mar·a·thon
[mar-uh-thon, -thuh
n] 1.
2.any contest, event, or the like, of great, or greater than normal, length or duration or requiring exceptional endurance: a dance marathon; a sales marathon.a foot race over a course measuring 26 mi. 385 yd. (42 km 195 m).
As many may or may not know I have been training for the Chicago Marathon 2010. This will be my first marathon and I'm excited and scared to death at the same time. I am taking some of my methods classes this summer and one of the classes I am taking is a P.E. methods course. We keep having this discussion in class about competition, athleticism, and talent. As someone who played competitive soccer for most of her life and always enjoyed other sports as well I am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with competition at a young age. My teacher however is of the opinion that competition should not start until the age of 12 (at the earliest). She argues that those who are not "naturally talented" will fall behind and it's not fair and 10,000 other excuses. The message that I keep trying to get across though is that it's not exclusively about "natural talent". In fact, I think that natural talent is only a small portion of what it takes to be an athlete. The real indicator of a good athlete is mental strength, mental endurance, and perseverance.
Was I born athletically inclined? No more than any other person. No one in my family is particularly athletic or has any athletic background. Aside from youth sports and a few pick up games no one in my family really played sports except for me. When I started out I was really bad. I don't just mean because I was new to the sport either, I was an awkward and gangly kid with no apparent athleticism to be seen. I got good because I practiced and practiced and practiced. I worked at it.
We had to give a presentation to our class about our view of athletics and sports. I took the stance that kids need to learn to win and lose and accept the things they aren't good at and work towards the things they are. Soccer was not my first choice sport. Gymnastics was. I was sure I was going to be a gymnast. Then, when I was in about 3rd grade a very scary looking Russian man told me I was too tall and would never be able to compete in it. This was the truth, this was a physical obstacle that I could not overcome to participate in this sport. I had to learn to accept that I would never be a gymnast. So, I found soccer. My question to the class was, how is this any different than a child not being as good at running, hitting, catching, kicking? Yet we go out of our way to try and make these kids believe that we are all created equal. It's bologna.
One girl in my class got up to give her presentation. She made eye contact with me and started talking about her soccer playing career. Her mindset was exactly what I was trying to point out as the problem with what we are teaching kids about soccer. When I was growing up, I didn't get to play a lot at first. I was a bench warmer. I remember after games I would cry to my mom and beg her to talk to the coach so I could play more and you know what my mom told me, "Andrea, if you're practice and show him [your coach] that you are so good that he can't afford to not play you then you will play." My parents would not beg my coaches for more playing time. They would offer to take me to a soccer field to practice, they would support me if I wanted to talk to the coach myself, but from the beginning my parents did not fight my battles for me. My mothers words stuck with me throughout my career and continue to in life. If I want to be considered the best or in the top I have to prepare and work for that.
Back to the girl in my class. She got up to give her presentation and told her story of high school soccer. She said that how they chose teams was unfair. She said in high school to be on the A team you would have to do "Indian Runs" (no offense or racial thing this is just what I know them as, you have a line of people and you jog around and the last person in the line sprints to the front and this pattern continues until your coach says stop). She said, "I thought this was unfair because my legs are short and I really don't like running so I don't think you should have to do this in order to be on the A team." She then looked to me as if I was going to agree with her. I had to hold in a laugh. First of all, who likes sprinting drills? No one. But if you don't like running at all then soccer is not your sport. Secondly, it was this mentality that I was trying to politely address in my presentation. She may have only seen the girls on the A team show up to tryouts and be good, but she didn't see all the endless hours of work that went on behind the scenes. I gave up a lot of things in my life to play soccer. I went to very few dances in my life, I didn't get to go to friends houses after school to hang out, I spent every single weekend playing game after game and when we didn't have tournaments we would have 6am practices. Every night I would play 3-4 hours of soccer, 2 of which were usually just running and sprinting drills. Was that always fun? No, but that's what I had to do in order to be a top soccer player and my reward is playing on the Varsity soccer team when that season came around. To have to share playing time with a girl who can't be bothered with running sprints would make me very upset.
My long drawn out point here is that people assume all of this competition stuff and sporting ability is related to who is born that way but I think what a lot of people (especially P.E. teachers) tend to miss is the amount of work those students put into their sport outside of the classroom. If one kid chooses to play on a club baseball team and another doesn't then yes, there should be a difference in their ability. It's not taking anything away from the other kid to put him on a B team because the B team is for the students who are playing for fun, and honestly they don't deserve to be on the A team if they don't put the work into it that is required. There are no hand outs in life, so why are we teaching kids through sports that there are?
Back to my original topic, life is a marathon. Everything we do is a longer than usual event requiring exceptional endurance. Any successful person will tell you that they got to where they are because they worked hard, they stuck with it, and they believed in themselves. The more I train for the marathon the more I am coming to realize that anyone can run a marathon. It's not about athleticism, it's not about being born a runner. It's about whose mind can out last the rest of the runners. If you want to run a marathon you can. Preparation time may be longer for some than others, but eventually with perseverance you can do it. If anyone is able to run a marathon I'm wondering why we are spending so much time sheltering kids from failure when all we need to be doing is encouraging them to go after what they really want. The ability to overcome obstacles to achieve your goals is a testament to how important they were to you in the first place. If you are willing to wake up at the crack of dawn and stay up into the wee hours of the night to achieve a goal, you will, in time, achieve it. If you expect things to be handed to you and sit around waiting for things to happen you may or may not achieve your goal, but you will never be satisfied with what you do achieve.
If a kid wants to play on a varsity soccer team and you tell them all they need to do is practice more and harder and they don't want to, then they are choosing to not be on that team. You have told them exactly what they need to do to achieve their goal and they have decided it's not worth the effort. If you add that child anyway because they complain, what are we teaching them about the world? In my very last practice of soccer with my club team before college I suffered a "career ending" ankle injury. I was told no more soccer, no more sports, no more anything. I was done because my ankle had nothing left. I wanted to play in college though. I had spent my whole life playing soccer and I did not want it to end in a practice like that. I worked my butt off and 2 years later joined my college's varsity soccer team as a walk on. What would I had done if I had grown up in the environment we are raising kids in now? I would have whined and cried til hopefully someone let me be on the team? Please. I'm glad I learned young that I have to work for my goals and that nothing is handed to me. It's made me a better person and it breaks my heart we aren't passing these lessons on to the next generation and even more so that P.E. teachers (not all) are encouraging parents to remove their kids from competitive sports. Competition never hurt anyone, and everyone needs to learn the lessons it teaches.
Don't teach your kids that they can wake up tomorrow and run a marathon, teach them that every day is preparation for the great race that we call life. I promise, they will turn out better for it.
Posts
