My
eldest son entered junior high school this year and decided he wanted to
run cross country.
If there is a family gene for cross-country running, it is surely recessive.
The only person I know in either of my or my wife's families who remotely
resembles a cross-country runner is my sister-in-law, who is a regular 4k
jogger.
Even she, however, admits she runs mostly for the reward of the runner's
T-shirt that most distance fun-runs offer to participants.
My wife jogged in the years immediately after she left college - for about
two weeks. She decided she did it more to be with her friends. She admits
she found running alone incredibly boring, and she did most of her jogging
along beautiful oceanfront paths and roads in Northeastern New England.
Among my friends I have a reputation for being sports-minded and athletically
inclined. I have a history of being involved with team sports. I played
lots of American Legion and town-league baseball and basketball and was
fortunate enough to play the same at a small college. As an adult, I have
earned money coaching women's volleyball and softball and men's basketball
at small New England colleges.
I remember as a player being chided by my coaches because I hated to do
"road work"; that is, pre-season distance running. As a coach,
I was probably too easy on my players in that aspect of their training.
At
the time my wife and I were married, I was playing softball on four different
teams: two town teams, a church team, and a college faculty-alumni team.
Anyone who knows anything about amateur league softball knows that its more
fun than sport and that one of the requirements, especially for players
over 30, is a rotund mid-section.
Our town league even had a courtesy-runner rule that allowed any other player
to pinch run once a batter reached first base safely. We had one or two
young players - mid-20s - who spent a good part of every game running bases
for older players.
I relate this long history of non-running in my life and family because
when I saw my 11-year-old sprinting toward the finish line in his first
cross-country race, a distance just under three miles, I experienced a strange
mixture of pride and pain - and distance.
He
finished 24th, less than a minute behind one of his best friends who was
also running for the first time. He was timed three-and-a-half minutes behind
the winning eighth-grader.
On paper, this finish appears mediocre at best in a field of 33 runners,
but for a sixth-grader making his first run against older and stronger boys,
24th seemed good to me.
This is one of those little family events that gets tucked away in consciousness
as a "moment never to be forgotten."
As he sprinted the last 100 yards of his race, my son looked smaller than
he is but stronger. He clearly was determined. His schoolmates and family
cheered him on and he followed his coach's instructions to bear down in
the final leg and run to the woman holding place-sticks at the finish line.
Turning back toward the crowd after crossing the finish line, his face screwed
up in pain, and without a word spoken I knew he had learned about challenging
himself and feeling that strange mix of success at having met the challenge
but hurt at having worked so hard and arrived at the goal behind so many
others.
We walked together with my arm around him and me coaxing him to "walk
it off" as one must during the cool down period after a race.
"Does it hurt?" I asked him.
"Only my feet," he answered. Then he asked for a drink.
Later, I asked him if he wanted to do it again, and with typical pre-adolescent
precision, he half whined, "I don't know."
We talked much about the pain, and the challenge, and although I didn't
use the words, I thought of the "loneliness of the long-distance runner."
He told me of his strategy: "I got lost a couple of times so I let
the next guy pass me, then I passed him again when I knew where I was."
I'm also thinking as we walk and talk that I never could have done this
as an 11-year-old. Running bases or running up and down a basketball court
is one thing, but to set oneself a goal three or four miles out and get
to it as fast as possible is not a challenge I accepted.
Yet, this is my son and this is the early achievement to which he has set
himself.
I learn in this one morning incident a major lesson about parenting. My
son is not a clone. He does not choose activities as I would have chosen.
He does not think the ideas I want him to think. He does not react to pain
and challenge as I would have reacted.
A
few days after the meet, he is back to practice and all thoughts of quitting
the team, thoughts he harbored during the cool-down walk we took, have disappeared.
He's back to practicing. One day, he and a teammate got lost during practice
and wound up running farther than they had to run. He laughs at this now.
His interest in cross-country, an interest that I disdained as a boy and
as an adult athlete, has a way of humbling me. He is experiencing what I
have never experienced. Play baseball, play basketball, I can coach and
teach him. With cross-country, I am simply a more dedicated spectator.
I coach him only from books I've read and from whatever cross-over comes
from my athletic experience, but I don't know the effect on lungs, feet,
calves, thighs, stomach, back, neck and arms that cross-country brings.
Something keeps me from mouthing the sports cliche: "No pain, no gain,"
because I know now that this must also become the slogan of fatherhood.
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Allan R. Andrews can be reached at allan.andrews@reporters.net