Morning Practice

Newsletter 2024-08-30

I’m writing this at an ungodly hour too early to be registered by modern clocks. I have already made my first drop off of the day with many more pickups and drop offs yet to come. My oldest daughter, Betsy, has come down with a tragic condition known as morning practice. She has to be at school by 5:45 a.m. to run. The alternative was for her team to stick to its normal practice time after school, which isn’t possible when afternoon temperatures are expected to be hotter than the surface of the sun. Two days this week, Betsy and her teammates were sentenced to run in the dark before anyone else on the face of the earth was awake. Correction: anyone but their parents. If I knew about this moment fourteen years ago, I might have made different family planning decisions. Instead, Betsy and I are both up well before the crack of dawn to make sure she can keep up with life’s most important pursuit: high school athletics. If the end of this newsletter turns into a bunch of random letters and numbers, assume I fell asleep with my head on the keyboard. Ironically, that will probably make my spelling better than usual.

Morning practice is a new and terrible experience to me, but only as a parent. I was well acquainted with it as a student athlete. For reasons that are lost to time, I went through a stint my sophomore year of high school where the baseball coach, who also took over cross country because no one else wanted the job, insisted that we needed two practices a day to achieve our maximum potential. Consequently, that was the only time in my high school career when I was the fastest kid on the team. There were only three of us, probably because we had morning practices. Making kids wake up early is an anti-recruitment tool. Then the coach forced baseball players who weren’t doing a fall sport to join cross country. I dropped back to my normal spot near the end of the seven-man roster. I have unlimited potential, but only for how far I can fall behind.

The other thing I remember about that brief period of morning practices is that my parents didn’t drive me. The coach picked me up on his way to school. I only lived a half mile from the building, yet my parents didn’t want to get up early enough to take me even that far. I point that out every time I make Betsy ride her bike to activities that are less than a mile away. It’s not parental laziness; it’s tradition. Alternatively, my mom might have been too busy to drive me because she was on her second or third job of the day by the time my morning practices started. Even now, when she’s approaching retirement age and only has one kid in the house (that’s about as low as the head count goes in Catholic families), She still wakes up every morning at 4:30 to do various jobs she no longer needs. I know she’s up because that’s when she first pings the family’s Facebook Messenger thread to wish people happy birthdays and anniversaries. The recipients would be happier if they could sleep in without being roused by a friendly ding. It wakes Lola up every time. She refuses to silence her phone at night in case there’s an emergency at work. She would skip her own funeral if she was needed at the lab. I’m the opposite. I’m completely unreachable at night, but the point is moot. By the time my mom fires off her first message of the day, I’m already on my way to Betsy’s practice. 

I had even more experience with morning practices in college. I ran for free as a walk-on, which might be the single dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Given my long history of less-than-smart decisions, all of which I share with the internet, that’s really saying something. We ran three miles in the morning in addition to our regular practices every afternoon and meets on Saturdays. Plus, we had illegal practices on Sundays when the NCAA said we were supposed to be off. We worked awfully hard and broke a lot of rules to still be the worst team in a weak Division II conference nobody cared about. I can’t imagine morning practices made us any faster in the long run. Given what scientists now know about the importance of sleep, we almost certainly would have been better off staying in bed. I got slower all four years in college. That had more to do with the school cafeteria than the running program. It was the one upside of morning practice. I was always awake for breakfast. While most other runners went back to their dorms after practice to get more sleep, I ate plate after plate of biscuits and gravy. It’s not surprising that my times kept creeping up; it’s surprising that I was still able to run at all.

Betsy’s morning practice should be a temporary situation. When the weather cools down, her schedule is expected to revert to afternoon sessions only. Then again, with global warming, maybe she’ll be stuck with morning practices for the duration. I didn’t care about the melting ice caps, but I do care if I have to wake up earlier a few times a week. I’m now an environmentalist. Schools these days are strict about running in the heat. If it’s over a certain threshold, all organized sports are automatically curtailed. When Betsy’s team did run in the afternoon this week, they had to modify their workouts. One day, they went swimming. Another day, they could only run for twenty minutes at a time before they had to go indoors to cool off. While high school sports remain the most important thing in the history of the universe, we’ve at least progressed to the point as a society where we agree that having kids die of heat stroke is less than ideal. You can’t win any championships if your best athletes burst into flames.