Hard to believe I have been at this job, in some capacity, for over eight years now. For those that don’t know, in addition to my high school teaching, I am a Cross Country and Track coach. Currently I am an assistant at Lincoln North Star in Lincoln, NE (after bouncing around middle and high schools in NE and CO).
But I love the fall. Bottom line is that it is the best time of the year to be outside. Which means the best time of the year to be running. Races every weekend, but even more importantly it is the beginning of the high school cross country season, maybe the purest of all sport. We can get some athletes, we get some random kids, we get other sport’s rejects, we get some people looking for friends or something to do, we occasionally get some legit runners. It is the sport that most people enjoy and many regret not doing. It is a sport where you can truly measure individual improvement and still be part of something bigger than just yourself. It is you, your team, one hundred opposing runners, the hills, the dirt, the grass, and a fall afternoon. Perfect
B —
Not to quibble with you … OK, I’m quibbling. You say that running is the purest of all sport. Under the classic dictionary definition, “sport” is merely an amusement or a diversion, and so any leisure time activity could be considered sport. Under what would appear to be the modern American definition of sport, it appears to be athletic competition. In that respect, I would posit that the combat arts (wrestling and boxing) more purely meet the definition of sport, in that one person emerges as a clear victor over the other. All other sports take an athletic pursuit and incorporate some sort of objective measure (time, distance, points) as a means of keeping score.
Of course, what I refer to as “the modern American definition of sport” is open to interpretation, and I’ll leave it to others to debate the merits of what I have averred.
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Nice website, Brian! Hmm… Jon Cannon always making it interesting. Climbing and running are the two “sports” I do regularly, but I am not sure that either of these are the purest. While you may be on a team with either of these, interaction/communication with teammates is not required to meet the end goal. So, I wonder, what makes a sport pure?
I’m still running, by the way, but not as much as in college. 4 to 8 miles per day now. 🙂