Alan Webb once held the American record in the mile.
For years, speed gave him something measurable. There was a clock. A finish line. A result. Put in the work, suffer through the training, and eventually the numbers told you whether you had succeeded.
Fatherhood gave him a harder test.
Webb, a Catholic convert, track coach and father of five with a sixth child on the way, says raising a family forced him to reconsider what masculinity means when there is no stopwatch telling you whether you are getting it right.
“Being a father with women around most of the time in our house, I think it’s actually enhanced my masculinity,” Webb said during an episode of Heroic Stories. “Because it challenges you to really understand your role.”
For Webb, that role begins with leadership.
And leadership, he argues, becomes meaningless unless a man knows where he is trying to take people.
“What Does It Mean to Be a Man?”
Webb lives in a household filled with daughters. Four of his five children are girls.
Host Dominic de Souza asked the obvious question: How does a highly competitive male athlete stay connected to his masculinity in a house dominated by women?
Webb’s answer went in the opposite direction.
Fatherhood had made the question more serious.
“One of my jobs is to be the protector and leader of the family,” Webb said. “So that role has caused me to ask that question. Well, what does it mean to be a man?”
His daughters, Webb said, are watching.
They are watching how he practices his faith. They are watching how he goes to Mass. They are watching how he speaks. And perhaps most importantly, they are watching how he treats their mother.
That creates a frighteningly practical standard for fatherhood.
If his daughters marry someday, Webb said, he wants them to marry good men who treat them with respect.
But where will they learn what such a man looks like?
“They’re looking at you,” Webb said. “They are looking at you, and they’re going to imitate you.”
That realization changes masculinity from an identity a man claims into a life his children observe.
The inheritance he hopes to leave them is faith.
“I want to give all of my faith to my children, to my family,” he said. “That’s what I want them to inherit from me.”
A Man Has to Know Where He Is Going
Asked directly to define masculinity, Webb returned to leadership.
“A real man can lead,” he said.
But a leader can possess enormous influence and still lead people toward destruction. Effectiveness alone cannot make leadership good.
“Maximilian Kolbe was a great leader because he led people to the greatest place, which was heaven,” Webb said.
That distinction sits at the center of Webb’s definition of manhood.
“True manhood, true masculinity is knowing who you’re leading,” he said, “setting the destination, and then doing the things that you have to do to get there.”
Leadership, under that definition, has little to do with dominance.
It carries responsibility.
The Loss That Deepened His Faith
The conversation took a heavier turn when Webb was asked about one of the hardest experiences of his life.
His wife, Julia, suffered a miscarriage.
“I would say that’s probably the most difficult thing that I’ve had to endure,” Webb said.
The loss remains painful. “It’s still tough,” he said.
Webb described mourning his child while also becoming more conscious of what he believes about the value of human life.
“I was so grateful to have my own children that are alive,” he said.
The experience could have produced resentment toward God.
For Webb, it did something else.
“I actually thought it increased my faith,” he said.
He struggled to describe the experience in ordinary language. There was no easy explanation for the loss, he said, but there was a sense of God remaining present within it.
“I could feel the Holy Spirit talking to me,” Webb said, describing it as a “mystical sense.”
The experience also exposed the limits of control.
That can be especially uncomfortable for men accustomed to measuring effort against outcomes.
The host raised his own experience of miscarriage and described the instinct to internalize the loss as failure, as though a husband should have somehow created enough safety to prevent it.
The question became larger: What happens when a man does everything he can and the outcome remains beyond his control?
For Webb, faith provided the destination even when he could no longer control the course.
The Mile Eventually Stops Mattering
Webb knows something about achievement.
His high school mile record survived for 25 years. He once held the American record in the event.
Yet discussing those accomplishments now, Webb offered an unexpectedly dismissive verdict.
“Who cares?”
The comment was less an attack on athletic excellence than a reordering of its importance.
Webb spent years worrying about how fast he could run.
Eventually, he began asking what any of it meant beside the ultimate goal of his life.
“Are you going to sacrifice what should be your long-term goal, your ultimate goal of being with God in heaven forever?” he asked.
The training still mattered.
The discipline still mattered.
The achievement still mattered.
But none deserved to become the destination.
That lesson now shapes his work as a coach.
Sports Can Train the Soul
Webb sees athletics as a laboratory for virtue.
Training teaches discipline. Competition teaches accountability. Athletes learn that habits produce consequences.
“If you have the discipline and put in the work, then you get a result,” Webb said.
The danger comes when those lessons remain trapped inside sports.
“I think sometimes the separation there between what you’re doing in sports and then your spirit, what you’re doing in your spiritual life, if you lose that connection, that’s where things go wrong,” he said.
Webb said he experienced that separation himself.
Today he wants athletes to ask the next question.
“Now what?”
You learned discipline on the track.
Now where else does it belong?
“Let’s apply it to our spiritual life, too,” Webb said.
For a former elite runner, the imagery comes naturally.
There is a destination. There is training. There are sacrifices.
There are people running beside you.
And eventually, every accomplishment has to answer the question of where it was taking you.
The Conversion That Happened Slowly
Webb entered the Catholic Church nearly a decade ago.
His conversion was gradual.
He had been baptized Protestant and attended Mass with Julia, who had been raised Catholic. Over time, he said, questions accumulated.
So did regrets.
“I would get these little moments where I’d look back and be like, ‘Oh, well, that wasn’t right. I shouldn’t have done that,’” Webb said.
Eventually, the evidence reached what he called a tipping point. “I don’t know everything, but I’ve heard enough,” he remembered thinking.
The Eucharist and confession became central. “You can’t argue with the truth,” Webb said.
His athletic instincts surfaced again. There was a direction. “I want to go up towards God,” he said. “So let’s go towards God.”
The People a Man Leads
“Apart from God or your family, who are you here for?” de Souza asked.
Webb chose his athletes.
He coaches men and women, and he sees the position as larger than producing faster runners.
“I’m definitely here to encourage and nurture the faith of the athletes on my team,” Webb said.
He holds authority as their coach, but he said the influence travels both directions.
“It’s reciprocal,” Webb said.
He tries to encourage their faith, and their faith strengthens his.
For a man whose life once revolved around crossing finish lines faster than almost anyone else in the country, the goal has grown considerably larger.
Fatherhood, marriage, miscarriage, conversion and coaching have all pushed Webb toward the same conclusion.
A man is leading somebody.
His children are watching.
His athletes are watching.
His wife experiences the consequences of his choices.
So the question becomes less about whether a man sees himself as strong.
It becomes much harder: Where are the people following him going to end up?