OUTSIDE THE BOX
It’s rare that Nikki Hiltz gets boxed in.
They didn’t get boxed in during their second-place run in the 1500m at the 2017 NCAA Championships. They ran smartly on the rail for the first half of the race, sidestepped trouble on the penultimate lap, and staked out a spot in lane three at the bell. After watching as several overzealous competitors made rash moves on the backstretch, Nikki began to shift through their remaining gears with 150m to go, unleashing a blistering finishing kick from lane four and narrowly missing out on the victory.
They didn’t get boxed in a year later on the same track in the same event at the same meet: the 2018 NCAA Championships. Nikki ran in the outside of lane one for most of the race, trading the extra distance for a premium position on the shoulders of the frontrunners. Their steps light and quick, their body never once betraying the considerable effort, Nikki made a decisive move with 100m to go and ran down every athlete but one to nab their second consecutive NCAA silver medal.
Without the assigned lanes of the sprints or the benefit of the long runway of a distance race to allow tactics to evolve, middle distance runners play a tense, physical, high heartrate game of chess. Time, space and oxygen are in rare supply. The most critical tool in any successful middle distance runner’s kit is the ability to navigate space: to make space where there is none. And Nikki Hiltz does it masterfully.
Can it really be a surprise then, that Nikki is as expert at claiming space off the track as they are on it?
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From the time six-year old Nikki opted into the boys’ section of Kids’ Camp on a family vacation in Mexico—and out-push-upped all the similarly bare-chested children—right up through Nikki’s first Team USA berth at the 2019 World Championships in Doha, where they stepped up to a start line in a country where their sexuality was considered a crime, Nikki has staked out a place for themself where others saw none.
Track is a cooly objective sport that has, since its inception, sought to resolve uncertainty and conflict by taking refuge in the binary: you can either run a qualifying time or you can not; your drug test is either positive or negative; you either finish in the top three and make the team or you do not; you are either female or you are male. The very geometry of a track—its painted lines and numbers marking perfectly even ovals—telegraphs the sport’s rigidity. Pick a lane, the sport seems to say, and stay in it. And Nikki Hiltz says, No, thanks.
“I think as a queer person,” they explain, “I’ve had to navigate a lot of spaces that don’t necessarily have a space for me. I’ve had to make a space for myself and that can be really hard sometimes.”
That burden took its toll on Nikki this past year. The pandemic impacted everyone, but it was a particularly challenging crucible for Nikki. What do you do when you’re a professional runner in a world with no races? Or a sociable extrovert in quarantine lockdown? Or a sole athlete in an individual sport carrying the hope and attention of an entire community?
You do what your middle distance training has prepared you to do: you get comfortable being uncomfortable. You adapt. You change the plan on the fly. You set new goals. You get creative. You learn how to take care of your body—not your muscles: your brain. And your heart. You start a 5k: the Pride 5k. You give both your communities—the running and the LGBTQ—a reason and a way to unite. You stand in the white hot glare of the spotlight—not on a track, but on Trans Visibility Day— and you explain your understanding of yourself as transgender non- binary all while continuing to train to compete at the highest level in a sport that relies on the strict objectivity of the binary more than any other.
At least that’s what you do if you’re Nikki Hiltz and a global pandemic threatens to box you in: you throw a few elbows, change gears and step into a new lane. You make space: for yourself, for your
communities and for those who will follow in your fleet-footed footsteps.
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When Nikki was in elementary school in Aptos, California they famously fell in love with the rigorous Junior Lifeguarding program. It required grit, hustle and a native athleticism, all of which Nikki possessed in abundance. What the Junior Lifeguards program also required of its youth participants back at the turn of the millennium, however, was that each lifeguard wore a swimsuit that corresponded to the gender they were assigned at birth.
Nikki sat out the Junior Lifeguards program for a full year, unable to reconcile—even at that young age—the idea of wearing a uniform on the outside that was so incompatible with how they felt on the inside.
Ultimately, though, Nikki allowed their identity as an athlete to trump the nascent sartorial discord and after a summer on the sideline they got back in the lifeguarding game. In retrospect, it was an early rehearsal of a conflict that Nikki would have to negotiate right up until March of this year.
They knew back then exactly who they were: they just weren’t certain how or when to share that with the rest of the world. As Nikki explained in a recent interview: “I'm just trying to catch you all up to who I've known I've been my whole life."
At bedrock, Nikki is an athlete. And running is their process, their performance and their platform. Like so many others who struggled with mental health issues during the pandemic, Nikki relied on their regular runs to provide a sense of calm and stability. Now that races are back on the calendar and finish line clocks are ticking, they’re keen to import that same sense of equanimity into the sport’s higher stakes moments.
“I can channel that calmness and peace that I feel when I'm just listening to my breath and I'm on a run and I'm out in the mountains or
on the beach, just running,” Nikki explains, “I can channel that same energy and say, It's just a race. You're just doing that, but a little bit faster and there's other people involved.”
