Tuesday 25 February 2014

Opportunities Lost

Opportunities Lost

Several years ago I decided to change career. I exchanged City life in London for the classroom. My views on the world, children and parenting have shifted immeasurably. The latter two I had never really contemplated other than as a nebulous concept on the later in life to-do list. I am not a parent yet, nevertheless I am thankful that I have become a teacher first. There are times when I miss elements of my old life. How comparatively stress free a desk job is. There are no more beers at 10 o'clock on a school night. That is only for the young and is a recipe for a long drawn out day of suffering at the hands of merciless ten-year olds. Fudging a presentation or looking busy behind a monitor was a lot easier when feeling under the weather. In a classroom you can’t. It’s like the sage advice of never turn your back on the ocean...and a classroom of children. But aside from the odd school night pint, my days are far more rewarding than before. But I digress from my point.

The opportunities lost are not those that you as an adult look back on your life and wonder what might have been. It is something I see everyday and these are opportunities that are being lost for children, and they will never know it. Perhaps it is because I grew up in South Africa where sport is a religion. There is no secularism in this particular union - sport equals national identity.  Like all older people the past is filled with memories of being an active child, running wild and free and stealing apples from the neighbour's trees. Now that I am a teacher and a coach, I am always thankful for the opportunities that I had at school. Most afternoons after school were filled with sports, there were strong rivalries with other schools. It was just a part of my school life. Now that I am at a point where I am looking at the future of the children I teach, I am always looking into the past at myself too. It is sometimes a strange sensation. What I am most thankful for now is the variety of sports I was exposed to. I was always encouraged to take part in everything and not just select one sport to the exclusion of all others. What grew is a confidence in what I could do. I was not the most gifted athlete but I knew I could take part in whatever I wanted to. Accidentally I came across cross-country running when it was never something I ever wanted to do. It was something I was encouraged to do and given the opportunity. Cricket was always my boyhood sport. I have not held a cricket bat in years, however, two decades later I rediscovered running and each day I enjoy the freedom it affords me. An opportunity recovered.



Childhood obesity is the elephant in the room that casts a long shadow over the future of young children. Childhood inactivity too, aside from obesity is a worrying trend. Something I have only realised since I became a teacher is how polarising sports can be for children. Very quickly they are aware of what their abilities are and where they fit in accordingly with their peers. Small decisions at the time, yet they alter their future in a big way. “I shouldn't play boy’s games”, “only girls play those games”, “girls can’t play football”, “I am not good at sport”, “I am much too slow - I should stop this”. I hear these all the time. All kids should be active, the trick is finding what fits and what can be fun. I want to look at providing children with opportunities in sport now, to encourage them to be active and try everything. This means exposure to different sports when they are young and influencing how children look at sport and being active. It empowers decision making later in life.

Avoiding the pitfalls of when children bracket themselves as either being able to ‘do’ sports or not at all is the most important thing for coaches. Football from my experience is one of the most exclusive games for young children. Children are incredibly competitive and know exactly who they would want on their teams - friendships and inclusion follow only distantly to skills and the ability to score a goal.  You don’t get passed to if your team mates feel that you can’t keep the ball or pass it well. Children that are keen become discouraged. Most often it is a variety of games that provide an outlet for everyone. It is games that are sometimes not seemingly linked that can help children get into sports. For example, through simple evasion games a pupil of mine now has the idea that he is fast, nimble and can run for ever. This is a fantastic realisation for this child. He will always have this thought, this germ inside him that he can run and move. Over two years he has progressed and is thrilled to run cross-country and because of this confidence he runs with the older kids.

Sport for children can also be about overcoming and building a confidence in themselves. The most important part of a teacher or coach is to instil a belief that they can do things. Children’s sport needs to be fun. Especially for younger children the social aspect of sport if most valued. Most sports are team games, even running and tennis, have the social aspect of being organised into clubs - something that is important as an adult.

It is the personal achievement that matters and not always the result. Most importantly all children deserve time and attention. It is the seed that is planted when they are young. It can lead to a lifetime of activity, or can make the rediscovery of sport later in life that much easier. It is the children that fall through the cracks that are the biggest failing of a coach.

Sunday 16 February 2014

Victorian Love






Victorian Love.

Greek drivers are perhaps like good Victorian parents were, instilling dread and not above corporal punishment. And there may be a small inkling of affection later on.

Five years ago I was not a runner. I could run, but it was not something I did. I saw myself as a cyclist, then a triathlete, and running mostly happened at the last stage of the race. Of course I did train, or at least I thought I did. Now when I think back, I ran, but I never really ran. I never thought about how I moved or how I felt. My wife was the first person to ever mention that I needed to work on my stride. I remember wondering what on earth she meant. Triathlons for me were about not drowning in the swim, thrashing the bike and hanging in for the run. Not a very good triathlete then.

