Over at Jonathan and Sharon's the other night I was talking to Kip, who had been one of the Pacers coaches back when we ran for the club and had also taught English at the high school. I was recounting our 9th grade track season, really the height of my individual athletic career, when I scored more points than Jonathan and he and I (together with Konanc) scored maybe 80-90% of our overall pretty middling team's points. I scored the most points only because I could do more events than Jonathan (he was limited to running just the mile in meets where he ran the mile, maybe his best distance).
The other salient point here is that I never beat Jonathan once. In meets where we both ran the 400 and the 800, he always beat me. That was no surprise in the 800, which verged on being a distance race, but the 400 was a bit of a surprise. I was more of a sprinter and I think I was faster than him over 400 in 8th grade.
So there, mixed in with my moment of greatest triumph overall, I was faced with the fact that I really wasn't the best at something I had thought was perhaps my domain. And I think I took it pretty well, even then. I just had to accept then and there that Jonathan was faster than me. We were teammates our interests were aligned and it felt like we were doing something impressive together, us two skinny geeky boys. One thing that made it easy to process and accept was that Jonathan was not from Glen Heights and had never once been mean to me during the more challenging early years.
All in all, I think it was a big developmental moment.
I think I was pretty careful to never race Jonathan over 200, though. I didn't want to face potential disappointment there. So we'll never know.
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