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Tempo Marking: Will Sumner Hits All The Right Notes

Published by
DyeStat.com   Mar 3rd 2022, 3:14pm
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Tempo Marking

One of the best 800-meter prospects in American history

is in no rush and playing by feel

 

A DyeStat story by Dave Devine

Photos from Sumner family, John Nepolitan and Phil Bond

______________

There’s a piano that sits in Will Sumner’s house.

He’s the only one who plays it.

It arrived about three years ago, a gift from a family that needed to find a new home for the instrument after their grandfather, the original owner, passed away. Will had been playing for a few years by then, having started in seventh grade and shown enough promise that his teacher encouraged Will’s parents, Brad and Tosha, to get a piano of their own.

“I love having it,” Will says. “It’s something that keeps my mind at ease.”

Asked for his go-to song, the composition he turns to whenever he’s asked to play, the answer comes immediately. 

“My favorite piece is Nocturne in C-sharp Minor by Frederic Chopin.”

Aware that Chopin might be an interesting choice for a high schooler, Will quickly amends his reply: “But if someone asks, I’ll play something more modern, a little more exciting that people won’t get bored from, know what I mean?”

But for the Woodstock High (Ga.) senior, perhaps better known as one of the most promising middle-distance runners in prep history, there was no hesitation in that initial reply.

Written as a solo piano piece by the Polish virtuoso in 1830, Nocturne in C-sharp Minor was published in 1870, 26 years after Chopin’s death. It’s sometimes known as Lento con gran espressione, a reference to the tempo marking Chopin provided for the composition.

In traditional music notation, a “tempo marking” indicates the speed, or tempo, at which the composer would like the piece to be played. It’s not unlike the direction a track coach might give for a planned interval, the pace at which the segment should be run. And like some of those workout instructions, the tempo marking often refers to how fast the music should feel, rather than any specific number or beat.

In the case of Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Chopin left an almost poetic note.

“Lento con gran espressione.”

Translated: Slow with great expression.

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* * *

The birthday theme was Will’s idea.

He was about to turn 5, already fascinated by the feeling of going fast.

Doing anything slowly — with or without great expression — did not seem to be in his nature. He’d become particularly enamored, at a young age, with professional cycling. Specifically, the Tour de France. And with his birthday approaching, he pitched his parents on the idea of a party theme celebrating the famous European stage race.

“He really wanted kids to bring their bikes,” Will’s mom, Tosha, recalls, “and we’d have this big bike race. But I thought that was too dangerous.”

Instead, Tosha and her husband Brad convinced Will to adopt a Field Day theme for the party, complete with relay races, homemade jerseys and medals for the winners.

“We have this one photo,” Brad says, “and Will’s holding a baton and it looks like he’s carrying a poster, it’s so big in his hand.”

From that point forward, Tosha says, it seemed like most of Will’s birthdays at their home just north of Atlanta revolved around some kind of sports activity. Which isn’t entirely surprising, given the family’s background.

villaBrad and Tosha met at Villanova University in the early 1990s as standout middle-distance runners for the Wildcats. Both were NCAA champions, multiple-time All-Americans and Olympic Trials competitors. And although they never intentionally steered Will or his older sister, Brynne, into running, the siblings couldn’t help but grow up around the influences of the sport.

As a child, Will regarded the family’s various memorabilia from two decorated running careers — most of it tucked in a downstairs exercise room — with a mix of curiosity and bemusement.

“They have all these trophies and medals in the basement,” he says, “just stowed away. There’s a Team USA jersey, some Villanova stuff, and like, batons —” he says it the way you’d expect a teenager to, upon discovering a random collection of relay relics in the basement — “I mean, under the bookshelves, like three or four batons. I don’t even know where they got them — I think the Penn Relays, maybe?”

Due in large part to Brad and Tosha’s reluctance to push their children into any specific sport, Brynne was first drawn to gymnastics while Will pursued, as Tosha says, “every sport that has a ball.” Ultimately, Will found those sports either too boring or too likely to result in a concussion, and switched to youth track in elementary school. He stuck with that through sixth grade, and then dropped it again until high school.

In between, he became a standout mountain biker and took up the piano.

By the time Will reached ninth grade, Brynne was already winning state track titles for Woodstock High. She’d soon commit to her parents’ alma mater, Villanova, before eventually transferring to Clemson.

“I would say Brynne wasn’t the sole reason I ran in high school,” Will says, “but seeing her be successful definitely motivated me, definitely gave me something to aim for.”

Tosha, an aspiring fiction writer who coaches track at nearby Life University, is also a volunteer assistant at Woodstock. Although she doesn’t work directly with Will’s training group, she collaborates with Brad and head coach Wakely Louis to develop the workouts and, perhaps most importantly, offers a set of eyes and ears trackside each afternoon.

