A Day at the Races

Today provided me with a life lesson. I was thrown into a world where I didn't belong: the scene, a middle school track meet at my school. That's right: the girl who dined on shrimp cake with a sheep farmer in Iceland, who visited the nude beach in the Canaries, who struggled to ask a stranger for directions in the middle of a park in Madrid, found her match in a 5-8 track meet.

It's not that I'm athletically retarded, I've just never had a very strong interest in sports and the competition alone drives me mad. I should also mention that I wasn't participating in the events, merely helping run them. But somehow this was far worse than being a competitor, because now I had nothing to distract me from it all. Kids crying because they lost races, girls succumbing to injuries and boys turning on their friends, all over a small peice of coloured ribbon. I couldn't see the point in it all, and I had a hard time sitting in the grass with my group, watching them argue over times, records, and losses.

Exasperated, I visited with an old friend whose parents had come out to cheer her on. Her father is one of those fanatic parents who seems to forget that A) it's just a game, it doesn't matter, and B) he's 40 years old, with a beer gut and a bald head, and no teenage girl in her right mind would take his advice on how to improve her 100m time. They dragged me over to the track to watch the relays, and I was unsettled to find that the whole thing reminded me of a dog race. Parents chattered in a crowd around the finish line, noting that one girl's legs were looking a little flabby and that another seemed unnaturally skinny enough to fare well. Disturbed but intrigued, I hung around near my friend's dad so I could hear each and every comment, and I watched the race.

His younger daughter was the lead in the relay, and watching her push her little body so hard for daddy's approval was intensely unsettling. She passed the baton to a good friend of mine, and he remarked that the hand-off was sloppy and his mouth drew into a fine line at the girl's not-as-lean figure. She seemed like a great runner to me, but aparently I have an untrained eye to this sort of thing. The next girl was not that skinny either, and only about 4-foot-8, so I expected some criticism, but now there was none. Was there any science to this sort of thing? The finisher was another friend of mine, a short and tiny little thing, but, much like Darrell's daughter, an insanely swift little thign when given the right motivation.

As she threw herself across the finish line, I watched Darrell's wife patting at his arm, giddy at her daughter's performance and victory. She'd been betting on the right dog. She had won. They checked the time and came back with even more pink in their faces. One second lower than their old record! Bragging insued. Praise for their daughter. Pats on the back for the whole team. Constructive criticism about their 'sloppy' hand-off and 'poor' running.

I felt so out of place, because no one else seemed to think the whole thing was dirty or wrong. The competition is fine, really, but the amount of pressure some of these kids are put under, all for a silly little ribbon. And if they win, they move on to a regional track meet, with even more pressure, because this time they aren't competing against their friends (whom they treat like shit, this one day every year), but now against strangers.

It was like been trampled at a dog track. I'm glad it's over, and even more glad I'll never have to participate at track meets again.