Nate Kelba

Finding His Rhythm

A school record, a near miss, and a fourth-year runner ready for the next step.

Nathan Kelba remembers his coach coming over after the race and telling him he’d broken the school record in the 1500 metres.

Sometimes progress announces itself that clearly. Other times, it leaves you close enough to something bigger that you spend the offseason thinking about the distance still to cover.

Last season gave Nathan both. Alongside the indoor track record, he came close to qualifying for the CCAA cross country championships. The near miss is among the achievements he’s proudest of, because it showed him where the work was taking him.

Now in his fourth year of eligibility, the Foothills runner wants to finish that task and reach nationals in November.

“I felt like all the hard work that I put in was paying off when I got to the track season,” he says.

The change showed up in practice before it appeared in a school record: more speed, more stamina, a different sense of what his body could sustain. Being close to nationals had already helped him believe the work was moving him somewhere. The track season gave him another form of confirmation.

The memories sit well together. One says he has achieved something lasting. The other says there is still a place he wants to reach. Nathan does not have to choose between being proud of last season and wanting more from this one.

Running originally belonged to his other sports—curling, hockey, baseball. A local five-kilometre race with childhood friends at age 12 helped it become something he enjoyed in its own right. Those early races offered competition and company without requiring him to know where the sport would lead.

Last year, a marathon remained a future ambition. This offseason, he completed his first half marathon, giving that larger goal a practical next step.

His definition of success still comes from within.

“Success to me is not just the awards,” he says. “It’s being internally satisfied with what you have done.”

He borrows inspiration from elite athletes, his parents, teammates, and coaches, taking something useful from each. Before races, he taps a rhythm with his hands, grounding himself in the cadence he wants to find when competing. “Enter Sandman” supplies the louder part of the preparation.

His sporting influences range from Usain Bolt and Andre De Grasse to Marco Arop, Femke Bol, Sidney Crosby, and Summer McIntosh. It is a wide-ranging list, connected by the way those athletes compete and prepare. He also pays attention to the people sharing his own training environment. A little lesson from one person and another from someone else can add up to a meaningful change in mindset.

That approach leaves him open to improvement from more than the stopwatch. Parents offer encouragement, coaches offer direction, teammates offer a perspective on the same difficult session. He wants to keep taking something from all of them.

And he eats his cereal without milk, neatly eliminating one of breakfast’s more unnecessary debates.

The record confirmed he had moved forward. The near miss gave him somewhere to go. Nathan enters this season with both experiences—and a rhythm he’s still learning to trust.