Representing the Nation
How one Lummi Nation Distance Runner built a championship from the ground up
Story by ANDREW WISE | Photograph by JOHN M. HARRIS
Enrique Medina loves football. He doesn’t love running but he’s pretty darn good at it. In 2015, he put on a show in the distance events at the Washington 1B state championship, and led a team of just four athletes to a miraculous state title.
The sun beat down bright on a hot May day in 2015 in Cheney, Washington, the site of the State Track and Field Championships for small division schools. Enrique Medina Gonsalez stood at the top of the podium. He wore a white sleeveless track singlet, shoulder-length black hair framing a broad smile. He had three medals around his neck, arms stretched up above his head. His three teammates flanked him on the lower steps of the podium, holding the corners of a flag bearing the seal of the Lummi Nation.
Medina held in his hands a state championship trophy, the first ever for Lummi. It was an unlikely victory. They had only qualified four athletes to the meet: Trazil Lane, Free Borsey, and Hank Hoskins, along with Medina. Borsey and Hoskins would only contest single events, so the bulk of the work fell on Lane, a sprinter who could also perform in the long and high jump, and Medina, a high caliber mid-distance threat with enough speed to run the 400 and the strength to gut out the two-mile.
Over those two days in the spring of 2015, the tiny Lummi Nation track team outperformed expectations in nearly every event they contested. They won the meet by two points over a small Christian academy in Seattle who had qualified 15 athletes and they did it carrying the weight of a nation on their shoulders. But understanding what that championship means, to the community and the athletes that were a part of it is complex. As the glow of victory fades, the uncertainty of the real world sets in.
“All year, Enrique kept telling me, “we’re going to win,’” says Amy Shimek, former assistant track coach at Lummi. “I was like, ‘No, there’s no way we’re going to win this thing, we don’t have enough kids.’”
Shimek and her husband Josh both spent time coaching high school sports at Lummi. Josh Shimek’s background is in football, but he also coached track through Medina’s junior year. Amy Shimek was a high jumper through high school and competed for Western Washington University during her freshman year.
Shimek works at the Lummi Youth Academy, a shelter located across the street from the high school. Medina lived at the shelter for two years during high school. Amy recognized Medina’s dogged determination, his self-motivated approach toward athletics.
Medina looks more like a football player than a distance runner, but running had always been secondary to football for him and the other athletes on that championship team. Football is a big deal at Lummi, a perennial 1B powerhouse that regularly goes deep into the state playoffs.
It was Medina’s football coach, Jim Sandusky, that first recognized Medina’s talent for endurance. Lummi hadn’t had a cross country team in six or seven years, but one day after school, an English teacher who would serve as a stand in coach for the team stood in his classroom with a stopwatch as Medina ran 12 laps on the dirt track around the football field. The pace wasn’t flying, but it was consistent.
Medina would run three meets that season and qualify for the state championship. He was the first Lummi athlete to ever actually complete a cross country season. The attention and the feeling of being at the front of races got Medina excited.
He’d continue to play basketball, and even split time between the school’s baseball team and track. For Medina and his friends, playing sports was an escape because they got to leave school early, get on a bus and be somewhere else for an afternoon.
“The first year [of track] it was just for laughs, we did track to get out of school,” he says, adding that a big part of the appeal was the stop for dinner at Subway on the way home from meets.
Despite the attitude, and the minimal amount of actual training, Medina was winning races, steadily cutting chunks of time off his bests in each event. That would continue through his sophomore year and into his junior track season. By this point, Medina had developed a simple, consistent training regimen for track. He started training for track in January, running his only workout: Two 400 meters, a 600 meter, and an all-out 200 meter at the end.
It’s a minimal workout, even by high school standards — even by small high school standards. As the season progressed, Medina would cut down the rest between intervals, tapping into a tried and true training principle designed to increase the amount of oxygen the blood carry and reducing lactate accumulation.
Shimek sees one of the challenges Lummi coaches face as the tendency athletes have to compete across multiple sports.
“As an athlete, he’s one of the most determined individuals, but really likes his own program,” she says. “He’ll pull things from people that he looks up to or respects a lot, but he’ll create his own program based on that.”
His system was enough to qualify and compete at state in several events as a junior. Medina and Deon Hoskins, Hank’s older brother, comprised the entire Lummi men’s track team that year, and they placed ninth overall.
That night after state, Medina put a long post on social media, and in it promised that Lummi would be taking the championship the next year.
“You know how you say things in the moment,” Medina says. “I didn’t even know who was coming with me next year.”
