Thursday, February 24, 2011

The Hulk

You'll have to forgive my lack of posts over the past few days.  I'm kind of an all or nothing type of girl.  If I'm in, I'm all in.  I won't half-ass it.

Which brings me to the Today's Topic.

It occurs to me that I might be unnaturally competitive.  I'm not sure how or why I became this way.  It's kind of a joke between me and my big brother.  Neither of us was born particularly athletic or sporty.  Not that we didn't take part in sports.  In fact, it's kind of the opposite.  I was the kid that had to be in every club and activity and I think I tried out for everything.  I will never forget trying out for Volleyball in 9th grade.  My school had three teams (enough, one would think that everybody who wanted to play could play).  At the end of the 2 day try-out there was an A Team, a B Team, a C team....and then me and three girls with various handicaps left in the sorting room.  Back in those days, the coach didn't even have Sue Sylvester's political correctness to put the Down's Syndrome kid on the team as a mascot.  So I sat with them and waited for Coach to come and tell us that we weren't really "Sports Material".  For the record, I'd have been a kick-ass mascot.

Sadly, I'm also not the kid that takes advice like "You should maybe stick to drama club" well.  It makes me mad and then I want to try harder.  Unfortunately, my natural athletic prowess and skills don't really cooperate.  I'm a spaz.  Which makes me funny.  But not somebody you want on your team.  So I run and hike and take private tennis lessons so I don't make a fool of myself.

So, I've come to my Sporty Self rather late in life.  I ran my first real race sometime in my mid-20s.  Discovered triathlons in my late 20s and figured out that Sports and Physical Activity aren't punishment...or What You Do So You Can Eat Dessert at some point in my 30s.  I discovered this incredible link between my mental heath and my physical exertion after the arrival of my second child.  Have I mentioned that she didn't sleep for the first two years of her life?  I swear, were it not for my friends that forced me to run with them in order to have social outlet...I would be locked up in a padded room.  The thing about becoming sporty in your middle years is that if you haven't learned how to be on a team or play nicely with others when you are a kid...you kind of just miss that lesson.  Nobody ever wanted me on their team.  Well, swim team.  But that's not the same thing.  It's still an individual sport.

I found myself at Trouble's Sports Day this week.  It was just adorable.  100 or so two to four year old kids doing a variety of sport, race, agility and balance games.  The kids loved it and mommies and daddies got to participate and cheer on the kiddies.  Things were going just fine until we got to the last station: Tug O War.  Miss Allison asked the mummies (Trouble attends a British School...she also says things like "rubbish" and pronounces "toe-May-toes" "toe-MAH-toes"...but, once again, I digress) and daddies to join the kids in an innocent game.  I found myself with bloodied hands, a couple of toddlers underfoot and a hideous grin of victory on my face.

Sadly, I didn't stop at the kiddie carnage.  The last event of the day (clearly meant to be good fun) was the Mummy and Daddy races.  Mummies were up first.  I had come to Sports Day straight from my tennis lesson at 8am and so was dressed in sports attire: Lucy running pants and a sports tank and sweatshirt.  The race was meant to be fun and funny: the mummies had to take off their shoes, don mis-matched and over sized Welly boots and run about 10 meters, open a silly frog umbrella and run to the finish line with the umbrella open over our heads.  I'm chuckling a bit with a fellow American MOM who had also come from tennis.  We were saying we were dressed for it, so we had to win...when we hear commentary from the peanut gallery.  "I'm not sure I want to be in the heat with the Lycra-Clad AMERICAN Mums".  Well...that was it.  My inner David Banner got eaten up by The Hulk.  I only remember fist pumping at the finish line.  There were numerous heats and in the final and I was ready to eat up the snarky mums.   Despite my best efforts, I lost to a darling little Chinese mum (who didn't open her umbrella, and as far as I am concerned should have been disqualified).  And I was actually mad at myself for losing.  I am proud to say that I stopped short of waging a campaign for her disqualification.

It took about an hour for my adrenaline to cool and then I was just embarrassed.  Trouble, thank goodness, had lost interest in me and the race before the first heat was over and, she's also slightly too young to be aware of my ridiculousness.  But it made me realize that it's really not a fair combination to be born uncoordinated AND competitive.  It's like a double-whammy.  I'm too bad at sports to win but to feisty to be gracious.

So, I'm trying really hard to Play Nice so I don't embarrass my children and, well, myself.  And if I can't Tame the Tiger...I suppose I'll just have to stick to hiking.  Only don't try to pass me on a climb....because I'll tackle you on the way down.

3 comments:

  1. You and me overly competitive, never :)

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  2. Andrea! This was a beautiful visual. Fight that inner tiger and wrestle it to the ground, or risk becoming my mother, who has to live with more than a few humiliating stories from days of her daughter's sports events. On a few shameful occasions, my mom ran up and down the high school soccer field, dangerously close to the inside of the field, shouting poor advice to her red- faced daughter. I can barely forgive her...

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  3. You have a gift young lady - don't ignore it. Oh, I don't mean the competitiveness either.

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