The Right Run

Competitive sports have been something I have done my best to keep my son way from to this point. He is going to be six in a few weeks and I have so far avoided the drumbeat to enrol him in hockey or any of the team sports that tend to bring out the competitive instincts of parents who have their own aspirations or agenda. He has been told a few times that he is not going to be playing football regardless of how big he gets.

To this point, he has been relatively active with gymnastics and swimming thus far and we may be at a crossroads with the gymnastics. His most recent round of gymnastics is in the late afternoons which has seen his class relegated to a corner of the gym that affords the older and more competitive kids access to much of the equipment that was the highlight during previous sessions.

Running continues to appeal and there have been more and more opportunities for him to sign up for races. He wants to race me whenever we are walking somewhere and his enthusiasm for it remains unbridled. Today, he had a 2K race and on a bracing, subzero morning he toed the line with about 30 other kids. Before the race, I cautioned him to go out slowly, take his time and save his energy for the second half of the race.

In the 1K race he had last month, he finished in just under 6 minutes, but I was not sure what to expect with double the distance. For an experienced runner, grasping the challenges with pacing, with saving a little energy, whether to compete with the people around or simply with yourself are all hard things to take into account.

As the kids start to cross the finish line and the minutes ticked away, I wondered how he was doing out there with the extra distance and whatever concerns I had eased when he crossed the line in tandem with a new friend and did a high five as the other boy's mother and I looked on. They fell into step together and spent the race getting acquainted with one another and by the time they crossed the line, they were a team. We parted ways probably too quickly, but I was not immediately aware how well Gabriel bonded with this other boy. As he talked about how he told his running partner about himself and his family and learned the same from him, I thought about how I bonded with fellow runners during my favorite races and how, whether we spoke a great deal or not, we shared the run in several ways and got to know each other and cheer each other on as we pursued our goals.

I am fully aware that as Gabriel gets older, sports will pose dilemmas as we weigh the difference between competing and participating. It is still too early for that and there is the simple matter of him finding sports that he is passionate about. If running happens to be the sport, then he has had a good head start and gymnastics will be helpful in developing the balance and physical awareness required for other sports. I am conscious of the blight of the participant medal and hope that he learns the lessons that come with competing but I hope that those lessons are learned in areas or endeavours where he is striving to do his best and find the personal achievement or growth that he seeks rather than in sports where he is less interested. 

In the meantime, I will cross my fingers that he runs into his new teammate the next time he lines up for a race.

Coaching

For Calgarians, soccer season is an eight week interval between the last icy gasp of winter and the start of summer holidays. This year, rather than subjecting us to the discomforts of standing against a brisk wind making us wish we had another layer of down, a blast of snow seized the first week of my son's U6 season outright rather than leaving any questions about how cold it might get before it was determined that the kids were better off with their normal, sedentary evening routines.

For week two, we congregated at the local community centre where nets are aligned in pairs across the soccer field and went through the routine of scanning the team app that we signed up for to determine who else was on our children's team and who the coach was. My son knew that he was on the same team as one of his closest friends from daycare and further to that I knew that among his teammates was the five-year-old most likely to do a 10-metre knee slide across the field with his shirt pulled over his head and beckon the crowd's complete adoration. I'm not kidding - it is the kind of thing that sticks in your head. Last year, this kid was the only one wearing cleats, and he showed up every week in an authentic Real Madrid kit complete with Ronaldo's or somebody's name and number. 

I scanned the roster on my phone and found the name of a "non-player" and as the queries about who was coaching mounted, a lean sixties-ish guy with a silver beard acknowledged his name and added that he thought he had made it clear that he said he wasn't available this year. Fortunately enough, he decided to come out to watch his grandson play and he would pitch in.  He turned to me and asked, "You know anything about soccer?"

"I've kicked a ball." I didn't bother to add that the last time I kicked a ball, about ten days earlier, my efforts redefined the word "errant" and left me humbly chasing my shot up the road to throw the ball back over the fence it sailed over. I played organized soccer up until I was 15 and I had played pick-up off and on. As for coaching, I knew that I would have to take turn at some point but I thought I oiled wait another year or so. I was going to definitely miss one week and that was enough for me to rationalize putting it off another year. I was not sure if I could muster the extroversion to elicit the excitement among the kids to play or get the focus for drills that I would expect myself to aim for despite it still being the time of, "Same team, same team!" and "When's snack time?"

