An interview with Billy Hild

Yeah. It’s true. Whenever I introduce Billy Hild to current members of the team, my autopilot description of him is, “he graduated from here in (oh wait, I always forget the year) and he’s the son I never wanted.” The son I never wanted. Billy looks like he could be my son (that’s not particularly a compliment nor an insult; it just … is). In some ways (but not all), our personalities are closely aligned. He describes himself below as an introvert, and I have many of those same qualities. He started running relatively late in high school, posted relatively mediocre high school times but then made himself into a pretty passable collegiate runner in college. More or less, that describes my early-running career path. We have similar interests outside of running. We talk all the time. We disagree and agree about sports, politics, the weather, everything. I joke with some of my current athletes that I probably text with Hild more than my own wife. I’m too scared to look up the metrics to prove that might actually be true.

Billy has a steel trap of a memory. Holy crap. If there is a transcript of every conversation I’ve had over the past 12 years, Billy could probably edit it for clarity and accuracy. He remembers EVERYTHING. I don’t need Google or factcheck.org. I just text Hild. Or, more likely, he’ll text me: He’s my source for breaking news. When something happens, I get the text from him before the notification on my laptop (I disabled all notifications on my phone last year) or I hear it from some other method. It’s almost become a game: Try to hear about something BEFORE Billy. I think I’ve won that game. Maybe once or twice. Maybe not. All joking and sarcasm aside – and my God, our default state is most definitely sarcasm – Billy and I have remained quite close. He is intensely loyal to our program. We have gotten into arguments about the current team, and amazingly he is often correct – even though I’m the guy that sees the team every day! He’s extremely intelligent and has an intuitive sense about a lot of different subjects. Yeah. He can be abrasive, he can be disagreeable, he can be downright grumpy. But like it or not, he’s the son I never wanted. It’s a miracle it took me this long to have Billy Hild featured in the Pandemic Papers. Because of his aforementioned steel-trap memory, this interview could have gone on indefinitely. It’s long, but good. He proved to be an excellent self-editor. He followed up with an email of “out-takes” stories that may have been longer than this interview (it was quite entertaining). He remembers everything! For those of you who have known Hild for years, you’ll enjoy this. For younger readers, enjoy this introduction. Because eventually, whenever we get back to normal, you’ll see The Son I Never Wanted -- at a practice or a meet in the future. Neat!

Your connection to Marist is unique in a few ways: You went to Spackenkill High School in Poughkeepsie, where our team used to practice on the track for many years. And your track coach at Spackenkill was David Swift, a former school record holder at Marist. Did that make your decision to attend Marist easier or more difficult? Were you looking at other schools?

Seeing the Marist track team practice at Spackenkill in high school was a common sight, although that is now a thing of the past given the clear upgrade to Vassar since then.

I moved to Poughkeepsie in 1996 and therefore grew up close to Marist, so I was always aware of its "existence," if that makes sense. I toured the school in the spring of 2009, when the campus looked much different than it does now (no Hancock Center or science building, old dining hall/student center, the best housing ever in Gartland still existed, with the Fontaine Annex next to it). I really liked it. I actually ended up being a tour guide at Marist and by my count, 8 future team members were people I actually gave tours to. My high school was small with less than 600 kids and everybody knew everybody's business. A significant percentage of kids I graduated with were kids I had known since kindergarten. I didn't quite want that level of intimacy in college. However, as an introvert, I also felt that I would be swallowed up in a larger school with something like a five-figure enrollment. Marist was a nice balance between those two extremes. 

From an academic standpoint, I didn't know what I really wanted to do after high school, but I knew what I didn't want to do. I had the idea of video game design/development but in hindsight I never really felt passionate about that (more on this further below). Nevertheless, there were a lot of other options at Marist that appealed to me.

