I was visiting last week at a vacation home I have in Northeast Texas that is across the street from the city’s main park. There is a metal-and-plastic gym structure with slides and climbing ladders that young children play on a large part of the day. The park is good-sized and has open spaces for kids to run around. The young children were the ones I watched that made me think of some cartoon comic posts I saved and wrote about years ago. One from ‘Family Circus’ had three kids running and one said, “When we get older, running won’t be fun. It’ll just be exercise.” Later a comic post of two older gentlemen out for a jog. One said, “Now they say we shouldn’t take a daily aspirin to prevent a heart attack.” The other gentleman replied, “I wish they’d say we shouldn’t exercise.” It was a perfect example of what the three kids were talking about when running went from fun to exercise.
One difference I noted was that when the kids were running it was always faster running. Some were playing tag and others were just running from one location to another. I don’t recall seeing a kid “jogging.” It was always a full-speed sprint. One noticeable point is that while running all the kids had a smile on their face or were laughing.
When on a few occasions there were older high-school-age children at the park there was never any running and about the only part of the playground they used were the swings. I guess swings never have an age limit for having fun. It just made me wonder where the change took place to running for fun. Running is hard to do and is just exercise. I recall my days in elementary school and middle school before you were old enough for organized sports. We ran and played tag football, even some tackle football with no pads, baseball, and games with as little as four kids playing a modified version of baseball. “Work up”, “One o’ cat” and “500” all had running but they were games and fun. If you didn’t go into organized sports, you also quit playing those “fun” games. No more running unless it was in a physical education class. And it seems that even physical education classes stopped after the last years of high school in many schools.
The sports that still seem to have kids running from a young age (down to 3 years I think) is soccer. And to get in shape for soccer it helps to try cross country running. The one difference in running is back to that first cartoon where running went from fun to exercise. Cross country running’s objective is to run faster. To run faster is hard work. I am not sure what pace it is that running changes from hard work to pure enjoyment. My first 10K was the first Capital 10K where you had to run 56 minutes to get the race t-shirt. It was the first time I had ever run 6.2 miles in my life and the only satisfaction was I did run fast enough to get a shirt. But the race started my running career.
I ran a couple more and helped organize the first run that I know of in San Marcos with the Cinco De Mayo 10K. I thought I had reached the top level when for the first time I ran an 8-minute mile. That was fast for me at that time. Then more races and now the times dropped to 7:30 pace. Somewhere between that 7:30 minute pace and getting down to a 6:00 minute pace for a race running became fun and enjoyable. I look back and think part of the reason was how my body felt during those faster runs.
Running at that faster pace, it seems running was easier now and not a struggle to put one foot in front of the other. Maybe that is the reason why younger kids running fast and older runners running faster makes running fun again. Running just makes the whole body feel better and to run fast enough to make a run feel easy and not hard is where running becomes fun.
