Sanity Check: Cross Country Lesson

We let our kids get involved in sports because we hoped they’d learn—through experience, sweat, wins and losses—the great lessons sports are supposed to teach.

Helping the team. Personal best. Winning—graciously. Losing—graciously.

Turns out, real-life sports don’t come anywhere close to the feel-goodness of sports movies. Our kids’ experiences haven’t quite lived up to slo-mo finish line crosses (or grand slams, goals, or slam dunks) set to a sound track. That’s because people are imperfect and life is gritty.

But leave it to a kid to remind us of just why competitive sports can be a good thing for mind and soul as well as body.

And the story’s even better because it’s about a kid who’s not related to us. Or even on our kid’s team. In fact, I don’t know this kid’s name and probably won’t be able, someday, to recognize him on a cereal box.

Our 12-year-old daughter runs cross country. This is a sport that just amazes me—the ultimate non-athlete—because it involves people running. For miles. Voluntarily. With no crazed bears chasing them. And no iced-vanilla-latté stations to stop at along the way.

In fact, no one stops in this sport. They just keep going, going, going, whether fast or slow. Plus everyone cheers on everyone else—boys’ team cheers on girls’ team, and vice versa; high-schoolers cheer on middle-schoolers, and vice versa. And I have yet to witness a coach or parent yell at a kid anything other than stuff like, “You can do it! Keep going! Great job!”

(Of course, since observing everyone involved on cross-country course would involve running around—no stadium seating for this sport—I may have missed a snarky moment or three. Nevertheless…)

At a recent cross country meet, while waiting for the girls to run, we watched the middle school boys compete. One boy led the pack. Not by just a little bit. And not for just a while.

Sorry, this isn’t an underdog-comes-from-behind story. This kid—we’ll call him Zippy—led the entire time, and by a huge distance. In fact, there were sections of the course where Zippy would come around a curve… and the rest of us would count to 5 before we’d see kid number two. Zippy won, by a huge margin.

Twenty or so minutes later, we positioned ourselves to watch our daughter run, when up walks Zippy to talk to some boys from another team. (The boys had gathered to cheer on the girls.) While waiting for the girls’ teams to start, a boy said to Zippy, “did you win?”

We figured the boy asking the question had been near the back of the pack and hadn't seen Zippy’s impressive victory.

But then Zippy answered: “No, we came in second.”

It took us a long moment to take in what we’d just overheard. The obvious answer, to us, to “did you win?” was “you bet I did, and whoo-buddy, by a long shot! Shoulda seen me zipping down that lane, my shoes a-fire, leaving everyone else in the dust…”

But to this 12 or 13 year-old boy, the question, and the answer, was about… the team. That moment was the finest example of humility and graciousness I’ve ever observed in sports of any kind, at any level.

It’s almost enough to make me put on some tennis shoes and go jogging.

Even without iced-vanilla-latté stations along the way.