This fall, my son has decided to be a 2 sport athlete. Retract that… actually he decided to be a 1
sport athlete and is playing football, but since I agreed to help coach cross
country for the school, he was forced into joining the cross country team in
addition to his participation in football.
Growing up, I always played sports.
Baseball was my thing, and I have to confess, I always imagined myself to
be a pretty good ballplayer – much more so than those around me, including my
coaches, apparently. I could never
understand why they didn’t see in me the things I saw myself, but that is
likely the subject of another story, meant for another time. I also played basketball and tennis. I tell you all this in order to say with some
semblance of authority that you can learn a lot from playing a team sport, and
perhaps just as much playing an individual sport like tennis. And whether or not my son is ever skilled
enough (in his eyes as well as the eyes of those who ‘matter’) or interested
enough to play in high school, or perhaps even beyond, it’s important that he
have the experience afforded to him by athletics in these crucial developmental
years, thus the reason for my possibly overzealous decision to make cross
country mandatory for him.
While football is great, if he decides not to play another
year, I’ll be okay with that decision.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching him play. Seeing him dance around play after play
desperately avoiding every player on the field while trying to appear as if he’s
interesting in blocking and tackling reminds me of how reluctant I was to get
hit at that age. He plays both
cornerback and wide receiver and while on offense, has only had a few balls
thrown his way all year. One of those he
caught, but it was one of his misses that made me most proud of him. His team was playing a team with much bigger
athletes, and on this particular play, he went over the middle on a crossing
route where he found a perfectly thrown ball headed straight for his
chest. I’m not exactly sure of the
timing of events that unfolded, but at some point, all three of these things
happened in quick succession. He reached
up, grabbed the ball, and took a suffocating blow to his side by a very large, salivating
linebacker who had watched the whole play evolve with the scent of blood in his
nostrils. The ball came loose as quickly
as he had ‘caught’ it, and my boy went flying through the air sideways,
rib-cage first, with head and feet in tow, until he landed hard on the
ground. I jumped up, thinking his
football days had come to an abrupt end, but no sooner had I stood to my feet
did I see him bounce back up and run to the huddle. After the game I bragged on him for taking
such a lick and getting back up, to which he replied, “Daddy, I don’t know why,
but the referees aren’t calling roughing the catcher today.”
But football is not the sport I am writing about today. Cross-country - a sport I used to think was
for the weaker kids who weren’t talented enough to do anything else - is. In the past few weeks, my stance on
cross-country, if you consider it important enough of an ‘issue’ upon which to
take a stance, has changed dramatically.
Those brave enough to participate in cross-country deserve to be called
athlete. Runners are quite possibly the
gutsiest of athletes, having whipped their bodies into shape by the sheer force
of their resolve. And as my views have
evolved, I’ve come to the conclusion that every child ought to have to run
cross country competitively at some point in his or her childhood.
It goes without saying that distance running is a tremendous
way to exercise, which everyone needs, but the beauty of running is that anyone
with healthy legs can do it, regardless of ability (as I so astutely, if not
rudely, pointed out a few sentences ago).
But it also teaches kids how to compete against themselves, which, when
you get down to it, is what 75% of life is about. The key to success in life, in my view, is
knowing how and when to battle and overcome oneself. And distance running is metaphor for life.
To us, it is the most sacred of metaphors. It’s the grid work through which we
discipline. Kids not practicing the
piano? No problem, we’ll just have a
conversation about the importance of conditioning yourself for the race, only
in this case, the ‘race’ is actually the recital. (On a side note, you might think piano
recitals are more about the expression of art and less about competition, but I
think that is utter nonsense. To me,
EVERYTHING is about winning, no matter how seemingly subjective a task.) Kids fighting and arguing? We’ll just discuss the value of teamwork
while running a race, and before you go there, yes, cross-country is a team
sport, as well as an individual one. The
kids encourage and push each other, and that makes them better. So I simply dust off an analogy of the
importance of teamwork in the game of life, asserting that we Dismukes are a
team, and if we stick together, we can win at just about anything we set our
minds to. And if the kids are in need of
a little old-fashioned punishment, I just make them run an extra mile in order
to teach them a lesson. My rationale is,
it hurts more than a spanking does and for a much longer period of time. And in the end, my kids have not only learned
their lesson, they are now more physically fit as well.
The greatest life lesson, in my opinion, one can take away
from running distance, however, is the virtue of perseverance. When we started, neither of my children could
run a mile without stopping to walk every 15 paces. But I pushed them into embracing the pain
brought about by pushing their little bodies beyond their perceived
limitations. How I did this, I’m not
sure, but I take full credit for whatever caused them to strive for greatness
(only kidding, of course, we Dismukes are born with an inherent desire to
achieve greatness and need little external motivation). And because they did, I now have unlimited
opportunities to help translate that experience into solutions for everyday
life situations.
Everything in life worth doing is met with some form of
resistance. The friction created from
meeting that resistance almost always results in pain of some kind. It could be the personal sacrifice of
devoting one’s time to a noble cause or the emotional pain of entering into a
relationship with another person. We are
almost never unsusceptible to pain. Winners,
as I tell my kids, learn to push through the pain, and Dismukes are winners.
Not all Dismukes are winners enough to push all the way
through their pain, however. This particular
Dismukes stopped running just 2 weeks into practice because he enflamed an old
basketball knee injury. However, I will
say that there are certain benefits to being legitimately injured. I now coach from the couch in my den – a fact
that has somehow eluded my 2 kids who still listen to everything that I
say. But let’s not waste too much time focusing
on that minor detail. This story is about raising up the next
generation of winners (and by the way, in my book, all Dismukes are winners –
even the injured ones).
Now comes the part where I brag on my children. In a matter of just under 2 months, I have
seen my kids come to love running. If
you’ve never been in the habit of jogging, you might think this strange, but
there comes a point in time where the pain of running actually becomes somewhat
addictive (unless, of course, it’s the pain of an old basketball injury –
there’s nothing addictive about that).
You actually enjoy the feeling of pushing your body beyond its
limitations. I think my children have
started show signs that they’re truly enjoying what started out as a
chore. Both have competed in their first
meet, and both did extremely well under the circumstances. My 9 year old daughter ran against 90 some
odd Jr. High girls and finished somewhere around 50th place – well
ahead of anyone else on her team – 2 of them, 7th graders. All in all, not bad for a 4th
grader who couldn’t run a third of a mile without stopping just a month and a
half ago. She is so encouraged, she
considers cross-country to be “her thing”, and now brags when she can run 2
miles without stopping to walk.
All of my kids have the potential to be great at whatever
they set their minds to, and cross-country has helped highlight that fact. All they needed was a little perseverance,
which I’m thrilled I was able to teach them… at least partially. And it’s a good thing… I was just about ready
to give up.
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