I knew by my senior year of high school that I really wanted to continue running in college, but even during my senior year I wasn't fast enough for most programs and certainly not for the other schools I ended up applying to. I knew what I was. Early in my senior year - school hadn't even started yet - I was running with my high school coach and our top girl and when the conversation turned to college running, I had brought up my interest in Marist at the time. As already pointed out, Swift ran for Pete back in the early 1990s and put in a good reference for me without me knowing (he did, in his typical sarcasm, say to me that "oh, Pete would just love you"). That, my being proactive, and Pete's willingness to take chances on underdeveloped kids with good work ethic went a long way to landing a roster spot.

What were the pros and cons of going to college so close to home (you were only 10 minutes from campus)?

Ten is a stretch, make it 15! *laugh* I actually lived on campus and I actually didn't have a car until my senior year, so I might as well have been three hours away. I actually didn't even get my driver's license until the day before my senior year started, a fact that I got a lot of ribbing from teammates over during the first three years of my college career. There are several reasons why that happened, but they're not really important for this interview.

A lot of the benefits were ease-of-life things. If I forgot something at home, it wasn't hard to get it. When moving in or out of campus at any point, there wasn't a long car ride (or a flight) ahead of me. I could go home for a few hours and watch a Giant game with my dad on Sunday - I tried to split it 50/50 between going home and staying at Marist - or go out to dinner with my family easily. A small story regarding my knowledge of the area actually came on the day of my first practice, where the car I was in got separated from the "convoy" on the way up to Ogden Mills in Staatsburg and a freshman that nobody really knew was able to give directions, having run races there numerous times in high school.

As far as the cons? I guess it would be, from a bigger picture perspective, delaying the "move away" portion of my life for a few years, as I didn't move out of Poughkeepsie officially until after I graduated.

How and when and why did you start running?

My first year on my high school's team was my sophomore year, which is probably a bit on the later side compared to many of my peers. My best friend growing up was already on the team and an emerging talent, and I wasn't doing anything else at the time. I was also friendly with a number of other kids on the team at the time too. There wasn't much more to it than that, or if there was, I don't remember my thought process at the time.  That summer of 2007 a few of us were running at 7am and I couldn't do much more than a mile at first. The day I met Swift (our first official day of practice), I was coming off of a week-long Las Vegas family vacation where I did not run at all, and my already-low ability was definitely rusty. Otherwise, I don't have some cool story like other people featured for this series. The most notable thing I can say about my early high school career is that I got lost in my first 5k race and didn't finish.

What are some of your high school career running highlights?

These are all incredibly trivial compared to my much more notable collegiate accomplishments, but I'm listing them because they do help tell a story and they were big deals to me when they happened at the time:

- The first time I ever completed a 5k without walking in my first cross country season. I'm serious, I was this raw. It took almost 25 minutes on a flat course, but there was no walking.

- The first time I ever broke 20 minutes in a 5k early in my junior year, which was the first time I remotely had a feeling that I "made it" as a runner.

- The first time I ever won a heat/race, winning the slow heat of the mile in my final indoor track meet during my junior year. Don't ask me for the time. 

- My senior year cross country league race was both a great achievement and a big disappointment (I just heard Pete groan as he's heard this story too many times before). The top 21 finishers in our league got league all-star honors. I figured going in that I would place just inside the top 30. I had probably the best cross country race of my high school career that day and was in the 19-22 range throughout the whole race. With less than a quarter mile to go I was still 21st, but got outkicked by someone from another school and came in 22nd by a hair. To come up just short of getting some type of accolade like that put a damper on that day, although the race itself was a breakthrough. (Editor’s note: I actually get the context of this story more than most, because my son ran in the same league for four years and getting top-21 was and still is a Big Deal; his senior year, he got 19^th and was thrilled. The competitive depth of the league has diminished through the years, but the places are what they are. So yeah, I get this)

- The first time I broke 5 minutes in the mile as a senior is one that really sticks out to me. My first mile in outdoor track my sophomore year was 6:27, and going under 5 minutes was something my 15-year-old self just never thought was possible and unattainable given my talent. To have a "4" in the minutes column was, to me, a validation of how far I had come in just under 2 years and proof further I could begin to hang with some of the big boys in my school's league.

