Rusty Cofrin, longtime Concord cross-country coach, has died
Every kid who sticks with the sport remembers when he first became as much competitor as runner. Rusty was the man who flipped that switch for me
George “Rusty” Cofrin, the first running coach I ever had, passed away on Thursday at 65 owing to complications from brain cancer he had lived with for many years.
I could extract tens of thousands of reflective, considered words just from my nascent and developing perspectives on running between August 1984, when as an about-to-be ninth-grader at Rundlett Junior High School (now Rundlett Middle School) I joined the Concord High School cross-country team with no running experience, and May of 1986, when I completed my first season of high-school track. Early in this span, I completed my first-ever running race, a 5K in White Park in 21:06. At the end was a 4:43 1,600 meters I ran for second place in the unseeded heat of the 1986 Class “L” Outdoor Track and Field Championships at Manchester Memorial High School.
In between, I had my first “real” kiss, set a school record in the 1,600-meter run, was thrown off a team, and spent two months in a walking cast. Rusty, with various degrees of enthusiasm, played direct roles in instigating or mitigating most, but obviously not all, of these events. Within these twenty or so months, I also had major surgery on my right eye; the kid whose one-year-old school record of 4:57 I broke was the son of the ophthalmologist who performed the surgery about a month before I ran 4:55.
The fatal shooting of an armed student outside the Concord High administrative officer by police in December 1985 and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986, which claimed the life of Concord High social-studies teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, spiced up what would otherwise have been a personally uneventful stretch.
I remember a lot of happenings going far back into my childhood. But one of the few memories from my teenage years that stands out to me with movie-like clarity is the surreal tableau in the CHS cafeteria—filled with students, teachers, and reporters from national networks—after it became undeniable shortly before noon on January 28, 1986 that the Challenger had come apart in midair, and that everyone’s worst unvoiced or morbidly joked-about nightmare-scenario was now in progress and mushrooming into nothing but horrifying and worsening news. I think a few of us got older by a couple of years very quickly that day.
A memory that seems to stand out with equal cinematic-emotional clarity is one from about eight months before: seeing Rusty Cofrin standing near the finish line as I entered the homestretch of that May 1985 race that saw me break Jeremy’s record. I had caught the leader—a talented but somewhat rules-averse eighth-grader on my own team who had taken an amphetamine before the race and gone out in 67 seconds for the opening lap—with 400 meters to go and started edging away from him with 150 meters left.
I vividly remember seeing Rusty standing and waving a towel over his head to get both of going, and noticing that the running shorts he already wore at a nerdish height even for the 1980s were hiked up almost to his armpits in his arms-akimbo excitement. I had won most of the races I had entered that spring, but in that moment, as the Memorial Field bleachers in my rotating viewfinder shifted to a fixed-line focus on the figures gathered at the approaching finish line, I internalized the idea that I was being urged on as a potential race-winner and even a record-setter. I had to try, and it was an honor to try. It was an honor to pant and flail and maybe fuck it up by starting to soon or otherwise being a human driven to make something of this opt-in foolishness.
I was in a race that meant something, and would still mean something for more than a day or two after it was over. I had been prepped for this with workouts and regular explanations of what they were for, and I was encouraged to take myself, including my habit of listening to Wham! on the side, seriously.
In those days, Concord ninth-graders who insisted on participating in track and field had the option of either the varsity team at Concord High or the junior-high team for grades seven though nine at Rundlett. I had run varsity cross-country already in the fall under the then-26-year-old Rusty, whose own first season in the Concord cross-country program coincided with mine. At the end of that 1984 season, he had already taken the job as the Rundlett spring track coach despite being a math teacher at Concord High a little less than a mile north. As the only ninth-grader on the 1984 CHS cross-country team fully intending to keep running long distance, he advised me to run “with him” in the spring, rather than get lost in the larger shuffle of high-school bodies.
Rusty Cofrin was the man who turned me from a kid who ran his races hard and honestly to a kid who ran races to win and sometimes ran like a maniac. It’s not important that I regularly lost sight of this lesson, or that he didn’t teach it perfectly. For all of my frequent and sometimes earnest complaints about having ever run a competitive step at all, I and Rusty were in this together for whatever reason, and inside that difficult and churning place where teenage minds often find reasons to escape, rather than embrace, being confident, Rusty flipped a switch inside me that made me think my running mattered.
Once I actually began attending Concord High School as a sophomore, I became good friends with Jeremy, who even then possessed a practically autistic need to baste everything in sarcasm but also knew how to laugh at himself. We both gave Rusty and other coaches at Concord both a steady series of headaches and regular reasons to smile.
I last saw Rusty at the 2021 New Hampshire Cross-Country Meet of Champions in Nashua. He looked well then, and told me the same. A lot had happened over the years to cross-country, we decided, not all of it great. We may have solved a few problems for good that afternoon, but if so, we chose to keep out solutions private.
I could say far more, as I knew Rusty Cofrin in many different ways over more then three decades. These words would be even more disproportionately self-serving as the ones I’ve already unfurled. But if you are a distance runner and have never properly thanked the person who first turned you on to thinking of yourself as like him or her, as a new but welcomed member of a special club—even when you were all-in on running but still had a lot to prove—then maybe don’t wait another day.