Re-shaped by God

Running in his fourth Olympics, Nick Willis is well accustomed to carrying the identity of one of the world’s best. But unlike most sporting celebrities, he’s also brutally honest about his shortcomings and struggles.

Earlier this year, Nick opened up on Facebook about a porn addiction that he only recently overcame. The news went viral in New Zealand, because no one opens up about this stuff, especially not on social media.

In an environment dominated by Photoshopped portraits and tropical holidays, Nick touched many people’s hearts by exposing his own, and talking about this silent assassin that is porn. He ruffled feathers and was even criticised for being so honest. But overly worrying about what others think of him is just one of the many struggles Nick confesses to battling through. And those struggles started at a very young age.

When Nick was four, his mum got sick and died a year later, leaving his dad to parent Nick and his older brother and sister. Seven years before, Nick’s parents had lost an older brother to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and a couple of years before that Nick’s father lost a brother after a caravan sideswiped him while changing a tyre on the motorway.

‘[My dad] has been through a huge amount of tragedy,’ says Nick. ‘And because I didn’t have a mum, a lot of my time was spent at other people’s houses. I observed how other families functioned and I played the comparison game a lot of the time. I saw they had the normal nucleus of a family and we were just getting by emotionally.’

As a teenager, Nick recalls the anger these tragedies had cemented in his heart. ‘My dad arranged for me to go to a Scripture Union snowboarding camp and one of the speakers at the camp said, “When you find Jesus, you find peace.” But in front of all the other campers I yelled out ‘Bull s***!

‘I ran out crying. One of the leaders followed me and talked to me. I asked, “What about my dad? He found Jesus but he has had all these people die in his life and he spends most nights sleepless and stressed and has anxiety!” It showed my anger towards God, rather than my unbelieving in him.’

It wasn’t until partway through a degree at the University of Michigan that Nick would peel back the layers of this anger and finally grieve his mother’s passing. But to get to Michigan he first had to find his identity as a runner.

The makings of a runner

Growing up in Lower Hutt, Nick watched his older brother and sister compete in kid’s athletics. He was itching to get involved. When finally allowed on the track he loved it and quickly discovered success. ‘I always enjoyed racing,’ remembers Nick. ‘And obviously I had a lot of success and that made me enjoy it more.’

He loved the racing so much that he’d get frustrated the races were only once every month or so, whereas his other favourite sports (rugby, cricket and golf) he could play every week. So in Year 10, his dad connected Nick with a local running coach who would pick Nick and other young athletes up from school to train.

Nick’s big breakthrough came when he turned 17. He was selected to compete at the Pacific School’s Games and he won the 800 m and just got beaten in the 1500 m. ‘It launched me to completely own the identity as a runner,’ he says. ‘Up until that point I was just a skater who also ran and played rugby and golf. ‘That helped me naturally embrace training. For example, the previous year I finished 83rd in the New Zealand Secondary Schools’ Cross Country Champs, because I didn’t really like to go for runs and it wasn’t cool.

‘I finally embraced the identity of [running] as something I could get a scholarship for and do full time. I trained as much as I could and enjoyed it and, from that, the results came. You’ve got to put in the work to get the real results. And that was when my times suddenly dropped in leaps and bounds.’

Later that year, Nick ran 4:01 in the mile and 1:48 in the 800m, effectively opening the entire running world to this blossoming talent.

The makings of an Olympian

A series of events led to Nick attending what was at the time the top university running team in the States. There he met University of Michigan head coach Ron Warhurst. They’ve been an inseparable duo ever since. Nick explains how this new training environment propelled him to the next level: ‘The big break for me was at the end of my first year when I ran a relay leg over 1200 m at the Penn Relays. I ran 2:49, which suggested potential to run 3:32 for the 1500 m.

‘Afterwards, everyone told me how good this was. I had no idea. But once they started calculating, they explained to me my potential—I could not only make the Olympics but actually be a contender! That changed my mind-set from that point on.’

The next year, Nick ran that predicted 3:32 and qualified for his first Olympics (2004 Athens). ‘In the first round I felt effortless,’ he recounts, ‘and finished across the line first equal with my heroes at the time. I thought, “Maybe I’m ready to turn pro!” ‘Then, in the semi-final, I was strutting confidently but had nothing in the last 50 m and just missed out by agonising inches from making the final. That humbled me a little and made me think, “Maybe I’m not ready to race the big dogs yet.” ’ After receiving offers to leave university and turn professional, Nick decided he needed to study for one more year to repay his university and coach for investing in him. But another series of hurdles awaited him back in Michigan.

Hitting a wall ‘I’d become a Christian a year earlier, but hadn’t really grown much, so I made the decision to turn down all the money and opportunities. Then my girlfriend and I broke up a month later when we realised we were heading in different directions, because I was leaning more towards learning how to be a Christian.

‘I let go of the money and the girl, but I still had my running. Then suddenly, boom, I was training hard core, running 100 miles a week … and I got a stress fracture in my femur. It was a pretty serious injury. ‘The money, the girl and now my health—all taken out from under me in the space of six weeks. That was in October and the Athens Olympics were in August. I said, “Wow! What now?’’ ’ Would Nick flip out and get angry with God again? Or was there a way God could be using these circumstances to draw Nick closer? God’s timing is uncanny, for it was as though everything in Nick’s life had been preparing him to make the right steps at this crucial crossroads.

