Coe-Brown New Hampshire Star Pressed Through Difficult Year In Which He Grew By Seven Inches, To 6-1

By Mary Albl of DyeStat

Aidan Cox doesn’t want to stop running. It simply feels good to him, and it always has. 

At an early age, his dad, Tim Cox, recalls that's all his son wanted to do. 

“He was very fast when he was young,” Tim said. “I had to hold him back. He just really loves racing.” 

But it was just a couple of months ago that Cox, 17, wasn’t experiencing any joy in his  running. The satisfaction was replaced by a constant pain in his knees every time he accelerated his legs forward, wanting to move fast. The pain he experienced for nearly a year was growing pains. 

“It was pretty frustrating I’d say,” Cox said. “I’d get into a workout and tighten up and it would end up just being super painful by the end. It took a while to realize what the problem was. You hear about growing pains, and it's normally not this bad.” 

Now Cox, much taller, is back to enjoying running and experiencing a pain-free senior high school cross country season for Coe-Brown Northwood Academy (New Hampshire)  as one of the top runners in the country. He recently won Manchester Invitational on Sept. 24 in 15:20, just three seconds off the course record set by Ben True. 

“I’m definitely not taking good races or runs for granted because they just feel so good right now,” Aidan  said.

AIDAN COX No. 11 IN LATEST DYESTAT RANKINGS

CHOSEN PATH

Growing up, Cox always had a ball in his hand. 

“He played baseball, soccer, basketball, he always had a ball,” Tim said. “He’s a really good all-around athlete, but running was his thing,” Tim said.  

Cox’s earliest memories involved a track or running trail. Both his parents – Tim and Jen – have been heavily involved in the sport of running in one way or another for most of their lives. Tim was a runner at Suffern High in New York and then attended the University of North Carolina-Wilmington on scholarship. He met his best friend Brent Tkaczyk in college. The two have been almost inseparable since and the co-head coaches at Coe-Brown for more than 20 years. 

“As far back as I can remember, I was going to all the track and cross country meets with my parents who were coaches. I sort of loved it from the start, and it was a passion growing up around the Coe-Brown teams,” Aidan said. 

Until the sixth grade, Cox played multiple sports. He eventually dropped basketball, another passion of his, to focus on running. 

“With running I could control everything,” he said. “There’s no timeouts, and it’s sort of me controlling what happens. I loved the feeling of running, and running fast.” 

FOLLOWING THE FAMILY FOOTSTEPS 

With an embarrassment of riches in the quantity and quality of trails surrounding him in New Hampshire, Aidan spent his time in the outdoors chasing his older sister Addison and cousins Luke and Tyler Tkaczyk (Brent’s wife Amy and Jen Cox are cousins); all of them providing one another with competition yet playful fun. During Aidan’s first year on varsity, Luke, who now runs for Siena, was a junior, providing invaluable guidance for Aidan. 

“It was really cool to have Luke there growing up,” Aidan said. “He’d always beat me, and my sister Addison used to beat me when I was super young, but I was always chasing Luke. We really pushed each other in the workouts and pushed each other in the right direction.”

In 2019 as a freshman, Cox and Luke Tkaczyk helped guide Coe-Brown to a Division II and Meet of Champions title, as Cox placed runner-up in both races. As a sophomore, he took himself to another level, moving into the No. 1 slot for Coe-Brown, winning the state divisional title and claiming the MOC title in a state-record time of 14:58.8. In the spring, he capped off an abbreviated outdoor season, due to COVID-19, at the Outdoor Nike Nationals in Eugene, Ore. with a third-place finish in the 5,000 meters (14:38.75), earning All-American honors. 

“He doesn’t lose confidence,” Tim said of his son. “He's the most dedicated kid I’ve ever coached. He does all those necessaries, core, stretching, weight routine; it’s a level of focus that is unparalleled.” 