- One of my more notable high school moments actually came after I graduated, when my coach called me to let me know that mostly due to the young age of the winter track team at my high school, I actually had our school record in the 1000m run and didn't realize it until just then. It's somewhat ironic because I only ran the event twice, my best time was not fast, and I was not a middle distance kid in high school and much less so in college. That record was obliterated quickly by two of my former high school teammates.

How was your transition from a relatively small high school track/XC team to a highly competitive D1 program?

This will be easier to explain if I give context on my high school team first. We had a pretty small cross country team - most years we had about 20 boys/girls combined at most (the track team was bigger and more competitive), but the social stuff was more important than anything we did in meets - although there were definitely individual standouts. I'm still friends with several old high school teammates today. I was our lead runner my senior year, and for most of the season I was a senior on a team of almost all freshman and sophomores. I think in in order to thrive as a runner from a performance perspective in that type of environment, you really have to develop a strong independent work ethic and willingness to be coached (I just heard Swift laugh, as I was anything but in a race). His mentality was "I can't force you to do any of this, you have to want it for yourself." 

That was something that carried over into collegiate running for me. For example - and knowing how Pete preaches "don't be a slave to your logbook" I know that this will make him squirm - my first experience in doubling was waking up early several times my senior year to get an extra run in before school started and add an extra 5-8 miles onto my weekly total. I'd do a lot more of that at Marist, and it wasn't a foreign concept then. My high school training my senior year was similar to what I ended up doing at Marist, just scaled down in mileage totals and pace. I will say that the tendency for the coach using the athletes' runs to accomplish his errands disappeared when I got to college; Pete never asked us to bring back a firewood log from a pile on the side of the road on one of our routes, nor did we ever have a day where practice started with "...so this is a list of tools I need and some cash, go run __ miles to the store down the road and bring them back to me, then we'll do strides and you can go home." (Editor’s note: If you think Billy is making this up, clearly you’ve never met Swifty)

So that foundation was there, but any time you jump from a small high school to a competitive D1 program, there is obviously an element of culture shock and I still had a long way to go. We had 14 boys in my recruiting class alone and I was the slowest one on paper. I remember struggling on the "Ogden Mills Hills" workout - the first workout of every cross country season for the Marist men - thinking "wow, what did I just get myself into?" For those reading this who don't know: that workout isn't supposed to be particularly hard. It almost felt like a totally different sport, but what helped immensely is we had a large roster with some guys that were not that much faster than I was. I was able to do regular runs and workouts with that group early in my freshman year and that enabled me to start working my way up to my collegiate peak. After those first 2 or 3 days, I never felt like I was in over my head, although I obviously wasn't about to regularly run with the top guys on the team. That came years later.

You were the classic “overachiever” at Marist as a runner. What are some of your favorite memories and highlights from your four years as a student-athlete at Marist?

I'll divide this up into running and not-running. My progression over the first 2 1/2 years of career exceeded the wildest expectations of what I ever thought I was capable of doing, and I'm very proud of that. Of course, I never set any school records or was the MAAC athlete of the week or any of that stuff - partially because of the rich history of the men's cross country/track programs (many of those record holders I was teammates with) - and partially (entirely!) because of my own relatively limited talent. I never contributed in the sense that I scored points at MAAC meets, but I was in the varsity scoring (top 7 individuals for cross country) in a regular meet once my junior year and I came close to scoring at the MAAC indoor meet my junior year, just getting outkicked by someone who had a personal best 5K time 40 seconds faster than mine. The "performance curve" trended down as a senior outside of 3-4 races, and I wasn't happy about that. But overall, I can't complain with the peak I reached. Tell my 18-year-old self what he was going to do in college, he would've signed up for it. On a separate note, watching pro runners such as Galen Rupp race up close at Boston University's famous indoor track my junior and senior years was awesome.

The above doesn't happen without having great training throughout the year. I always loved doing the mile repeats on the New Paltz rail trail or the hard runs in Minnewaska park during the fall season. I think during my senior year, it rained on nearly every Tuesday workout we had from August preseason through the end of cross country season, and we thought that was a character/unity building thing for us.

