Lucy's Mud run

Newsletter 2024-05-17

I ruined my children. That’s the seven thousandth time I’ve started a newsletter that way. Wrecking their lives is my most consistent activity and the closest thing I have to a real hobby outside of board games. I had the best of intentions when I got my girls into running. My oldest, Betsy, made it to state. My second oldest, Mae, quit after one season. My nine-year-old, Lucy, might not make it even that far. She’s still too young for team sports, but her elementary school has a running club. Wednesday was their sole race for the year. She and a hundred other kids ran nearly two miles through a surprise swamp. As she trudged through mud deep enough to swallow that horse in The Never Ending Story, I could see the look of betrayal in her eyes. Her biggest mistake wasn’t joining the running club; it was trusting me.

I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong when I got my daughters into running. I wouldn’t wish anything upon them that I hadn’t already tried myself. That was the first red flag. I ran track and cross country from fifth or sixth grade through college. Now, I can barely run at all. I used to view jogging as one of the few lifelong sports. It’s not like you can play a pickup game of football at forty-five. Well, you can, but multiple people are going to end up in the hospital. I once played a game of tackle football in my early twenties and couldn’t walk for two days. No wonder retired NFL players move like they were run over by a team of Clydesdales. I thought running would be much gentler to me as I aged. Outside of school teams, I also joined a running club as a kid where most of the runners were old. I admired how they kept doing physical things into their twilight years. In reality, the people I thought were ancient were probably in their thirties and forties. Today, they actually are old, and most of them have had multiple knee surgeries. Lesson learned. 

I was so excited when Betsy was finally old enough for cross country in sixth grade that I volunteered to help coach. That was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, which, given my life, is saying something. Being on a team is fun. Being in charge of a team is not. It was like wrangling a family of twenty rather than four. My job at most practices was to round up the stragglers. I spent the majority of my time not inspiring kids to do their best, but begging them to run at all. I never understood their resistance to running. That’s the entire sport. It’s not this was basketball, where they could hate the line sprints but love shooting. Cross country only had running and more running. If they didn’t want to run, they could have stayed home instead of joining of their own free will. I found out later that some of the kids hadn’t volunteered. A few of them were forced into it by their parents because they had too much energy. Weirdly, the most amped up kids became hopelessly lethargic as soon as it was time to run a mile. Perhaps the key to fixing squirrely children is to tell them they’re supposed to move as much as possible. Then they’ll sit perfectly still and read books. Meanwhile, the motivated kids with the other coaches got faster and faster. Surely that was merely a coincidence. My tenure as a volunteer assistant was a short one.