The Race to Nowhere

Newsletter 2023-05-26

In my humble and highly biased opinion, my kids are winning at life. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re winning at sports. My eleven-year-old, Mae, and eight-year-old, Lucy, recently participated in a race for their running club at school. At the starting line, I told them my only goals for them were no walking and no crying. How many of those goals did they achieve? The final tally was a lot closer to zero than to two. Afterwards, Mae was mad at the world and Lucy said she was done with running forever. Fair enough. An important part of growing up is learning what you hate and never want to do again. When I look back at my life, my greatest regrets aren’t the things I quit, but the things I didn’t quit soon enough. Not coincidentally, all of those things were sports.