Last week, I snuck out of work early to catch little T’s first-ever cross country meet. He’s running with his school’s cross country team this year, the first time he’s really ever “done” running in an organized way, every day, with a coach and a team to be a part of.
It took me a little while to get across town from my office to the school campus where the meet took place, but I made it in time to see him at the starting line. It was (really!) warm and sunny out, but that didn’t put a damper on his spirits, as I could see him laughing and joking with his teammates.
And then the starter said, “Go!”
He ran with his teammates for a stretch, keeping up with them as best he could. Slowly, he drifted toward the back half of the group, and then the back third. Back to what, for him, is a normal pace.
After that, I couldn’t see him anymore — he and the rest of his team turned onto the trails that wind around the edges of campus. Off they went, and so we waited. And waited some more.
A bit later, I strolled over to the finish line, where I watched the first runners start to come in. The leaders were sprinting all the way in, as they always do. Once they were in, later groups started making the final turn too, crossing the finish line with as much energy as they could.
Like I expected, little T came in among the later groups, and I could see him struggling a bit. Clearly he was tired — I don’t blame him a bit, as I’ve run those trails myself and they’re hilly! — but when the finish line finally came into view for him, he gave it his all and sprinted in too.
When he’d cooled off, he shared with me what had happened on the back part of the trails, far removed from our sight. Like everyone else, at about the halfway point he’d come upon a steep, steep hill that was almost impossible to run up; he slipped and took a tumble on the ground.
But he got up, shook off the dirt, and started running again.
“So you were okay, then?” I asked him.
“Yeah, dad,” he replied. “I was fine.”
The other day, I stumbled across this wonderfully moving story of a 10-year-old’s backpack on the product review site Wirecutter. In it, the writer Lauren Dragan shares the story of how her son kept the same backpack she and her husband gave him when he was just a year old.
As she writes, the bag “would travel from daycare to preschool to elementary school, and to summer camp. It would fly on planes and be stashed under the seats of buses. It would carry sandwiches and sand, water bottles and water balloons. And over nine years, it slowly evolved into more than just an ordinary bag.”
He took the bag with him everywhere — to school, to camp, to swim, everywhere. Just before he was set to start the fourth grade, Dragan asked him if he’d be up for getting a new backpack, as this one was clearly aging, barely hanging together. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “This bag is special.”
Well, you can imagine what happened next. Nothing lasts forever, and sure enough the bag finally broke apart. When Dragan asked her son what he wanted, he said, “The same exact thing, only bigger.”
There’s a part of me that thinks it’s a little silly to be so moved by a story about a backpack; it’s just a nylon bag, you know?
I think about how when kids are really little — I’m talking two, three, four years old — you have to be involved in so much. Every moment requires so much focus, so much energy from you. (I was constantly terrified of little T falling on the corners of furniture and accidentally losing an eye back then.)
But, as they grow up, they don’t need as much from us. Which is a hard thing to adjust to, because as exhausting as parenting little kids can be, it gives you such a strong sense of purpose, you know?
Like
wrote so beautifully earlier this summer, “If you want to be a decent dad, or parent in general, you really can’t be the main character anymore.” That time feels like it will stretch on forever… until it doesn’t. And I see that now, more and more.Tiger Woods’ first coach Butch Harmon said once that when he first started working with Tiger, he instructed him on how to play golf in every last detail: how to hold a club, how to swing it, where to place your feet when you stand next to it, where to aim, how to think around the course.
But as Tiger mastered the game’s fundamentals, Harmon felt himself draw back to the point where, by the time his most famous student was nearing turning pro, he really only served as Tiger’s “eyes and ears” from the outside, and chimed in with occasional suggestions.
I can feel my little man starting to find his way in the world. He has his own personality with his friends, he’s starting to have goals and dreams. It’s just like Dragan writes in Wirecutter: “Every cliché about the fleeting nature of childhood is true. So few aspects of parenting are constant”:
“When I calculated the bag’s age and remembered the downy-soft hair of the baby it first supported, I felt the deep ache that all humans who love a child endure when they know that their days of being needed are growing shorter.
I was not the bag, but in that moment, I developed an anthropomorphic kinship with it. The backpack had overcome and accomplished more than we ever could have anticipated in those early days. It carried its burdens well, without complaint, so tirelessly that it transcended from a useful thing into a beloved companion. It had been there every day, witnessing chubby legs growing longer and stronger, walking, and then running toward the future.”
That’s what it’s like, isn’t it? And for those of us on the other side of it, we have to find new dreams, and a new purpose of our own, don’t we?
As always, I hope you’ve had a fantastic week and have gotten some great runs in — keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.
Your friend,
— Terrell
We’re running Atlanta this October!
Join us when we get together in person to run the PNC Atlanta 10-Miler here in my hometown of Atlanta, Ga., on Sunday, October 19 — can’t wait to see you there!
👉 Here’s all the details if you’re interested — and I hope you are!
Relatable … we had them (our two daughters) for 18+ years and sent them off to college, hoping that not necessarily all but at least some of what you taught them sunk in. We have been fortunate to have maintained good relationships with our daughters, observing their lives evolve through twists and turns.
Beautiful