My First Loves

I loved wrestling for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. Still love it. I'd have given anything to be good at it. The requirements of strength, speed, endurance, and skill; testing yourself against others in the wrestling room; the camaraderie of the team, sharing the same hardships of practice; learning new tricks; teaching rookies, and accomplishing the unexpected. Whats not to love?

So the question still remaining from the very first post here is how did I change from a competitive coward to this alleged (And I so hope it is true) velociraptor? If this happened, and I feel obligated to say if because I am not entirely convinced, it would have to be through the sports of track and cross county.

I’d been wrestling with my oldest brother and my dad on the living room carpet since my earliest memories. I certainly learned some competitive attitudes at home as they were both tough nuts and great fun to wrestle. I tried baseball through the ninth grade and was never any good at it. Tried church league basketball and did not care for it; it being basketball, not church. I swam all summer long at the pool and the lakes and reservoirs, but was too young to realize that the world had competitions for this sort of thing. (Who’d a thunk it?) We played croquet, badminton, and table tennis. We had a boat and skied most weekends weather permitting. I rode my bike everywhere but again, I never heard of bike racing. Soccer hadn’t arrived from Europe yet in the 1960’s. The only activity I could compete in, and actually cared about, was wrestling.

My oldest brother ran cross country to get in shape for wrestling when he was in high school. So naturally, when cross country became available to me in high school, I went out. My brother had no great success at cross county that I can recall, so I wasn’t expecting much of myself, and neither did my family. To the great surprise of all, most of all myself, I was good at it.

Cross country and track fit my personality and allowed me to compete in a passive-aggressive fashion. Better yet, Dad didn’t know much about either sport! Distance running required a great deal of work and discipline. Some were more talented than others, but the talent was meaningless without putting in the miles. A lesser runner could beat the more talented runner by putting in more miles. There were no tricks or moves or plays that could cause you to lose. You lost because you did not do the miles, or you were not born with the heart, lungs, slow-twitch fibers, and capillary system of the other guy AND failed to do the miles. There was only one winner, but there was no shame in losing as there were plenty of other guys out there who shared the same fate.

Wrestling was a zero-sum game. You won or lost. The joy of victory or the agony of defeat; there was no other measurement. In running there was this same aspect, but there were others as well. Was your time better than last week, last month, or last year at this time? Where did you place last year at this meet? Did you lose by less to your nemesis this week than two weeks ago? Did you beat somebody new and by how much? Do you think you can do it again? Have you got more miles in than last year at this point and what difference are you seeing in the results?

Running wasn’t about winning and losing. Running was about getting better than you ever were before. Running was about testing and finding the limit of your ability.