For non-running: I've noticed throughout reading this interview series that a lot of people hold dear the "little things," and I think that's the same with me. It's a lot of little things, including but not limited to: laughing at Russian dashcam videos on YouTube with Chris Reynolds in our off campus house my senior year, installing the inflatable swimming pool and palm trees in our Fulton house my junior year (sorry housing) and giving out our custom made ugly sweater Christmas cards to our whole housing block (I was not there for the shopping part and got stuck with the worst one by far - picture included), the countless long cafeteria sessions in the old cafeteria especially on weekend mornings, arguing with Pete in a van going to/from practice why

whatever Mike Francesa just said on WFAN was actually completely wrong, the longtime team traditions like MAAC songs (I still have every lyric sheet), Jerk Squad dinners on Wednesdays, the secret Santa every year, and watching the Giants/football as a small group every Sunday (especially my sophomore year, the year they won their most recent Super Bowl). There's a great story involved about the oversized TV we watched games on during that school year, but it's not mine to tell. Even though I didn't major in either of the subjects, having the late legend Dr. Sand for two core classes on Mondays during the fall of my junior year provided a lot of memorable moments.

On a personal level, many of my close friends now are people that I was teammates with and met at Marist. Several I lived with, for multiple years. There are still a good 9-10 people I stay in close/regular contact with. What's cool is that some of them have settled in the Poughkeepsie area, so it's very easy to see people personally any time I am visiting my hometown.

What was your major at Marist and how did it prepare you for your career?

My official academic program was Communications with an emphasis in Interactive Media design/Game studies, with a minor in computer science. I'm pretty sure that program has changed a lot since I graduated 6 years ago and goes under other designations now. My major was declared coming in, while I took up the computer science minor my freshman year on the recommendation of my faculty advisor, who said that extra background would be incredibly helpful to my career.

I'll try to connect the dots to my current career: I originally wanted to go into video game design and development. But I realized I didn't have quite the passion required to succeed in that kind of field which requires a tremendous "labor of love," so I looked into UX/UI design. That turned into a job/career in software development, which is a closely related cousin and immediately relevant to my minor. There's part of me that says "you know, you could've just been a computer science major from the start and made more money in internships with much more secure 2014 job prospects," and then there's the other part of me that says "19-year-old you would have been miserable." More on that a few paragraphs down. Either way, it worked out, so no complaints here.

Describe your current job – how long you have been there, what you do and how it has been impacted by Covid-19.

I currently work for a private IT company in the Washington DC area, which has a contract with the FBI for maintaining and adding new features to one of their largest law enforcement systems. My uncle worked at this place before I did and referred me to my original boss, who was hiring a whole new development team at the time of my hiring. I have been there 5 years working across 3 different teams which have all required vastly different skills to be developed and utilized. In slightly more recent times, I've also assisted contract management staff with further automating their metric gathering processes, which has saved them a lot of time to do other important things.

I will be completely honest: I struggled in the computer science minor classes at Marist, and I had a lot of consternation about taking this job. Compared to a peer (from Marist or just in general) who actually majored in this stuff and had 2-3 directly related internships, I didn't think I had as developed of a background. However, I can draw parallels between my collegiate running career to my professional career. My attitude towards being on the team and starting at the bottom as an unknown, working your way up to the top along the way, was the same attitude that I took to my job. "If you feel like you don't belong, make yourself belong," that sort of thing. I was the youngest (by age) person when I started there and obviously had the least experience. But it turned out OK. Attitude is everything for someone that is raw and/or inexperienced.

Fortunately, IT jobs lend themselves very well to telecommuting. I already worked from home on Mondays and Fridays, and now it has been every day for 2 months, with nearly no changes in my day-to-day duties or capabilities to produce. Management on my contract have posted daily questions on our general team chat so that we can keep in general touch with each other and we're starting to integrate video conferencing into our meetings instead of just having them be phone conversations, although given the network bandwidth with more than 50 people this has to be somewhat limited. Other than the physical remoteness, it's very much business as usual for us. Like many jobs in the DC area, we're government funded, so we don't have to worry about funding either. I am admittedly one of the lucky ones to still have such secure employment and if I ever have a bad day, I remind myself of that.