He would spend his senior season working to pull together a group of younger athletes and convince them to take track seriously. A team title was a dream he barely let himself think about. Medina came into the season 25 pounds heavier than he’d been a year prior, struggling to match his freshman year best in the mile.
In the final weeks of the season, he had managed to qualify in the 400 meter, 800 meter, mile and two-mile. He’d convinced Trazil Lane, a phenomenal football and basketball player, to come out for track. Lane would sneak into the state meet in multiple events after barely competing during the season. Hank Hoskins was consistent in shot put, and Free Borsey, a sophomore, had qualified in the javelin.
They had a chance, but Medina would need to look strong in all four of his races in order to give his team a chance. Lane had a tall order as well, faced with alternating between jumping and sprint events. With 1B heavyweights Mount Vernon Christian and Mount Rainier Lutheran having qualified each qualified double and triple as many athletes as Lummi to the state meet, Medina and his teammates didn’t expect to wind up on the podium.
Medina was wandering through stores in Cheney on the day of the mile when he stumbled upon a pair of Nike running socks with pink trim. He bought the socks, and would run every race of the weekend in them.
The first battle came in the mile, and Medina faced down Tyrell Bonner, a guy he’d been racing against all season. He would bury him in the last 300 meters of the race, clocking a new mile best in 4:28, crossing another significant threshold for high school athletes.
“Pretty good time for someone who only did sprints in practice,” he says.
Next up was Free Borsey in the javelin on Friday morning. It was Medina’s grandfather who took Borsey aside and told him, “A lot of these guys know where their throws are at, know where they’re seeded, and have a pretty good idea of where they’re going to place. A lot of them don’t know you’re here. Go give them something to watch.”
Borsey took seventh, scoring two points that would prove critical when all was said and done on Saturday.
Medina checked the scores going into the events on Saturday, and found his team in a three-way tie for fourth place.
“Honestly, we didn’t expect to win,” he says.
Medina had spent the night prior trying to will Hank Hoskins into being competitive, trying to break through the “just for fun” attitude that had gotten him to come out for track in the first place.
Hoskins was the first event of the day, and heaved his way into fourth place, adding another five points to the team score that wasn’t in the projections. It wouldn’t be the last unlikely effort of the day.
“Trazil had the hardest day out of all of us,” Medina says. Lane had both sprinting events, as well as the high jump and long jump. “He is a gifted athlete, though.”
Medina gutted through the 400 to take third, then just hours later took the line for the 800 — tired, dehydrated, and worried. On the starting line, he told the other athletes how tired he was, that he’d definitely be sitting on the pack. This was a strange admonition at the start of a race, especially the 800, which is a classically tactical race that demands a particular combination of confidence and restraint.
With a lap to go, Medina moved to the front, felt his legs cramping, and rode the knife-edge of maintaining speed but not pushing his muscles to the point of locking up, all the way to the line. The time was slow, outside two minutes, but it was a victory.
All that remained was Medina in the two-mile and Lane in the 200.
Medina faded to fourth in a race that tends to reward higher weekly mileage. “I just went out and ran. I was definitely really dehydrated by then.”
Then Lane got in the blocks, “I don’t know what happened. He just took off,” Medina says. Lane placed second in 23.7, pushing the team score to 54.
Medina’s grandpa told the group there were seven points separating the top two teams. Lummi was in the lead.
Medina was overcome. “I started bawling, it was a dream, I had no idea we were that close.”
Rainier Lutheran, the team in second, still had five more athletes to compete. Medina was done, and all he could do was watch. They were expected to win the last event of the day, the 4x400 meter relay, and a victory would mean a 10 point jump.
Lane was warming up for finals in the long jump when Medina pulled him aside, still trying to shake the tears from his eyes.
“All I can say is, leave it all out here,” Medina told him. “You have the potential to bring something back to Lummi that may never happen again. Do it for me, do it for the tribe, do it for everyone that came out here.”
In the final, Lane would jump a foot further than he had ever jumped before, nabbing sixth place and buffering the Lummi point total.
Now, it was down to the 4x400. Lummi didn’t have a team, and all they could do was watch. When Rainier Lutheran placed second, Medina, who had the points calculated slightly incorrectly in his head, immediately started bawling again, convinced it was over.
He had walked away from the track, wrenched apart by such a near miss, until his phone lit up in his hand. It was a text from his mom, with a photo of the official results, which showed Lummi at the top of the list: They had done it.
“All my tears were gone. I was so dehydrated, and it was surreal, just crazy.”
School ends early at Lummi, which means it was already summer break when the team left for Cheney. When they returned to the reservation, they wouldn’t get to walk through the hallways as state champions. The school pulled together a last-minute commemoration on the track, but even that was bitter-sweet for Medina.