Joining the crowd

Nick had grown up attending Petone Baptist, but didn’t really connect with church. In fact, as a teenager, Nick explains, ‘My Sunday mornings were spent in Wellington city skateboarding around the empty concrete jungle. Church just seemed this really boring place where everyone was happy—and I was this grumpy teenager who wasn’t very happy at all. I felt that everything was against me. I blamed a lot of that on God for allowing my mum to die.’

Alcohol had also become a crutch in his teenaged years. ‘A couple of weeks before finishing intermediate school, with no prompting from teachers or parents, a bunch of us were just hanging out one day and made a pact to never do drugs or alcohol. It wasn’t religious or anything. We were just ambitious.

‘The empowerment that intermediate school gave us to experience responsibilities was awesome, but suddenly I got to high school and the dynamics changed. You’re the youngest and at the bottom of the heap and you’ve got no responsibilities. Kids start looking for opportunities to feel older again and to feel important.

‘For the first couple of months we’d go to “coke and chippie” parties. But one night I turn up slightly late and everybody was totally blitzed. So I went round trying to take it out of everyone’s hands, saying, “What are you doing? You’re going to ruin your life!”

‘Only two of us, me and my best friend, weren’t drinking, so we walked home that night, heads down, thinking, “What are we going to do now that our friends have dived into this totally different world that we don’t agree with?”

‘We had to decide: do we make new friends or do we join in with what they’re doing? So the next weekend, we stole a bottle of wine and got drunk ourselves. I wasn’t even 13 yet.’

For the next eight years, Nick says he figures he made a fool of himself every other weekend because of his drinking. ‘I became known as the guy who did stupid but funny things at parties. That became something of an identity as a teenager.’ Once the running training increased, Nick would use his Sunday morning long run to burn off the excesses of Saturday night. But this was reinforcing a personality type completely different to the person he is today. ‘I was so reserved and had no confidence when I was sober. I relied purely on alcohol to get me to talk to girls and to speak up in a crowd.’

This reserved and withdrawn character was a far cry from the public figure Nick has become, personified as the uber-confident sportsperson who carried the New Zealand flag at the 2012 Olympics. So, what changed?

Good grief

‘It all came out after my first year at university,’ explains Nick, referring to that simmering anger he held towards God. ‘I realised I was becoming an adult and had to choose who I was going to be in this world.

‘That’s when I started reflecting on my mum. I had never grieved for her, so I started that grieving process. I realised that if I think she’s genuinely up there in Heaven then there must be a God who created that Heaven.’

Nick started wrestling with what that meant, and says that if someone had come up to him at this point and explained the Christian gospel, he would have committed himself then and there. A few months later, he connected with Athletes in Action (the sports ministry for Campus Crusade for Christ) and had a lot of his questions explained.

‘It got to the point where I pulled out old photos, and I actually enjoyed the crying and reflecting on my mum. That was a really healthy release from years and years of not processing it. Now I have this genuine understanding and peace that eternity is the real deal.’

Meeting a mentor

Through Athletes in Action Nick grew close to a mentor who took him through the Bible one-on-one. ‘He led me to understand Christ’s forgiveness and what it actually meant to have the price [for my salvation] paid by Christ’s blood on the cross,’ says Nick.

Amidst finding a new faith in Jesus, Nick was still rationalising that it was okay to have four or five beers if he wasn’t getting wasted. Then his mentor challenged him that although the drinking age in New Zealand was 18, in America it was 21. Nick was 20 at the time.

‘I sort of laughed him off at first,’ says Nick. ‘Then I thought, “He’s probably right, it’s better to abide by the law.” From then on it became easier to not have any drinks, than to have several.’

That was the end of Nick’s drinking, but also the end of his source of confidence in social settings. However, his mentor had a plan for that, too. He arranged for Nick, as a well-known local athlete, to give talks—firstly in front of small school groups, then in front of entire schools and finally in front of churches of several thousand. Not being thrown in the deep end allowed Nick to develop in confidence gradually. He now also had a reason to be outgoing that was much bigger than himself.

'It was never about performing,’ explains Nick, ‘it was about sharing how my life had changed and believing that would help encourage other people. ‘The more I thought about how I could help others, the more it would take away all the nerves. I wasn’t getting graded, and you get positively reinforced by people who come up to you and say, “That really spoke to me.’’ ’

Letting go

Nick had done all the ‘right things’—sobered up, found faith, grieved his mother and gained a new source of confidence—but back from his first Olympics and he lost everything: the money, the girl and the running. So, what was his response?

‘This was when I hastily let go of holding on and said to God, “Okay.” It was then that God really moulded me into who I am today. Letting go of all those other things allowed God to break me down first—and then he re-shaped me.’

Nick got involved in non-sporting life with Campus Crusade—a group of regular Christian students. ‘I got to see what it was like to live a life as a Christian first and not worry about sport. Not being able to train, I focused on this for three months. Running wasn’t even a second thought.’

He bounced back from injury to win the gold medal at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games two years later and went on to win silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and two more Commonwealth medals. Nick is now consistently the best performing non-African middle distance runner. At the Rio Olympics he heads a team of three Kiwi 1500 m guys—the most New Zealand has ever sent to the Games. He is happily married to Sierra and the couple have a three-year-old son, Lachlan.

On Sunday 21st August 2016, Nick Willis won Bronze in the 1500m Final at the Rio Olympics, becoming the event's oldest medallist.

---

by Hayden Shearmen(c) 'War Cry' magazine, 20 August 2016, pp 5-7
You can read 'War Cry' at your nearest Salvation Army church or centre, or subscribe through Salvationist Resources.