“If I need to talk about pacing,” Will says, “if there’s a nagging soreness, a question about the workout, she’s always there.”

Brad, now a software developer, collaborates on Will’s workouts with Tosha, drawing on various coaching connections, plenty of research, and his own background as a prep star who found success at the collegiate and post-collegiate levels.

“It’s definitely a group effort,” Will says of the coaching arrangement, “but at the end of the day my parents are the ones that put everything together and make it into a training plan.”

And much like the rest of Will’s immersion in the sport, having his parents involved in his coaching has felt instinctive and unforced — the natural next step in a career with a great deal of promise.

“Before,” Will says, “I always thought it was cool that they had that stuff in the basement, but I never really knew the significance of it. Now that I’ve gotten older and I’m starting to run faster, I have more appreciation. The last couple of years is when I’ve started to look at it and think, ‘That could be me one day.’”

* * *

True to its tempo marking, the opening of Nocturne in C-sharp Minor is soft, almost hesitant. But each note must be struck clearly. The piece requires, particularly in the early moments, a degree of restraint.

A piano teacher will tell you: It looks easier than it sounds.

Like many things in life, it’s disarmingly complex.

* * *  

No one quite knows what happened in Eugene.

Even Will isn’t sure.

Things went sideways at the worst possible time.

After a stellar junior season that included a Georgia 7A state title at 400 meters, a personal best of 47.01 in late May, and a breakthrough 1:51.67 800-meter mark in June, Will and his parents traveled to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field in July for The Outdoor Nationals Presented by Nike. He was looking forward to a big 400 and a season-capping 4x800 with his relay mates from Woodstock.

Heading into the meet, Will had a clear idea of what he wanted to run, and viewed the national championship as the place to accomplish that goal. He’d had it circled on his calendar for months. As it turned out, merely matching his personal best would have yielded a fourth-place finish. Slipping under 47 seconds, as he’d hoped, would have placed him on the podium.

He ended up 29th of 30. With a time he’d still rather not discuss.

“We don’t know exactly what happened,” Brad says.

Reflecting later, he and Tosha felt it was likely a combination of things: the timing of a pre-meet COVID vaccination; seasonal allergies that often hamper competitors in Eugene; the toll of travel, long days, and upended routines.

Will offers his own blunt assessment.

“Honestly, just a lot of things went wrong.”

The 4x800 relay, which had been a last-minute add — a way to get in an extra race with his high school buddies — also went poorly for Will. In that case, the outcome carried the extra burden of feeling like he’d let down his friends. The distance traveled and the big-stage moment of racing at Hayward Field only compounded the disappointment.

“To go out there and just kind of blow it like that,” Will says, “really left a sharp taste in my mouth.”

Mostly, he mulled that taste quietly, and on his own.

Brad and Tosha gave him space, avoided chiming in with their own assessments, tried to make the best of the family trip, knowing Will was surely being harder on himself than anyone possibly could.

“It was a matter of being understanding,” Brad says. “We knew his best days were ahead of him.”

* * *

At the center of Nocturne in C-sharp Minor is a balance of seemingly disparate parts. The left hand maintains a rhythmic backdrop of broken chords while the right hand embarks on a gorgeous, haunting melody that requires precise, nimble playing.

Consistency on one hand, creativity and quickness on the other.

Stability paired with speed.

The challenge resides in sustaining that balance. Holding two things at once. 

* * *

In March 2020, when the COVID pandemic shut down high school athletics across the country, the Sumners salvaged opportunity from the unexpected stoppage.

While Will, Tosha and Brad all realized he would likely gravitate toward the middle-distances eventually, the plan had been to focus on developing Will’s speed first. 

They’ve also tried to embrace the possibility that Will, who signed to compete at the University of Georgia next year, might never become an 800-meter runner like his parents. Brad and Tosha have been clear: their history should not be predictive of Will’s future.

“We really didn’t want to pigeonhole him,” Brad says. “Everyone was like, ‘Well, he’s going to be an 800-meter runner.’ But what if he doesn’t want to be an 800-meter runner?”

And so, for now, the focus is on speed.

Continuing their approach of consulting with as many experts as possible, the Sumners used the COVID shutdown to connect Will with a sprint coach that Tosha knew at Life University. Dominic Demeritte, now Director of Cross Country and Track & Field at the school, is a two-time Olympian from the Bahamas who claimed 200-meter gold at the 2004 World Indoor Championships.

His work with Will yielded almost immediate results.

Some of those results came in the form of technique and turnover, some in the form of mindset and perspective.