Speaking of the pandemic, how has your life changed since it started? How have you adapted to it and how has it impacted your family?

There's good and bad. Not commuting 90 minutes round trip three days a week has given me more time to do stuff that isn't sitting in a car, and I've had lots more time to get more caught up on books I haven't read, movies I haven't watched, podcast episodes I haven't listened to, and video games I haven't played. I've been able to keep in touch with people via the usual methods - texting, zoom/facetime video calls, straight phone calls, and so on with some people I still need to get around to catching up with. I have scaled back my running a bit, from 5-6 days a week to just every other day, and the routes are on local roads where I live (I don't currently run in DC area parks, near the National Mall, etc.), at night, when there's few if any people outside. Given the undesirable post-April weather in the DC area - and there are many other words I'd like to use there not fit for this interview - I prefer night running anyway.

On the bad side, I have lost two family members. My dad's aunt became one of the thousands of deaths related to COVID-19 complications at the beginning of April. The necessity to stay indoors, closing of shops, social distancing, etc. rapidly worsened my surviving grandma's dementia to the point where she had to be admitted to a hospital as an absolute last resort, got infected, and also succumbed to it a few weeks later. My extended family is still unsure what happened there, because despite isolation for weeks, she was admitted to that hospital's COVID unit almost immediately.  

You’ve done some good post-collegiate running. Talk about that, your current running and your future goals?

Oh, I have? *laugh* For most of college, I had the vision of embarking on a post-collegiate career similar to what a lot of my former teammates have done with great success; joining a post-collegiate team while working a full-time job and still continuing to run big races and big times. As time went on in my running career and I had a rough junior year in so many ways (running and non), those plans changed, and by the end of my four years I was questioning whether I wanted to continue with the sport at all. I felt very burned out and it almost felt toxic to me. The logic was that if I wasn't going to continue to give it that type of effort to get to that next level, it wasn't worth it. I was too competitive against myself.

However, as time went on and I got a little older, I adopted a different mentality towards running after college. It was basically a soft reboot. I put high school/college behind a proverbial glass case and for lack of a better term, "opened up a new record book." First off, I need to keep the weight off, and running is good for that. Second, I only compare races I run to other races I've run since I graduated, and I've found that to be a much healthier attitude. So, I am not nearly as competitive as I was in college at this point, but I have done at least one road race a year every year since I graduated. They were all half-marathons, except for 2017 when I ran the NYC Marathon. I was lucky to get in via lottery application, and I always wanted NYC to be my first one. My attitude going in was to do solid training and just run it, whatever the finish time was would be what it was (I set a soft goal of 3:10-3:20 based on training). My training was solid up until September, when I thought I had some type of stress reaction in my shin and was worried I'd have to defer a year. Scaling back the training helped mitigate this where I got to the starting line in one piece, and although my finish time wasn't anything special, I'm still really happy I did it and learned a lot of lessons for next time. A lot of the "memorabilia" from that race is on a wall in my apartment.

As far as future goals, I'll just say that I don't plan on NYC being my only marathon, but right now there's obviously no timetable given the world situation.

Also re your post-collegiate running: You've been able to connect with a lot of older alums (through Swift and other avenues). How has that been and what kind of bond have you formed with athletes with whom you were never teammates?

Well, I'll go older first: I think my first real experience with connecting with the older alumni base was actually as a student, when I got special permission from Pete to run the Mudders and Grunters race my junior year between seasons, as the team needed an extra person for the "title defense." I then lost my shoe in the first mile in very deep mud, completed the race anyway, and afterwards Hopkins saw half of my sock ripped away (pic included here) and said "oh no, Pete's going to kill us." 

The older, 90s/"Swift"-era alumni I don't know as well, although I met several at Pete's 50th birthday party back in 2014 and I've come to know Lurch and Matt Pool (who coached at another school my high school often competed against) better since I graduated.

