Get ‘em Young

That was the subject line of the late-October email message from my mother. Inside was a digital photo which is still the desktop image on my laptop. The picture shows my brother and I against a sharply blue seashore sky. We’re dressed in warmups and shuffling; in front of us, his three-year-old daughter Megan has her arms up in a victory celebration: Yay me! Wahoo!

The photo is staged, of course, because even a week after a fall marathon my normal running stride is almost as long as Meg is tall, and my brother is as much a runner as I am a swimmer (in other words, rarely.) Earlier that morning, Meg came with us to watch her mother, father, and grandfather run a 10-K race not far away. I ran out on the course to meet Meg, her sister, and the remaining grandparents, and we all searched the passing crowd to yell, “Go Grampa!” “Go Daddy!” “Go Mommy!” Running races was all Meg wanted to do for an hour afterward.

Meg’s not likely to be the next Deena Drossin, but already at three she sees nothing strange in going out on a weekend morning and running around the neighborhood. Or, for that matter, taking a ferry out to a Casco Bay island and swimming to the mainland, a feat both her parents perform so easily as to be competitive about it.

The sorry part is that this puts Meg in the minority among children in America today. The lack of fitness shared by my generation and the one coming up is well documented. Last spring, I heard Frank DeFord announce on NPR that the younger generation will be the first which does not live as long as its parents, and that a sedentary culture is to blame. The American Runnning Association delivered the same message at its gala in March. What’s more, DeFord pointed out, one of the frequent casualties of the budget crisis facing states around the country is Phys. Ed., aka the Dreaded Gym Class.

I don’t see another class or another youth soccer league as the answer, though. It’s not simple to make the transition from the organized “play” of leagues, or even pick-up teams, to the sort of lifetime exercise that generates magazines like Runner’s World. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s not even easy to find a group like the “Amish Futbol League” with whom I played soccer weekly in Pennsylvania. (No scores, no sidelines, and “the penalty for a red card shall be shunning.”)

More than a youth track meet, an everyone’s-a-winner race, or a ten-mile-a-week training plan, our kids need good examples of people having fun keeping fit. (You’ll find a lot more examples by following the kidsrunning.com links at the bottom of every page in this site.) They need antidotes to the idea that exercise, like badly-cooked vegetables, is something to be tolerated “because it’s good for you.”

Meg has those examples, and so did my brother and I. We had coaches in our sports who ran and swam even more than we did. I had a coach with a dog who had done longer runs than I had. Now my nieces are watching half the family run road races, or listening to the excitement in their father’s voice when he talks about sharing a pool with Ian Crocker.

This should be easy stuff. Anyone who reads this page is probably here because there’s something they love about the sport. All we have to do is share.