How to Teach Perseverance For Those Who Lack Patience – Part 2 – or Dusting Off Your Old Basketball Injuries

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m committed to the seemingly endless task of teaching my children the virtue of perseverance, and if things don’t start to click soon, I might throw in the towel.  For those of you that are wondering, I still have all 5 chickens, but they seem a little reluctant to give us any eggs.  I wonder if they can lay at will.  If I were a hen, and I’ve been called that in my younger years (kids will call you anything as long it rhymes with your name), I would definitely not lay eggs for a kid who has trouble remembering when meal times are. 

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 50^th place – well ahead of anyone else on her team – 2 of them, 7^th graders.  All in all, not bad for a 4^th 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.