Why I Love Running: Part I
By BetsyG
Chubby as a child, and then busty with stubby legs in my teens, I don’t think anyone would have looked at me and said, “There goes an athlete.” Besides being slow, with low stamina, I didn’t have great hand-eye coordination, in part because I needed but never wore glasses, but largely because I wasn’t born with that kind of timing. I had no interest in or discipline for exercise, so I didn’t have the muscle strength needed for tennis, for gymnastics, for basketball. I wasn’t half bad at volleyball—because I loved punching things and that translated to a vicious serve—and I was okay at softball, likely because that involved smacking something hard with a sturdy implement.
I liked hitting a softball so well that, in ninth grade, I tried out for the team. I didn’t throw well (I think they came up with the expression “throws like a girl” by observing me), but I could catch okay and could get the ball over the plate if I was pitching (not understanding then that serving up meatballs did not a good pitcher make). The one thing I could do was hit a pitch for a base hit, practically every time.
But during the tryout, I wasn’t given the chance to hit a pitch. Instead, I was to toss the ball with one hand and hit my own “pitch,” as any Little Leaguer could demonstrate.
I could not then, and cannot now, do that. For anyone with an ounce of athleticism, this must not compute, but I threw that ball and swung and missed, swung and missed to the point of humiliation, which was surely Miss McCormick’s intention when she came up with that drill. Because the last person anyone expected (or wanted) on the softball team was me.
And that’s only in part because I was a poor athlete. The other reason was that my place in the highly segmented school firmament was a galaxy away from the girls on the softball team, and surely the coach—my gym teacher—knew that. I was loathed by all of them. While today, a girl without athletic ability would be a pariah, back then, being good at sports hardly put you in the center of the social scene. Instead, assets like mine—a curvy body, and an outgoing, flirtatious nature—were keys to status. Intelligence and empathy, which I would list among my other assets, didn’t help at all.
[A footnote: it was when I was going through high school that Title IX started to take hold, which eventually resulted in the prevalence of girls’ sports you see today. The story of Title IX was documented by one of my high school classmates in the film A Hero For Daisy.]
At 47, I’m still no athlete. I’m just not, and I think now those girls would appreciate that I didn’t play sports because I couldn’t. One of the nastier things my ex said when we were breaking up was—and this is verbatim—”You can’t even throw a Frisbee.” (What kind of rotten wife was I?) But I can do a few things. I can dance (not ballet…I could regale you with stories of humiliation in that arena). I can rollerskate. I can do Dance Dance Revolution. And I can run.
It’s funny that, at 47, I run. When I tried out for that softball team at 15, I couldn’t have run half a mile. I’m still not a great runner; with my little legs and big chest, I’m not exactly built like a marathoner. But I run about 10 miles a week, and I love it. It makes me feel like the athlete I never was, and the fact that I didn’t use my body for this purpose in my youth means that all the parts work like they’re just out of the box.
I’d wager that running 3.5 miles or more at a stretch is something many of the girls from that softball team can’t do today. But I imagine they can still hit their own pitch (and throw a Frisbee), and when they swing a tennis racquet they hit something other than air. I still can’t do any of that, but when I run, I get a taste of what it feels like to be one of them, and it feels pretty damned good.
November 19th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Ah, yes, I have vivid memories of being the proverbial last one picked when the jocks in my high school gym class were choosing teams for the designated blood sport of the day. (Unless Dale Hoover was in my class. Then I was next-to-last. Thank God for Dale Hoover.) My one voluntary experience with sports (and by “voluntary” I mean “strong-armed into it by my parents and best friend”) was a start-up little league baseball team that happened to practice at a school right up the street from my house. (So I couldn’t even plead inconvenience.) The team started near the end of the season, and we only managed to play one official game before season’s end. We lost. Inspired by such an auspicious beginning, we proceeded in the following season (my first full season and my last of any kind) to lose every game we played. You might think that I’d feel at ease in the company of such losers, but the fact is, I was the worst of a pretty pathetic bunch. They stuck me in the outfield where I could do the least damage. Most of the time, I was left alone, watching the other players batting and running, throwing and catching, as if they were in a different game. Mainly, I passed the time by daydreaming about being anywhere other than the outfield. Even church started looking good. But one day, I was startled out of my reverie by a pop fly arcing my way. My eyes followed the path of the ball across the blue and cloudless sky–and right into the blazing sun, where I lost all sense of its position in the air. I squinted and thrust my glove up over my head with a sinking heart, knowing that all eyes were on the utter vacuum of athletic ability that I represented. Then, with a smacking sound and a jar to my arm, the ball landed in my glove. I’m sure that to the assembled multitudes, it was just another easy pop out. But for me, it was the one shining moment in my brief baseball career, and for just a minute, I could tell myself that I’d earned my place on that team. But then the moment passed, and I quit the team before the next season. No regrets, either!
November 26th, 2008 at 12:03 am
[...] Why I Love Running: Part II [...]
February 25th, 2009 at 6:42 am
[...] I ran up to the bar and froze; my body refused to cooperate. I’m not known as an athlete (see Why I Love Running, Part I), but this was beyond my usual incompetence. I told the counselor I wanted try it from the lefty [...]