Because it's Fun

Because it’s Fun

“I know, I understand, I hear you”, he said “but what I want to know is WHY do you love to run?”

This past Thursday, I met my wife at our local Health Club to watch my son, John Michael, pass his “level five” swimming test.  Here’s this kid, seven years old, in the pool with 10 and 12 year so called “older kids” swimming more than half the length of the Olympic sized pool ahead of the fastest of them.

John Michael doesn’t have the greatest form.  His legs tend to thrash independently of each other rather than in a graceful synchronous flutter kick. His arms flail indiscriminately about, clutching at the water in large clumsy grasps.  But he does know his strokes: crawl, breast and back, and he certainly has a lot of energy.  What John Michael lacks in style and coordination he more than makes up for in effort and the sheer joy he has for the sport.

While the other, older kids struggle with exasperated looks of dire concentration, John happily slices through the water in generally the right direction, and always finishes far ahead of the pack.  The older, bigger kids work hard at their swimming with slow but steadily measurable improvement.  John on the other hand doesn’t really care.  He’s just having fun, and in having fun he is the best swimmer.  One of the primary reasons why John Michael looks forward to attending his swimming class is because, to him, it doesn’t seem like a class.

Another earned achievement of John’s this week was his graduation to “8 gup Blue” in his Tang-Soo-Do Karate class on Friday night.  John’s skill as a martial artist is impressive.  He shows an intensity and dedication to his Karate, deserving of his “blue belt”.  At least twice a week John “bows in” to his “Do-Jang” to learn routines, drills, and simple life philosophies (such as “winners never quit, quitters never win, I choose to be a winner!”).  But if you ask this kid what he likes best about Karate, he won’t have a specific answer for you. “It’s fun!” he’ll answer.  His high motivation in Karate, just as in swimming, comes from his understanding that these activities are nothing more than play.

Running is my own play.  I’ve trained myself to run along at an 8:30 pace for 12 miles or more because I’ve thought of each days run as simple “play”.  It may be that in contrast to our daily responsibilities (my network analysis research and John Michael’s second grade school lessons) our daily one-hour physical exercise, heavily disguised, as “play time” is a welcome and sought after escape.

If you want to excel at something, you have to like what you’re doing.  If, in pursuit of that excellence, you achieve weight loss and health as a “side effect”, then you win big!  The universal secret to pursuing excellence begins with having fun.

Dr. George Sheehan understood this.  He wrote:

“Play is where life lives.  Where the game is the game.  At its borders, we slip into heresy.  Become serious.  Lose our sense of humor.  Fail to see the incongruities of everything we hold to be important.  Right and wrong become problematic.  Money, power, position become ends.  The game becomes winning.  And we lose the good life and the good things that play provides.”

I’ve a major announcement to make here.  I’ve performed some complicated calculations taking into account my age, height, wind speed, air resistance, body weight and shape, biomechanical capacity of my legs, foot and torso, and of the race course itself and have come to a startling conclusion: I will never win the Boston Marathon.

Actually, in one of my “computer models” I did find a way to finish in first place, but that was highly dependent on my being the only one to actually enter the race and the statistical probability of that happening was rather low.

I don’t run to win.  I do my best in each race, and I push myself hard to shave a few seconds off my finishing time, but I’m never so disappointed with my performance that I’d ever quit.

“Okay, alright, fine…but why do you love to run so much?” he asked again.

“Because”, I answered “It’s fun.”

Steve Walker
"Having more fun than people should be allowed to have"
October 29th, 2000
Oxford, MA.