In addition to cultivating a sense of calm, Nikki has also come to rely on that six-year old Junior Lifeguard, the one who wanted so much to be an athlete. In times of stress this past year, Nikki has made a point of touching the bedrock of their love of running: “I just go back to the basics or go back to, Oh, why did I start this in the first place? Or what do I love about this? And then it puts everything into perspective really quickly,” Nikki explains.
In many ways that little Junior Lifeguard—full of conviction and moxie —has become Nikki’s private mascot: a familiar and regular reminder of their roots in sport and the earliest space where they claimed the identity of “athlete.”
At no point in their career was Nikki’s athleticism on better display than at the US Championships in Des Moines, Iowa in 2019, Nikki’s first full year as a pro. Wearing hip number 12 and starting all the way out in lane eight, Nikki was fast off the line and slotted into position just behind the leader. But as the race evolved and the pace accelerated, runners drifted by, and with 200m to go, Nikki was inexplicably stuck. Chest held high, still and proud, Nikki looked good—really good—but they were still boxed in. And you couldn’t help but think: if they could just find some space, they could do something really great.
Nikki recalls that moment, too. They remember feeling like they had several gears left, and hearing their friends and family screaming their support from their places in the stands. With only 50m to go Nikki was still in fifth. But a space began to open on the rail and without hesitation Nikki found her last gear and accelerated into the gap, crossing the line in third place and earning her first spot on a World Championships Team.
Within seconds of finishing Nikki put both hands to their face. They covered their eyes. It’s hard to say what they were seeing just then. But it’s possible to imagine a small sun-freckled child, sand between their toes, sprinting headlong down the beach.
Sport has prepared Nikki—just as it has prepared those who cheer for Nikki—to do the hard work on the track and in our broader culture. The beauty of sport—especially a sport as straightforward as running—is that athlete and spectator alike have been conditioned to believe in the possibility of change provided one is willing to take a few risks, to bear discomfort and to invest in the process.
That change is slow, incremental. Whether you’re looking to make adaptations at altitude or to improve your mental health, whether you’re working on your top-end turnover or working to topple long- standing barriers, it takes time. Just ask the Junior Lifeguard on the beach in Aptos back in 2000. They’ll tell you it’ll happen—you’ll achieve the goals you set—you’ll stand on start lines with your whole self on display, and you’ll compete courageously, and when you find that narrow gap and shoot through it to grab what it is you want so badly, you’re going to pull a whole community across the finish line with you.
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Watch that space. And watch Nikki, too. Look closely at them: their contagious grin, their quick and easy laugh, their 5’4” frame—always still at the center—as they orbit the oval. The lightness with which Nikki moves through the world on and off the track belies the weighty responsibility they’ve assumed.
Since coming out as gay in 2016 and as transgender non-binary in March of this year, Nikki has received thousands of messages—most supportive, some not—and been told many deeply personal stories from people who rightly see Nikki as their secular patron saint. Like St. Kevin of Glendalough, who stood still long enough for two blackbirds to nest in his hands, Nikki stands with arms outstretched, cupped palms open to the sky, and holds space for whatever lands there: stories of joy and grief, heartbreak and triumph. Whatever people bring to Nikki—and they bring a lot—Nikki carries.
The responsibility cuts both ways.
“At the Trials,” Nikki explains, "it was so special to meet all these people who had been messaging me or just to have that in-person contact, to give people hugs, and them telling me that they just came out to their parents. And there's nothing like that, you know? Right before a race to have a connection with someone like that and then just go out there and be seen on one of the biggest stages as a trans person. It's so special and I think it does give me a little extra edge in the race. I feel like I'm running for something so much more than just myself. I'm running for an entire community of people.”
“But,” they confess, “it’s also really heavy. Everyone that comes up to me at meets, it's almost like they're just unloading, whether it's trauma or a good inspirational story. It’s intense a lot of the time.”
Nikki speaks candidly about their position because it’s one tool they have to make visible the work they’re doing. Like every athlete competing at the most elite level, Nikki’s talent for running a fast mile makes it look easy. The truth is: it is anything but. As Nikki continues to bring visibility to the transgender community by stepping up and speaking out, they’re drawing attention to the struggle, the work and the commitment necessary to move a community forward. And just like the ceaseless and nuanced work required to make running 1500m in 4:02 look effortless, the work of bringing visibility to transgender athletes is unending—and invaluable.
So when you see Nikki Hiltz step to the start line, imagine for a moment what they see when they draw that last deepest of breaths before the gun fires: a finish line far beyond the boundaries of the stadium. And imagine what it’s impossible to see: the weighty responsibility of Nikki’s leadership in a community that is finding its place in the public’s eye.
And when you see Nikki Hiltz cross the finish line of the Olympic Trials, what do you see then? Do you see the extinguishing of a dream? Or do you see a torch igniting sparks in other athletes throughout the stadium and around the globe?
As Nikki states plainly: “It all depends on how you look at it.”
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For STRAVA
June 2021
photocred: Ben Lonergan/Register Guard