JUNIOR YEAR

Tim still doesn’t know how his son pulled off his performance at RunningLane. Aidan calls it his only good race of the 2021 cross country season. On December 4, in a field featuring national powerhouse Newbury Park, he willed himself to a seventh place finish at the Garmin RunningLane Championships in personal best time of 14:18.5. 

“He loves the sport, he absolutely loves the sport, and I think his love of running and as well as competition is what really got him through,” Tim said. 

Flash back nearly four-to-five months prior, and this race almost certainly wouldn't have been possible. As Cox’s sophomore season of track wrapped up, he started to experience pain while running. Tim continuously modified Cox’s training as his ferritin levels were low and his knees were in constant pain. He had to pull his son out of the Manchester Invitational in the middle of the race – something he’s never done before. 

“He couldn’t finish a tempo run, his knees were just so tight,” Tim explained. 

With rest, Aidan was able to make a comeback on minimal training for the postseason where he defended his DII and MOC and went on to win the Nike Regionals Northeast crown (15:43.6), and race into the top sevenl at RunningLane. Tim thought they may have turned a corner at that point. 

“We headed into the winter and indoor never got off the ground. He was fading in workouts, races and outdoors got worse,” Tim said. “In particular his left knee he started to develop a limp and significant pain.”

Tim said they went back to the doctors and received an MRI, which showed his growth plates were still very wide. With some help and guidance from specialists, Tim said it was time to take another break and be patient. 

“It was a painful decision, but it wasn’t a hard decision,” Tim said. “It was the only decision.”

For the 16-year-old Cox, who his dad describes as a quiet kid, dealing with an injury that was out of his control, and learning how to manage the highs and lows was a lot to manage. 

“As far as how he handled this, he has this quiet fortitude from his mother,” Tim said. “She is just a very strong-willed person, doesn’t talk a lot about what she's going to do, she just does it. Aidan is the same way and internalizes a lot. During the last year that was not a good thing as communication wasn’t quite there at the level we needed it to be but at the same time it was just a really difficult time. But he’s getting really better at talking it through and that's why I think we are being more successful now.”

A DIFFERENT RUNNER 

Aidan has sprouted from 5-foot-6 to roughly 6-1, nearly seven inches in a year's span. 

“I’m looking up at him now, he has a lot of hair and I have none,” Tim said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t say he looks like a man yet, but he looks like a young man.”

Since this past summer, knock on wood, Cox has experienced no pain in running. Tim said they've been careful about taking things slow and gradual in workouts and not overdoing it. 

“It’s a lot easier for him to run fast, he has more muscle, more definition, he does look very different,” Tim said. “But he hasn’t lost confidence or focu. That’s been the constant.”

During his junior year, his quiet demeanor coupled with an unwavering confidence and love for the sport kept him going. His family, particularly his older sister, Addison have been a key support. Addison, who was at the University of New Hampshire last year, was looking into switching schools. The two were able to take an official visit together to the University of Virginia. Aidan said the tipping point of him choosing UVA was Addison. 

“For all the quietness, Addison is boisterous, verbal, she's super emotional, very much like me,” Tim said. “When they were younger they would go snowshoeing, running, jogging, hiking, biking, what have you, they were very close, but still brother and sister, and would still get on each other's nerves, but never affecting the core of the relationship and running is a big aspect of that. She’s given him a pretty cool gift of communicating and standing up for yourself.” 

NEW OUTLOOK

Tim knows his son hates to lose. Last fall, he finished seventh at the New England Championships, despite the season's challenges. 

“He’s a guy of redemption, he doesn't like not racing well,” Tim said. 

With a solid and pain-free summer of training, Cox has been off to a great start to the fall winning the Manchester Invitational and recently placing second at the Black Bear Invitational on Saturday, Oct. 1. He has goals of helping Coe-Brown win the program’s fifth-straight DII title and place well at NXR Northeast as a team and individually with hopes of qualifying for NXN in Portland. But for Cox now, he’s taking it day by day and enjoying just the feeling of running. 

“The biggest thing is just the consistency I've had pretty much every day,” he said. “I look forward to running every single day and that’s like the best thing.”