From left to right, back row, are runners: Susan Brady, Dan Holve, Neil Barnet, Sanford Jeames, and Tim Reynolds; middle row, Bridget Matthews, Kelly Holve, Madeline Bergen, and Ana Nunez; and, front, YMCA course instructor Lee Haseltine. (Submitted photo)
WESTFIELD – Running is not easy. Ask anyone at random what their least favorite class in school was and they likely may say – GYM. Well, not everyone.
“Phys ed was always my favorite,” said Lee Haseltine, an avid runner, teacher, and the third-year girl’s cross country coach at Southwick High School, a man with a passion for helping people through his own personal obsession, running.
“I started running around 2000, I’d say,” said Haseltine, a former soccer star at Southwick in the ‘70’s and former Runner of the Month for Locally Run, “and I was astonished at the amount of running there is to do in this area. There’s the Jones 10 miler, there are races in Stanley Park on Monday nights in the summer, 5K races in Northampton, Thursdays in Holyoke. It really is incredible!”
As a member of the Greater Springfield Harriers, a running organization in the area that funds his race participation (of which he competed in over 50 races last spring alone), Haseltine is a noted running aficionado in the area. So it was no surprise when Cindy Agan, the fitness director at the Westfield YMCA, approached Lee about running a training program for competition in the 10K.
The program started on January 8, and will conclude on February 26, and meets on Sunday mornings from 7 – 8 a.m. And it is designed to push those who sign up.
His business card proclaims that “Pain is temporary, pride is forever”, and this is a philosophy that Haseltine brings to not only his own training, but also to this program at the Y. “We’ve had mornings when we have started with a temperature of 4 degrees outside,” Lee said, “these are people who just want to be here, either to get better times, or to lead healthier lives.”
The routine of the program is strenuous, but designed to help each runner progress at their own pace. “We sign in, then loosen up with some push ups, sit ups and jumping jacks,” he says, “I then send them around the gym for four or five minutes, then stretch again, and do a warm up run before embarking on our runs for the morning.”
In his first year of running the program, Haseltine believes it is going “very well.” “We run by minutes in the program,” he explains, “25 to 35 to 45 and finally to an hour of straight running. By the seventh week, all of the participants will compete in the 10K race at Forest Park in Springfield.”
Haseltine, in addition to substitute teaching, bus driving and running the Coach Dick Atkinson 5K race every year to benefit Southwick High athletics, is very pleased with this year’s crop of runners and hopes to continue running the program in the future.
“After serving time in the Army, working in a sales position, I wanted to reinvent myself,” Haseltine says, “and I chose to do that through running. I am so glad that I have been given this opportunity to have a positive impact on people’s lives through what I love to do.”