“You got to hold the trophy for a minute, take pictures with it, then we had to give it right back to the school,” he says.
What he remembers most fondly, though, was getting to stay at the hotel in Cheney the night after the meet with his dad, and hang out in the pool. He hadn’t ever gone to the pools in the hotels for track meets, wary of expending extra energy or pulling a muscle the night before a race.
“It was amazing, got to make a big post about it, it was a dream come true.” He ate two burgers from Carl’s Junior, fell asleep at 7 p.m., and didn’t wake up until the next morning.
Joel Pierson, the head coach at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was born in Ferndale. He ran in high school for longtime distance powerhouse Mead High School, and was part of the 2002 state championship team. He’d go on to become a coach at Whatcom Community College as a 21 year old, before bouncing around coaching jobs at several different universities in the Midwest. He landed at Stritch, and has been the head coach there since 2014.
Jim Pearson, Joel’s father, still lives in Ferndale. The elder Pearson was a distance runner in his own right, at one time holding the American record over 50 kilometers. Jim Pearson had tracked Medina’s progress as an athlete, and in the summer after the state title, approached him about trying to run for his son’s team.
“Originally, I had planned not to go to college. I didn’t want to. I was tired of school,” Medina says.
But Shimek, helped him through the process. She and her husband met with PeeWee Halsell, the head coach at Western, to discuss what it would look like to get Enrique on the team. When he started talking about Stritch, Shimek helped him through the process.
Medina was the first in his family to graduate from high school, and decided he wanted to set a standard for his younger siblings.
He jumped on a flight to Milwaukee, sight unseen. Medina showed up two days before school started, jumping in with a team that had already been training together for several weeks, and many of whom had been running consistent mileage all summer. A typical collegiate program asks runners to put in anywhere between 70 and 100 or more miles in a week. Medina’s biggest week in high school had been 20 miles.
While Medina was used to splitting time between football and cross country, and spending hours in the weight room, Pearson just wanted him to run. But run a lot.
“It was fun at first, I was loving it,” he says. Some of his teammates had also come from far away — the Bahamas, Spain — but most were local kids from Wisconsin. He struggled to fit in.
Nonetheless, he was Stritch’s number two at a few meets. But the coaches were pushing Medina to lose weight he’d put on through the last year. He began to feel new fingers of pain reaching into his legs, things that hadn’t been there before when he was playing football.
Longer races were demoralizing, and he didn’t feel prepared for the workload. His relationship with Pearson was up and down. They clashed over weight lifting and playing basketball.
“I couldn’t do anything, and it was really bumming me out,” he says. Academically, he hadn’t had final exams before, and at Lummi he had been able to turn assignments in through the end of the semester. He would hold on through the spring semester, chasing times on the indoor track and trying out a couple of steeplechase races outdoor. But he wasn’t getting faster. He didn’t break his high school 800 best.
Shimek saw some parallels to her own experience, going from a dominating a small division in high school to being humbled by collegiate competition.
“He had to be super disciplined,” she says. “He was disciplined here, as far as he knew how to be, but [in college], there’s a whole new set of expectations.”
He came back that summer and worked as an assistant coach for a track club in Puyallup called Native Stride, maintaining a connection to track and helping young native athletes. He would return to Stritch in the fall, despite initially planning on staying home.
A death in the family, coupled with athletic and academic frustration, led Medina to return to Lummi in December 2016. He can go back if he wants to, but for now is content working construction for his father in Blaine.
Nearly a year later, he’s planning his next move. Once the construction project is finished, Medina’s hoping to work at the school or at the Lummi Youth Academy, a housing and support facility for students where Medina lived for a time during high school.
He’s interested in coaching, but will serve as a volunteer until there’s room in the budget, but also hopes to go back to school.
“I think I’m more prepared to do it now,” he says.
He’s considering going to Community College and might try to get back onto a football team.
Last year, the team was set to finally receive their state championship rings from that 2015 season. Shimek says Medina sprang into action, calling everyone involved with that team and bringing them together for a formal presentation of the rings at the Lummi Nation prom.
“He’s always the one organizing to keep this group alive,” Shimek says. She doesn’t coach for Lummi anymore, but she went to Cheney last spring to watch the team compete at the 2017 1B state championship.
They would finish a distant second behind Mt. Vernon Christian, but dominated the 4x100 meter relay. That team included Free Borsey and Trazil Lane, then seniors closing out their careers, seniors that Medina had willed into running track two years earlier.
“If there is a legacy,” Shimek says, “it’s because he wants to make it known that we did this. He wants everyone to be really excited about that, and proud of themselves.”