I had "solved" this conundrum earlier by adopting code from a similar question, although I had really hoped there was a more direct way. I took @Nolen Royalty's "cheeky" one liner and wrapped it in the int() function is all. In essence:
rec = record[14] #stores index 14 of a list to rec which is a full datetime object
rec2 = rec.time() #stores time portion of that datetime object to rec2
rec3 = rec2.strftime('%H:%M:%S') #uses strftime to convert to string
s = int(sum(int(i) * 60**index for index, i in enumerate(rec3.split(":")[::-1]))) #converts that string to integer
Convoluted, but it works...still, if anyone has anything better I would be very intrigued.