy Olympic village, tracking social media posts about his starring role.

‘‘I finally got out of the village and slept 15 hours my first night out.’’

This time around, he’s trying to be more patient and careful, avoiding the need for ‘‘confidence boosters’’ (hitting encouraging times in his training) and holding himself back just enough so that he is on the way up as the Olympics progress. He plans to spend only a handful of nights at the village.

London prompted other, deeper questions too. Success there was something he had prayed for. The race was also ostensibly his last great chance at the Olympics: the conventional wisdom suggests middle-distance runners peak in their mid-20s.

Willis, who is now 33, grappled with all of this in 2013. He considered giving up running and taking up a normal job. He also tossed up whether to start a family – yet more runners’ lore suggests that fatherhood can deplete a runner, because of everything from sleep deprivation to a natural reduction in testosterone.

To clear his head, Willis spent the year running without thinking ahead. He ran races he had never had time for before, did plenty of ‘‘road miles’’, and slowly rediscovered the profound simplicity of his sport. He didn’t lose his iron discipline, but he found a new sort of freedom.

By the time he won a bronze medal at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, without much emotional investment at all, something had shifted in him.

‘‘I went, ‘Man, I’ve got the hunger back again. Let’s throw all the eggs into the basket again for Rio’, even though it was so painful – the London experience.’’

He doesn’t think he’s too old – he’s improved each year since he turned 30, he says. Fatherhood, too, has turned out to be no barrier to performance – his young son, Lachlan, has given him a distance from the sport he’s never felt before, which in turn is helping him run more freely.

‘‘My son is far more important to me than any running results that I’ll ever have.’’

Despite all the demands, Willis says he has never found it a trial to be a runner – to monitor every mouthful, to keep going for every last painful training mile. It might be something to do with his faith, he thinks – a comfort with discipline and treating his body well.

‘‘Many of my competitors and peers, when the season’s over, or their last big race, then it’s like finally they can let loose, and they totally go to town for a month and just let their body go to waste.’’

It’s a sign their sport is actually a burden to them, he says. He doesn’t feel like that.

Based in Michigan for years now, Willis still hopes to return eventually to New Zealand, where most of his family lives – though he fears rising house prices might thwart that plan.

At the start of each year, he comes home. One of the first things he does is head off for a long run along the fire breaks on hills above Wainuiomata, or Belmont Regional Park. The landscape takes him back to his teenage years, before things got truly serious. What happened after that is still a wonder to him.

‘‘Wow’’, he thinks. ‘‘I dreamed of getting to some of these places, and now it’s actually come true.’’

"My son is far more important to me than any running results that I’ll ever have."