I’m No Jock

I've been a lap swimmer for over thirty-five years and while swimming this morning my thoughts were wandering.  As a kid I was not into sports...team sports that is.  I was the tender, academic, artistic one.  The 'sweet' boy was the label I got from grandmothers and my aunt Betty.  I was the one who picked violets for mom--the ‘thoughtful, sensitive son’. Commended by all the women of the family but rarely by my dad who went the opposite way calling me a sissy or cry-baby.  

 My cousins Steve and Stuart were the jocks in the family and lesser so, my brother.  They played softball, then baseball. I excelled in studies, the arts and did Scouting.  In junior high I did enjoy running track and was getting into tennis but did neither competitively---on the teams.  In high school if you were in marching band, you could opt out of PE so I left the access to school sports.  I did have a bicycle as a boy.  I remember the first one with rusted chrome fenders, the huge basket in front (I was a paperboy) and the big red reflectors on the back.  That bike was heavy, probably 45-50 pounds---ok, maybe that's an exaggeration, but it weighed a ton.  I recall the bloodied elbows and knees from crashing that tank of a bicycle. It did give me my first taste of freedom though.  We would ride regularly to Harvard Hills Shopping Center (a couple of miles away) for a cherry phosphate at the drug store...after collecting pop bottles on the side of the road and exchanging them at the corner market at Tecumseh and Harvard where we collected two cents apiece.  The phosphate was only 5 cents, I'll take TWO!  We would on occasion go miles away to exotic places like Mohawk Zoo.  The biking bug bit me early.

Throughout high school, college and graduate school, other things consumed me.  It was in my late twenties that a sports physiologist at our church pushed a program called 'Temple Conditioning' (our bodies being ‘the temple’).  He ran us through a battery of tests, body fat indexes and such.  Then outfitted us to all be runners.  I went along for almost a year as a runner, but it never caught on with me.  The only thing I enjoyed about running was when the run ended.  At that time I was teaching part-time at Trevecca (now TNU) and met Terrell Sanders who became my biking buddy.  We, like all bikers, started out on the bikes we'd had (not the one with chrome fenders), but quickly began ratcheting up to better, lighter and more well equipped bikes.  I loved it!  The previous trips of a few miles became Saturday rides of 60-75 miles.  About the same time we as a family joined the Y in East Nashville..at that point an old, run down facility but nearby to home.  In Boy Scouts I had learning to swim but had never been a lap swimmer and decided to make an attempt at it.  I'd skip lunch and go to the pool.  There were a couple of other guys there at the same time.  I'd observe them, finally getting up the nerve to ask one for advice.  After drinking half the pool, I got the timing down and became a lap-swimmer...and like I said earlier, still do. Biking and swimming became my ‘sport’ activities along with getting into whitewater rafting.  Over the years I've taken many men's groups to East Tennessee, North Carolina, Northern Georgia and West Virginia for white-water rafting on most every river in those states.

Rafting the Gauley River in West Virginia

On one occasion due to a guide not showing, I guided a raft of our guys down the Nolichucky River.  Even went on to the rivers in West Virginia which are spectacular. 

In continuing as a Y member currently and going at the same time each morning I’ve met a few guys who've become friends—gym rats I believe we are called.  One morning I said in a conversation that I never saw myself as a 'jock' to which a couple of the guys jumped in and said: "You're at the Y three mornings a week on the elliptical and other machines, you lap swim, bike, do whitewater, and you're not a jock?"  That was a pivotal moment.  My guys confronted my distorted way of looking at myself.  I’ve seen myself differently since then.  For we men, the input of other men is important and powerful.  We actually learn how to be men, to be masculine, to know what manhood is---in the company of other men.  Here was one point of correction for me.

Labels from childhood and adolescence are powerful and it's only when they're challenged that we retire them.  Too often, the label remains in our heads because it's only my voice up there.  It's when other voices---good friends, a counselor, a mentor---confront us and mirrors us back to ourselves that things can change.

I may not be an NFL prospect but I am a jock…and jocks come in a variety of shapes and sizes.  

3/2021 edit