I was ready to coach and pitch, though feeling a bit of stage fright about trying to drill them on things for the half hour of practice that preceded a loosely officiated game. Twelve hours after the fact, it has just dawned on me that .I could start them off with some stretching and that vaguely remembered game with the numbers or something. I don't even like stretching.

Instead of taking the pressure role of leading the kids in their early paces, I seized the opportunity to lay out the cones that separated the field into units for each of the four teams. I grew hesitant with each step as I acknowledged that nobody else was laying out cones for any of the other teams. A voice in my head chided me for not jumping in and taking the lead even though the current volunteer as coach was not too reluctant to accept the task that was thrust upon him.

"You go in net with these guys. Okay?"

I immediately started to wonder about how competitive I was going to be and with each save I wondered if I was going to hear the hue and cry of parents who would complain the game wasn't fair and that I ought to let the kids-only opposition score enough to keep it fair. I was a hockey goalie growing up and those same instincts took over quite quickly. Still, I made a point of letting a goal in early to put the other team ahead before knuckling down and stopping shots aggressively. I thought I was getting a sense of how our team was doing, but they did not score as much as I had thought. There was one little pocket rocket, with plastic shin pads the glimmered with a metallic blue sheen, who had pretty good speed and a good sense of footwork with the ball and he got some decent breakaways on me and scored a few. On a separate occasion, I pulled Gabriel aside to point out a crestfallen opponent who was taken aback by a push Gabriel delivered. As the ball hit the twine behind me, the coach gently chided, "You! Penalty for parenting."

Snack time followed and I was off the hook and managed to escape the wrath of parents who thought I was playing too hard or too well. Instead, the little pocket rocket came up to me and said, "I score three goals on you." He was cute and I liked the way he played, so I gave him a fist bump instead of replying, "Two. You scored TWO, kid." With that, I was off the hook for this week, but I suspect it will be time to dust off a stretching exercise and a few games to get them enjoying some drills.

A Lesson to Save

A month ago, I took a shot at achieving a goal that I had been targeting for a while: qualifying for the Boston Marathon. I had spent much of the winter preparing to meet my Boston Qualifying (BQ) goal and headed to Vancouver with the hope that the climate and altitude would give a further boost to my pursuit of the target. The race proceeded well and I was at a promising pace up until the 35K mark when cramps set in.  "Set in" seems a bit too euphemistic actually for the pain that stabbed through my left calf. I tried to run through it a few times, but I resigned to caution in the face of the pain and the looming mid-morning heat.

I walked most of the last 7K, watching the Boston Marathon qualifying time tick away and then the possibility of a time in the 3:30's and then eyed the threat of finishing in over 4 hours.  I picked up my feet and jogged in the last kilometre or so, to summon up a bit of pride that took a particularly hard blow as some idiot in leather thongs trotted passed to glory and the serated stigmata of the leather's carve through his naive feet.

Toward the end, I just wanted to see my son for a welcome smile.  We have been in the habit of finishing together.  The first time I did it, I carried him across the line with me and since that time he has been eager to grab my hand and run through the finish gate with me, thrilled to get that feeling and my medal to boot. Like Jim Valvano, I'd like my son to get practiced in the rituals of victory and celebration and visualize the thrill of the finish line.

On this occasion with disappointment blooming, I wanted to see him for the comfort if nothing else. I slowly scanned the crowd for my wife and my son and thrilled to see them along with my brother- and sister-in-law, who were wary of the mild insanity that congregates around marathon courses. My wife hoisted my son over the high fence and despite everything, he felt light and we were ready to run it in for the finish.

We crossed the line together and my son beamed up at me as he does at the thrill of running as fast as we can when we are coming home from school and he has asked me to hold his hand and run as hard as I can until his spinning legs cannot keep up and he either slides or takes flight upon giving up the effort to keep up.  For him, these few hundred metres to stop the clock are perhaps just another occasion for that thrilling, everyday ride with his dad.

I stop as soon as we cross and I give him a hug and I ask him, "How'd I do?"

He replied, having heard that I would have been 35, not 62 minutes getting to the finish from the point when he last cheered me on, "It was really long."

"You proud of me?"

"Yeah."

And I told him that I too would be proud of him in the face of his disappointments just as he was proud of me and that no matter how bad he would ever feel, I would always have his back.

It might be a lot to lay on a four-year-old, so the picture helps.  I'll be able to remind him or show him that moment when he feels that way and tell him of how disappointment can burn and linger and that in the end it doesn't change anything about the way I feel about him.  Actually, it would likely just make me prouder.