For the current team, it's easy to "connect" since my parents still live in Poughkeepsie, so if I'm ever home I can just come right over and get a run in from campus or something to that nature. The typical introduction to anyone on the team (or the team as a whole) is something like "People we both know have said Hild looks like my son Joey. Joey is a son I have, Hild is a son I never wanted." I like to stay in touch but I also don't want to be "that alum that never graduated" either. I've been able to find common ground with guys that grew up in the area/ran for a high school I competed against, guys who like the same music or sports teams as me, etc. I should also give big shout outs here to former teammates Tim Keegan and Justin Tampellini, who have taken turns hosting a young alumni gathering in NYC shortly before Christmas every year that allows many graduating classes to get together in one spot.

You have continued to follow our program closely and that loyalty is appreciated. What has kept you connected to the program and what are your hopes for the future of our program?

Early on as an alum, I still had a vested interest as I still had friends on the team and I lived local for a bit so it was easy. As time went on, I scaled that back, but I still go to one meet a year or so (some years that would be indoor MAACs at the Armory and a trip to Coogan's, which unfortunately just announced it was closing). The "home opener" at Vassar Farm is easy because I can just run there from my parent's house, and the past two years I just happened to be home that weekend for other reasons. As far as the why, six years removed? I'm not totally sure, it's probably a subconscious thing. I have a great relationship with you (Pete) and I'm a loyal sports fan of my three teams, so there's probably some carry over from that, and it's magnified because it was a team that I was actually a part of rather than just a fan of.

Hopes for the future of the program: Given the current situation, I hope that there IS a fall season. Even if it's something atypical to what the team has been used to, it's still better than not having one at all. Start with that, and then go from there. But for sake of argument, let's say there is: I was a part of three of the best Marist teams ever from my freshman year through my junior year. In cross country, they had two of the three highest regional placements in school history, some of the best MAAC finishes ever, and broke a lot of school records in track. Simply put, I think the current team can get back to that level based on results from this past year. As an alum, I happened to be there the last time that the men placed second in the MAAC to nationally ranked Iona (in 2015), which was great to watch. The Mets losing game 4 of the World Series that night was not.

What message can you send to our current seniors (some of whom you know) about the loss of their final season and their final few weeks of senior year?

I think Bo said it best in Pete's interview from a few weeks ago: "you got robbed!"  That goes for the other spring sports as well. There are certain things that you can unfortunately never get back, like all of those bus rides with your teammates, your last MAAC meet, chasing a school record, being able to run with your friends every day, those hard track workouts at Vassar or the New Paltz rail trail, and so on. But life does not end after college, and running doesn't have to either if you don't want it to. Just take a look at the accomplishments of so many former team runners as alumni. You'll stay in touch with your friends - it'll require more effort and it won't be every day (maybe even just a few times a year if distance is a factor), but it'll happen.

Anything else you’d like to add …

I don't like to make sports comparisons to a pandemic, but this sticks in my head: I think back to what the great NY Giants defensive end Michael Strahan said to his teammates before the team took the field in the 2008 NFC Championship game, played in -2 degree weather: "This (the cold) is temporary, a championship is forever!" What I mean by that: Other than things that mostly had direct regional effects, such as 9/11 in the northeast, Hurricane Katrina on the gulf coast, Hurricane Harvey in Houston, etc., our nation as a whole has not been tested like this in decades. If you were born during the 1919 flu outbreak, you're now over 100, and the people who really experienced that firsthand are long gone. Their children and grandchildren - Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" - who grew up and/or came of age during the Great Depression and World War II, shrink in number every day. My generation - and the baby boomers/Gen X above me - are unfamiliar with this lifestyle where we have to deal with inconveniences and compromises on being able to do whatever we want on a daily basis - not going to a beach, park, vacation, concert, sporting event, etc. But in history, we have dealt with it before, we have survived it, and we will do the same here.  Hopefully when the dust settles on this pandemic, we will have learned important lessons that make us better ("BE BETTER").