Five years ago I arrived in the still shiny new Athens International Airport with shiny shaved legs and my shiny one-year behind pro-team level bicycle. We had not even unpacked all of our belongings and I hit the road almost immediately. The road hit back. The car is king here. The old joke about ‘what side of the road do Greeks drive on - they drive in the shade’ is fundamentally true from an attitude perspective. Most road signs are up for debate, traffic lights too. Parking in Athens is possibly one of the most organic activities you can ever hope to behold. One of my favourite Bill Bryson observations is on Roman parking. No matter what road you happen across in Rome he muses. it always seems as though you just missed a parking competition for the blind. Clearly he has not yet visited Athens. Cars are often double parked, scooter owners sometimes leave their keys in the ignition so that if someone is inconvenienced by their goal-oriented parking they can move it themselves. The law is completely laissez faire in any regard to the road user. Don’t be mistaken, there are laws, but they are not enforced. You’ll find the police are about, usually smoking with their motorbikes parked in the shade spot on the pavement. Perhaps, after the strict Junta years this is just one of the heady hangovers of liberation. For the blind or the disabled, pavements are unnavigable.

One of my first rides was along the beautiful coastline to the south of Athens. The beach road to the ancient temple of Sounio is well known.  It probably could rate as one of the most scenic cycling routes in the world, rivalling the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. The combination of sea, sky and mountains were breathtaking yet I could not help but be distracted by the scattering of innumerable broken automobile parts and heavily dented safety railings. Cycling in London and Surrey now seemed orderly and gentrified. This felt like a blood sport. Ever since, I have never been able to shake the fear that some liberated multi-tasking cigarette smoking, coffee drinking and talking on the mobile driver would fail to see the brightly coloured cyclist on his windscreen until after he had found out what was dinner and hung up. I had never seen so many dented or scraped cars before, nor so many sign posts gently nudged away from upright before.

It was frustrating because cycling was really one of my first loves. I had visited unforgettable places in Spain, the Alps, Bordeaux and the Outer Hebrides. Cycling was an integral part of it. I miss it and often when driving somewhere spectacular I still wish I was riding my bike. Slowly and sternly the roadie was beaten out of me. That was the fear and dread part. Most probably I had spent too many years cycling somewhere with established road user rules and predictable driving. I could not adjust. Cycling is booming now in Greece, but it’s drivers are still the same.

But that fear pushed me onto the mountains and trails. I wanted to be as far away from drivers as possible. It was here that Greece suddenly opened up to me. It is a glorious place, with rugged mountains everywhere. It makes Wales seem like Belgium in comparison. Whereas running had always been a component of another sport, I no longer was racing or competing. My agenda had changed. I began to think of how I felt and how I moved when I ran. I became interested in analysing my stride. I took a far greater interest in running shoes. Before it had only been one brand of shoe and one brand only.

I started feeling connected with where I was running. It was a connection that built up with time, miles and miles; the repetition, the knowing of the hills, the trees and plants, how the rains had changed the trails. My running seemed to be integrated with the trails. The better I knew the trails, the more I ran. I was able to share this new experience with my wife and our dogs. It was a good place to rediscover running and it is here now, on these pine and thyme scented trails that I am most happy. And so, this is where I began.


Saturday 15 February 2014

Running Back




Running Back.

If I think back, running was the first sport that I discovered I was good at. Of course there were others that I would preferred to have been better at, but running was the one that stuck. Like most children who find that they are better at longer races, I discovered it by accident. Usually it is that you just can't keep up with the good sprinters. You aren't the fat kid. You run around a lot. You ride your bike and are active...yet frustratingly you just can't get near the top 3 places in a sprint race and so are never considered a good runner. You are just a good all-rounder. A second-stringer.

A few years later, when the longer races get added to the programme, the coach does what they always have and put the good runners in the important 'fast' races. The slower spare kids get the 800m and 1500m races. The rest get shunted over to the field events. This always felt unfair and if I wanted to continue to be part of the athletics team I had to endure the tough long races. It seemed like this to me because after each race I could not see straight and my lungs felt as though they had been scoured with a wire brush. Never mind my lactic-filled rubber legs. The sprinters after their race looked as fresh as daisies. Daisies receiving adulation too. Not only did they have less to run but they also suffered less. So it did feel like a punishment of sorts for me.

 It was in my personal purgatory of long races that I discovered, that even though it was never easy and my lungs and legs always burned, most of the other kids started falling away. You realise that you can keep going that bit longer, you can outlast the other runners. Even though your legs feel like molten lead, your heart soars and you somehow feel lighter. That realisation in what you can now do becomes a belief and then an identity.

 Often the running path is abandoned. I left it for the lure of mainstream high school sports. Some never find their way back to running. I found my way back after 20 years. I was always active, playing rugby and later spent an exorbitant few years trying to call myself a triathlete. It was only when we moved to Greece that running only ever returned to my life. I have never been spiritual about running, never felt that you can find yourself in running. Yet I do know that it can help you find parts of yourself. For me it fills a need to challenge and bring out the best in myself. It makes me want to change aspects of life. Running is one of those purely for ‘every action there is a reaction’ type of sports. Your progress isn't influenced by equipment the way a set of deep section aero wheels or a well made racing canoe can affect performance. It is just you.


 Perhaps that is the simplicity that appeals to me. I know I will never be as good as runner as I want to be. But I am back on the path and glad to be on it.