SEATTLE – If you want to know the truth, Andy Fader would rather be playing football.
Quarterback.
For the Washington Huskies.
“If he could do it all over again, he’d love to be 6-3, 225, and throwing the football in Husky Stadium right now,” said UW cross country coach Greg Metcalf with a grin. “I guarantee it.”
Once, Fader had a dream of doing just that. As a young athlete, he was the backup quarterback on the freshman team at Cascade High School.
“He would have been a good quarterback,” said his younger brother, Joel. “He was just too small.”
Andy loved football. “Sometimes I wish I could still play,” he said. “But no way was I going to be a Division I player.”
What he was going to be with his lean and light body was a solid Division I distance runner, a top-10 finisher in the 1,500 meters at the Pacific-10 Conference track and field meet the past three years, an All-American with a fifth-place finish on a UW distance medley relay team at the NCAA indoor meet last March, and co-captain of the UW cross country team this year and last year.
A leader and a young man respected by his peers.
“He’s the man,” said Husky teammate Austin Abbott, a redshirt freshman from Chehalis. “He’s like our dad.”
On a recent Saturday morning, old “dad” – Fader turned 22 in February – showed he still has the stuff to put a whipping on the kids as he finished seventh in a field of 122 in the Sundodger Invitational at Lincoln Park in West Seattle. Not only that, but the UW senior ran his best time ever for an 8-kilometer (4.9 miles) race, 24 minutes and 14 seconds.
“To me,” he said afterwards, clutching two cups of fluid and sweating profusely, “it’s just 25 minutes of pain.”
Real, deep, long-lasting pain is running 80 miles a week, which was what Fader averaged this summer in training. Sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But it’s less than he put in a year ago. “I’m not in really great shape,” he said. “I took it easy this summer. This was a test to see where my fitness is.”
It appears to be pretty dang good. As the more than 100 guys who finished behind him can attest.
Fader tends to downplay his own talent while praising that of his younger teammates. “This guy’s future is my mission,” he said, nodding at Abbott. “I’m teaching him all I know because he’s flat-out better than me.”
That may be. But Fader knows the inner game of running. And he has the intense competitiveness of an inside linebacker.
“The last three years at the Pac-10 track championships, he’s scored at 1,500 meters when on a piece of paper going into the meet maybe he shouldn’t have scored,” Metcalf said. “But he makes good race decisions, he knows what his strengths are, and he’s gone out and done it. He’s had a great college career.”
One thing Fader is not keen on is training. “My coach would probably say I hate running,” Fader laughed.
“He loves the training part where he’s hanging out with the guys, he loves the camaraderie and all that stuff associated with it,” Metcalf said. “But the sheer act of lacing up his shoes and going for a 10-miler probably isn’t that much fun for him.”
That he is able to lace up a pair of shoes, step outside on a brisk fall morning and go for a long training run is something he doesn’t take for granted. Not after what happened to him as a freshman in high school.
In the fall of 1997, Fader nearly died from meningitis, a disease that infects the lining of the brain. He was in a coma for more than three days at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle.
“They said if he had gotten to the hospital 10 minutes later, he wouldn’t have made it,” his father, Jerry, recalled.
Looking back, Andy said at the time he probably didn’t understand the severity of his condition. “I was just (ticked off) that I couldn’t play football,” he said.
Small to begin with, he lost 27 pounds during his hospital stay, falling from 130 to 103 pounds. His body wasn’t the only thing that suffered. So did his grades, as he had to miss two months of school.
When he returned to school on a half-day basis, a major life change awaited him.
Craig Bekins, Cascade’s head track coach at the time, was always trying to recruit kids from the football team to run, jump and throw in the spring.
Bekins had in mind for Fader to run the 1,600 and the 3,200 . He didn’t know what kind of runner Fader would turn out to be, but this he did know: He was an “exceptionally determined kid.”
Still not completely back to full strength, Fader didn’t do much as a freshman. He remembered being on the final lap of the 3,200 in the Western Conference meet and looking across the track to see the top runners crossing the finish line. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m terrible,’” he said. “The next year I was second.”
Still, even after a breakout year as a sophomore, he wasn’t quite sold on running. Football still had a strong grip on him.
Going into his junior year, mere days before the Bruins were to begin football practice, Fader was still uncertain about which sport to pursue.
As much as he loved football, though, he realized that his size was a much better fit for cross country. “Kids I’d played football with as a freshman had grown,” he said, “and I hadn’t gotten that much bigger.”
Rather than having large, angry young men pursue him on the gridiron in the fall, he opted to have small, wiry, pacific young men chase him on soft paths through woods and over golf courses.
Most of his success came in the spring, however, as a distance runner on the Bruin track team. By the time he graduated, he had finished in the top-10 four times at the state track meet, with his best performances being fifth place in both the 1,600 and 3,200 his senior year.
It was a trend that would continue in college. “I’ve always been more of a track guy,” he said. “I’m always looking forward to the track season.”
This cross country season will mark the end of his collegiate career (he’s already run four years of track after redshirting the cross country season as a freshman) and he wants to make it one he’ll cherish forever.
His goal: to help the Huskies reach the national meet.
It’s a young team, a gifted team. A team that needs strong leadership, and two of the runners providing that ingredient are from Snohomish County: Fader and Mark Mandi, a senior from Mariner and the top runner on the team.
There was a time when beating everyone was his sole purpose in life, Fader said, especially in his strong suit, track. “I took it extremely seriously,” he said. “I was so competitive. I was going to try to beat everyone else all the time and that’s all that mattered. I treated it too seriously.”
It was after his third year of college that he had an awakening: that some of these guys were just better runners than he was. “These guys should beat me,” he remembered thinking. “I’m just not as naturally gifted as they are.”
He realized that he didn’t have to win to be successful. “I said if I can’t win, I can score points in the Pac-10 (track meet) in the 1,500 and still help the team.”
Running then became more fun. “Less of a job,” he said. “Last year and this year have been less about myself. I’ve been trying to teach the younger guys whatever I can.”
It’s what a leader does.
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