From Drug Dealer to Long-Distance Record-Setter: Kevin Castille’s Redemption

Ososlo

Throughout his twenties, Kevin Castille sold crack cocaine on the streets of
the Truman neighborhood in Lafayette, Louisiana, where his grandparents and
aunts had raised him and eight other children, who slept in their modest family
home three to a bed. He’d been the smallest, quietest one. He still was. But
dealing brought money—some ten thousand dollars a week, throughout the
nineteen-nineties, in profits. He bought fancy clothes and cars, including a
string of seven Ford Mustangs. He didn’t use drugs—or even drink alcohol—but he
was “getting high from the cash,” he told me a couple of years ago, for
a Runner’s World profile. Living in a bleak blur of hotel rooms
and apartments, he’d had two daughters with two women by 1997, when he turned
twenty-five. Just as his own parents, an alcoholic and a troubled Vietnam
veteran, had been absent from his life, he was largely missing from his
children’s.

He survived this way, under constant threat of
arrest and violence, until 2001, when he was sent to prison for possession with
intent to distribute. Confinement was something of a relief: junkies and robbers
couldn’t get him inside. It was also a wake-up call. Castille had been the
leader of the Acadiana High School cross-country team in Lafayette—they finished
second at state during his senior year—and had even been recruited to run at the
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where hunger had led to hustling after a
single season. Now he’d lost some of his most important years as a runner. His
running career before the age of thirty boiled down to three words familiar to
most serious runners: “did not finish.”

This week, the
forty-three-year-old high-school track coach, personal trainer, and father will
run in the U.S. Olympic marathon trials held in Los Angeles. Over the past
decade and a half, Castille has resurrected himself as a man and a runner and
made his mark in the masters category at an impressive range of distances. (For
distance running, masters runners are over forty years old.) He has held
American masters records at the three-thousand-metre,
five-thousand-metre, ten-thousand-metre, and ten-mile distances, though
only his ten-thousand-metre record remains. These results, he says, are due to
both hard work (he runs 120 miles per week, including brutal track workouts
texted to him by his coach, Matt
Lonergan, an assistant coach at Northeastern University, in Boston)
and the unexpected benefit of not running in his twenties: his legs—if not his
mind—are less weary than most. “I was Lazarus,” he told me, describing this
period. “I’d been risen from the dead.” (This period was not without its own
pitfalls: he qualified for the ten-thousand-metre race at the 2004 Olympic
trials, but didn’t finish.)

Some observers, particularly those who
frequent the speculation-friendly LetsRun
message boards, claim that his running transformation couldn’t
possibly have transpired without the assistance of performance-enhancing drugs.
But Castille has never failed a test. The only advantage he says he has allowed
himself: regularly sleeping inside an altitude-simulating tent, where he inhales
the reduced oxygen levels that would be available at ten thousand feet,
prompting him to produce extra red blood cells. The idea is to counter the low
elevation of Louisiana. “It’s not a runner-friendly state,” he said. “Too much
heat and humidity. Not enough hills or elevation. But it’s my home and I’m not
leaving.”

As if he had not had enough challenges
already, Castille had to qualify twice for this year’s Olympic marathon trials.
He was told that he’d made the cut back in May of last year, at a San Diego
half-marathon, with a time of 1:04:45, and began to receive paperwork from USA
Track & Field reaffirming as much. But he learned in December that the San
Diego course was ineligible, because there was too great an elevation drop per
kilometre. A few weeks later, in Jacksonville, Florida—just six weeks before
Olympic trials would begin, only nine weeks into his marathon training—he
requalified with an even faster time, two seconds off his half-marathon best:
1:04:33. “I didn’t panic,” he said. “I knew I was fit.” He’s now the
second-oldest American male marathon-trial qualifier ever (and the oldest this
year); he’ll turn forty-four in March.

Age, geography, Olympic trials: these are
relatively minor concerns compared with Castille’s past. It wasn’t until last
year that the faculty, students, and parents at Lafayette’s St. Thomas More high
school, where he is the beloved track coach, learned the darker details of his
biography. “I work in the Catholic system,” he told me. “In the Catholic
diocese, where people say, ‘Come as you are. God’s gonna save you no matter
where you come from.’ But I wondered: Would people really do what they say
they’d do? People know me and they know what I do here, my involvement in the
community and dealings with kids. And all of sudden, after all these years, they
learn this stuff about drugs and jail? I’d kept it in a safe with a lock and
key. What would people’s perceptions be? It took years and years to forgive
myself for what I did.” It took the Lafayette community—most of it, anyway—no
time at all.

On January 17th, Castille set a course
record at the Louisiana half-marathon: 1:07:53. He believes that he will soon
run twice that distance at the same pace. Sure, he’s never run a marathon
quicker than 2:20:58 (in 2013, at Minnesota’s Twin Cities marathon), but he
thinks two hours and fifteen minutes is reachable, and he feels the same about
the Rio de Janeiro Olympic games, in August. Considering the Benjamin Button arc
of his running life, it’s hard to doubt him. But should he fall short of the
Olympics, he has the joy of coaching high-school cross-country to fall back on.
“The team is doing awesome,” he recently told me. “I had my best team this year.
The state course was so muddy, in November, it kind of neutralized us. We got
third. But that’s just the way life is. It’s a life lesson for the
kids.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/from-drug-dealer-to-long-distance-record-setter-kevin-castilles-redemption

be interesting to see how he goes.