He really made Will enjoy running,” Tosha says. “Will believed in him, and he got his speed work in — he’s a different kid, now. It just seemed like that COVID year, Will really came into his own as a runner and started to figure out his path.”

That path has involved a strong focus on 200- and 400-meter races, with a healthy dose of relays and an occasional 800-meter race. Close observers of Will’s career will note a cross country result or two, but Tosha says those are outliers, not attempts to stretch Will’s range.

“Will does not run cross country,” she laughs. “He ran a couple races because he wanted to help our team, but that is not his focus. His longest run is maybe four miles, and that’s like, ever.”

Will, who says he’ll likely end up shifting toward the longer stuff at Georgia, is content for now to stay the course.

“The plan,” he says, “has always been speed first.”

xc

* * *

In September 1939, as Nazi Germany began a devastating bombing campaign on Warsaw, Poland, the opening salvo to World War II, the final piece of music broadcast on Polish radio was Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp Minor.

It was played live, with the Luftwaffe bombers closing in, by a renowned pianist of Jewish descent named Wladyslaw Szpilman.

* * *

Will wasn’t thinking about World War II in the Chicago hotel room.

He was trying to get ready for a race.

He and Brad had traveled to the Windy City for the CYUP Misfits Invitational on January 22 at the Track and Field Center at Gately Park. Tosha was back home coaching her Life University runners at a collegiate indoor meet. One week after slipping under Strymar Livingston’s decade-old high school record for 500 meters at the Virginia Showcase, Will had come to Chicago gunning for another 2012 Livingston standard — 1:17.58 over 600 meters — on Gately Park’s swift banked turns.

And while he was killing time in the hotel, flipping through stations on the flat screen TV, Will stumbled upon an old favorite: Unbroken, the 2014 film about the life of U.S. Olympian and World War II prisoner of war Louis Zamperini. Based on Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 book by the same name, it was a movie Will had loved for years.

So, of course, he settled in for another viewing. 

As he watched, one of the film’s iconic lines kept running through his brain.

A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory.

“I’ve loved that movie for so long,” Will says, “and that quote has really stuck with me over the years.”

When he walked onto the track for his featured three-lapper later that evening — the first 600 Will had ever raced — the line was playing again in head. He knew he’d have to take his body to an uncomfortable place to get the record, but he also felt like the hurt would pay off.

And it wasn’t only Livingston’s mark he was pursuing.

Thirty-three years earlier, at Cornell University’s cavernous Barton Hall fieldhouse, Will’s father Brad had set a national high school record in the 600 that endured for a decade. Then a senior at McQuaid Jesuit in Rochester, N.Y., the elder Sumner became the first high schooler to break 1:20 when he powered to a 1:19.56 clocking at the 1989 New York State indoor championships.

And although the mark had been lowered several times through the 2000s, eventually whittled down to Livingston’s 1:17.58, Will was drawn to the sense of connection that would come from a father and a son setting national records in the same event three decades apart.

Brad, helping Will prepare for the Chicago race, recalled the pressure he felt before his own record attempt. Remembered how people came up to him before the race to assure him he was going to break the record, how the PA announcer trumpeted it as soon as the gun went off. For the first time this year, could tell his son was starting to feel the weight of those expectations, too.

“I told Will, ‘Whether you get the record or not, I’ll give you a hug,’” Brad says. “Because I remembered how nervous I was. I tried to let him know I understood.”

That support, the presence of a father extending love no matter the outcome, was another element common to the two record attempts.

For Will, that figure was obviously Brad.

And for Brad, it was his father, Bill, crowded into the Cornell fieldhouse stands at the end of the homestretch, recording the 1989 race to a VHS tape for posterity. Bill had studied video production at Syracuse University, and brought an uncommon expertise to filming that exceeded the typical grainy efforts of sports parents in the 1980s.

“I’m very fortunate,” Brad says, “He had all the best cameras, all kinds of cool stuff back then when nobody had it.”

Those old VHS tapes are still in the Sumner’s basement, of course, although Brad has also made digital copies to preserve the memories. He’s been equally diligent about recording his own children’s athletic feats. And on the eve of the Chicago race, Brad was looking forward to capturing Will’s attempt.

Sitting in the stands before the race, he huddled with his brother-in-law, a former track coach, and discussed what Will might run. They both agreed that Will’s fitness and his recent 500 record projected a time that was, at once, achievable and nearly unthinkable.

The sort of thing you were reluctant to say out loud.

“I was like, ‘Gosh…is he able — he might actually be capable of a 1:15,’” Brad recalls,

“But that felt like crazy talk.”

The two men shook their heads at the audacity of imagining Will might rip two full seconds from a respected 10-year-old record.

