In case you couldn’t tell by everything about me, I am not the most athletic person. In fact, if you placed me in a room with a randomly selected group of people, there is a pretty good chance that I would even be the least athletic person in that room. Despite my best efforts (and my father’s, bless his heart), I have never found any great passion or aptitude for doing sports, and with the exception of hockey I am generally not that keen on watching sports either. (I’m excluding the Olympics here. I rally hard for the Olympics.) That said, 20 years on I am more or less sports literate in that I understand basic rules of most of the popular sports and only sometimes forget that the Superbowl is a thing until the day of the Superbowl. I am not track and field literate. My knowledge of the sport before the talk began and ended with “People run various distances, jump various heights, and throw various things”. My strategy whenever I had to run a mile in gym class was to jog the straightaways and walk the corners of the track field. Now that all the track and field people are cringing and/or laughing and/or shaking their heads, let’s move on to my thoughts on Mr. Paul Wilcox’s talk. All of said thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt because, as I’ve mentioned, I know nothing.

What interested me most about the talk when I read about it was first the title because I have a weakness for talking about life and world views, and second was the history of the Transatlantic Series, something I hand’t even heard of before the talk. How do you get nerds to a sports talk? History! It was really interesting to hear about the series from Mr. Wilcox who is clearly very passionate and invested in it. I thought it was incredible how this competition has survived through two world wars, the Depression, and countless other tests of time. I think what makes this series so resilient to the winds of change is precisely what Mr. Wilcox mentioned or alluded to multiple times in his talk: the Transatlantic Series isn’t just about track and field. It is an opportunity for athletes and coaches to experience something new, to make connections with people who share their passion, to travel to new places, and above all a way for people to use their sport to expand their world view. From competing with members of a team usually considered their rivals, to connecting with student athletes from another country, to seeing the long lasting effect this opportunity has from people like Mr. Wilcox and Dr. Hill, the Transatlantic Series is about much more than track and field (though I don’t think that bit should be discounted either). It has very clearly built a strong community and as such has been able to continue the tradition for many years.