More Life Lessons With the Ringlet

More Life Lessons with the Ringlet

When I was in the third grade, my gym teacher took a special interest in me because I was a very fast runner. I was just naturally and tremendously fast. Not a single person in that school could touch me – boy, girl, didn’t matter – nobody could keep up. He thought it would be a good idea to have a chat with my parents and then shuttle me into town to see a man who was, at that time, already at 2 time women’s Olympic track coach. He ran a private team, separate and apart from high school teams, and would now and again recruit kids from the outlying areas to try out for his team. I was taken to him and given an opportunity to give it my best shot.

Up to this point, my best shot was always enough. Usually, whatever I felt like giving was enough. I was all of 8 years old and baby, as far as I was concerned, I was IT. At least that’s what I thought until about five minutes after arriving at my tryout. I went from being all that to “how do you like your view of my back ” in the space of about 10 seconds, which is about all it took for his runners to dust the floor with my lagging-behind little rear end. But in spite of it all, he took me on and I made the team.

I then spent the better part of the next year running and training and getting carted all over the east coast for AAU track events and coming home from each and every one of them with my tail between my legs, having at times been beaten so badly I doubt that anybody even knew I was there.

The long and short of it is that I was just as stubborn then as I am now, and I just kept working harder, trying harder, learning more and busting my gut to climb back up to the top of a mountain that had suddenly tripled in size in my little eyes. Eventually, I did. Eventually, I made it out the heats and into the finals just to get beaten in a quite glorious and tremendous fashion all over again. Then I started placing. Then I started winning. Then I was the one to beat again, but it took two years to get there. Eventually, I was probably the fastest sprinter in my age group on the east coast. In fact, I still have the trophy to prove it.

The big fish/little pond vs. little fish/big pond lesson is one of the most important lessons of my life and one that Ringlet learned the hard way this past weekend. I took her to an out of state tournament, in a state where they take their karate about as seriously as Snarks takes her politics. The level of competition was like nothing Ringlet had seen to date, and while I warned her about it, she really didn’t pay me any mind. She had already decided that she knew her kata well enough, didn’t really need to sharpen it up, didn’t need to really do much of anything. She walked in there with her eyes firmly planted on the enormous first place trophy.

She walked out of there a different kid.

To her credit, she realized early on in the day that this was a different world. and rather than crumple or find an excuse to get into the car and just RUN, she rose to the challenge and her performance was just about the best I’ve ever seen out of her. But she was from out of state, unknown and just a bit unprepared for what she was facing. She held it together until we got to the car and then she burst into tears. She was furious at having come four hours, stayed overnight and then spent a day in a hot stuffy gym for “a stinking medal”.

I told her we hadn’t come all that way for a medal. I told her that when she pulled it together, we’d head for the Sonic we spotted on the way there, get a couple of Blasts and have a chat about why we HAD come all that way.

And we did. And she listened. And after a while she got it, especially after listening with rapt attention to the story of my two year asskicking in track. But she got it. She wasn’t even mad at me for dragging her all that way for her very own asskicking. She realized that the second you think you know it all, the second you think you’re the best, when you think you don’t have to work harder or reach for more, that’s the time when somebody’s gonna come up to you and show you, usually in the most humbling manner possible, just how very wrong your assumptions have been.

She’ll head for practice tomorrow night with a new view on things. She’ll sit down with her Master to discuss her short term game plan and goals and she’ll up her game and her training to accomplish them. That alone made it worth my setting her up for a fall to teach her a lesson. Because I’m still not sure even this morning who had the hardest time with this particular lesson: her or me.

Right now I’m thinking probably me.