And then the gun went off, with Will exploding off the bank in Lane 5 to draw clear of the field by the break. He was out in 24.4, slightly behind what he wanted, but close enough.

When he came through 400 meters in 49.6, he remembers thinking, “Man, this is going to hurt.”

But also: Moment of pain…lifetime of glory.

He churned into the final lap feeling sluggish, consciously going to his arms, doubting he was holding form well enough to take down Livingston’s mark.

“I crossed the line,” Will says, “and I looked up at the board and I was so surprised. It did not feel like I’d closed fast enough.”

But there it was, the numbers Brad had hesitated to say aloud: 1:15.58.

Exactly two seconds faster than the existing record.

In the bleachers, Brad and his brother-in-law blinked back tears, overcome by the enormity of what they’d witnessed.

“I don’t think, at my highest level of running, I could do what he did there,” Brad says. “It was that shocking.”

When father and son were finally able to reunite, they shared an emotional, cathartic embrace. For Will, the emotion came, not simply from claiming a second national record, but from accomplishing a deeply personal objective, something he’d started contemplating as a sophomore.

“I don’t think my dad knew just how long I’d wanted it,” Will says.

Cornell to Chicago: three laps each, 33 years apart.

“Just seeing my dad’s face, it was special. Definitely a moment I’ll remember forever.”

Brad, with the perspective of years, could appreciate that feeling.

“Someday, when Will hangs up his spikes,” he says, “it will still be something we can look back on and always have together.”

But he’s also thinking about those VHS tapes in the basement. The way his own father made sure to preserve the big moments. And how he was in the Gately Park stands with his iPhone pointed at the track, capturing his own son’s race.

Bill passed away in 2005.

Watching those old races, when Brad does, is about far more than reliving past glories.

“There’s certain ones where I can hear him cheering for me,” Brad says, “and to be able to still have something where you can hear his voice, it’s very meaningful.”

* * *

nbgp

After Will’s back-to-back national records in successive January weekends, he was invited to compete in a nationally televised 800-meter race February 6 at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix.

He would race a field of pro athletes, including Olympian Bryce Hoppel

It was another opportunity for Brad and Tosha, as parents, to wrestle with the question of when to help Will slow down, when to adhere to the plan, and when to get out of their son’s way and let him rip.

Restraint can be a difficult value to instill.

Whether playing the piano or pursuing track records, it can be challenging to engage with the process, live inside the tension, be patient, rather than rush to the anticipated outcomes. When you’re young and fast and precociously talented, that struggle with restraint only grows more acute.

When to hit the gas, when to ease off the pedal?

Slowly, the tempo marking says, but with great expression.

When it came to the New Balance opportunity, all three agreed that sometimes a chance comes along, and you shouldn’t let it pass.

“It’s alright to take advantage of those,” Brad says. “and have some fun with it.”

Will decided to compete in the New Balance race, running a smart, off-the-back effort that yielded the second-fastest indoor 800 ever run by a high school boy.

His 1:48.14 was just a few ticks off Josh Hoey’s 2018 mark of 1:47.67.

He nearly had his third national record in three weeks.

And this one came in the event that distance fans had been clamoring for him to run. The one that many argued should be something of a birthright, based on DNA and family lineage and some simple addition performed on his Chicago 600 time.

So, the message-board-thinking went, he’s an 800 guy now, right?

Another shot or two, and he’s got that indoor record.

Will felt the pull, too.

“For a minute,” he admits, “I was getting kind of greedy. Like, ‘You know what? I kind of want to run another 800.’”

But his parents helped bring him back to the plan. The idea that there was no need to rush anything. No need to hurry this experience. This career. 

Two weeks after the New Balance race it was back to the long sprints. Will ran a 200 and a 400 at the University of Kentucky, roaring to new personal bests of 21.58 and 46.78 at those distances. He’s currently ranked seventh in the nation for 200 meters and U.S. No. 1 at 400, 500, 600 and 800 meters.

At the upcoming Nike Indoor Nationals in Staten Island, NY, he plans to again race the 200 and the 400.

And another 800?

That can wait a little longer.

“I’m still not where I want to be at the end of the year,” Will says. “I still have a lot of work to do. I can’t get complacent, just because I’m running fast and getting attention for it.”

It’s an approach that requires patience and perspective, keeping the long-game in mind.

Not unlike his favorite piece of music.

Nocturne in C-sharp Minor might begin with that admonition, Slowly with great expression, but it builds to a poignant conclusion that balances the consistency of the left hand with nimble, almost magical rising and cascading notes from the right.

There’s a feeling, near the end, of deft acceleration. 

A sense, on the final rising note of hope, that all the waiting has been worth it.

READ MORE DAVE DEVINE STORIES



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