Every day Sean Fitzwilliam sees the same recreational joggers making their way down the St. Charles streetcar line and wonders why they do it.

“There’s nothing appealing about running. It’s awful,” he said.

That’s the testimony from the first cross country inductee into the Loyola Hall of Fame.

“People tell me they are interested in running; I don’t recommend it,” said Fitzwilliam, who graduated in 1999. “It’s stupid, it’s painful, there’s no real reward at the end. The only real reason to do it is to race.”

And that’s the reason why Fitzwilliam, now 29, continues to put in five to 12 miles a day.

He’s a competitor before being an athlete and to him nothing tests the heart and abilities more than the long distance race. In 1999, before leaving to compete in his second nationals appearance for Loyola, Fitzwilliam savored the intensity at the starting line seconds before the foreman pulled the trigger. Today, he is still chasing that same adrenaline rush when he competes in road races locally and nationally.

Fitzwilliam started running cross country his first year of high school after missing the cut for the baseball team. “All the other small and skinny kids were running, so I started running,” he said. He came to Loyola after being scouted by then-cross country coach Steve Kalbaugh at a high school meet on the Lakefront. He said he was only the fourth best runner at Jesuit High School, but Kalbaugh saw potential for a promising future at Loyola.

An average runner in high school, his muscles developed during his first year on the Loyola squad. His times progressed from the fourth best on the team at the beginning of the season to the fastest by the time of the national meet at the end of the season. Over the next four years Fitzwilliam would set school records in several events, win a Gulf Coast Athletic Conference Championship and qualify for the Nationals on three occasions.

He ran his best times in his last two Nationals appearances in 1998 and 1999. As a junior he placed 83rd nationally for a Loyola record 26:25 in the 8,000-meter race just 45 seconds from being an All-American. He returned to the same race the next year to place 68th and set the standing Loyola record time of 26:08. He also holds school records for the four-mile (20:29) and five-mile (26:51) races, giving him three total.

Today, trophies and plaques from various road races line the walls and windowsills of the shotgun house he rents with two buddies about a mile away from Loyola. It looks like the typical college frat house – except cleaner – equipped with a ping pong table, secondhand furniture and an old bicycle nobody rides.

Physically, Fitzwilliam could still pass for a college student. The curly mop of hair hangs over the shoulders of his small frame, as it did his senior year at Loyola.

Rifling through a stack of paper racing tags he saves from each race, Fitzwilliam counts 30 road races from last year alone. The New Orleans Track Club puts on two to four races a month and Fitzwilliam will do anything from a one mile run to a half marathon. “Some give you a trophy, some give you a medal, some give you a plaque, some give you money – very few give you money,” he said.

Last year he and a group of fellow New Orleans runners competed in the world’s largest running relay race in Oregon, the Nike Hood to Coast. Fitzwilliam ran 19 and a half miles to help his team win 11th in their division. For the following three days he said he could barely walk.

But Fitzwilliam is well acquainted with injuries. Since graduating he has sprained his ankle twice and pulled his hamstring a dozen times – the last time, in 2006, he had to undergo a six-month rehabilitation.

Since then he has remained injury-free and runs consistently. He said he can still run at about the same pace he did when he graduated.

So why keep doing it?

“Because I’m stupid,” he said. In fact, Fitzwilliam admits he doesn’t know why he continues to run other than the challenge to beat his last time.

At Loyola, Fitzwilliam and fellow runner Chris Couvillion hated training so much that they would have contests to see who would quit first. To this day he has to force himself to grind out his nightly 10-mile trek – he’d much rather be playing pingpong.

But with the Mardi Gras half marathon starting the morning after his Hall of Fame induction, and the 20th Annual Run on the Bayou following in March, followed by more and more runs, there’s little time for pingpong.

Some people like to run for fun. Sean Fitzwilliam likes to run to compete.

Steve Heath can be reached at [email protected].