I Didn’t Sign Up For This | My Experience With Youth Competitive Sports
In “Fighting My Way Out Of A Paper Bag”, I briefly mentioned that I used to do competitive track and field (I also did cross-country in the fall). At that point in time when the anecdote took place, I had actually been at it for almost three years.
Yes, when I was eight years old, my dad decided that it was a good time to get my sibling Zeke and I ready to be involved in competitive track and field. He decided we were going be runners, and we were given no say in the matter. If this sounds bad on my end, keep in mind that Zeke was in FIRST GRADE. Not to mention that some kids get forced into sports even younger.
It started relatively light, just running around the field of our local playground, either sprinting back and forth or doing longer loops around the whole field. Then at some point, my dad purchased a stopwatch, as well as a notebook to write our times in, and it was all downhill (ha ha) from there.
After a while, my dad started researching the training programs of various pro runners. He ended up modeling our training programs after those of college and pro athletes, specifically Sebastian Coe. If it sounds weird and borderline barbaric to subject children to a scaled-down version of the training of a pro athlete, that’s because it is.
For a long time, I was good. I was REALLY good. I went to Nationals a few times, and even got some National medals! Of course, running wasn’t all glitz and glamour. Most of the time, it… well, it sucked.
Training with my dad as my coach was not fun. He had very strict time goals he wanted me to hit, and got angry when I didn’t meet them. I quickly began to dread every workout, especially long intervals on cold, windy days. To top it off, our runs that weren’t workouts were always at state parks where it’s easy for a spectator to get from one point to the other. As such, my dad would always make a habit of watching Zeke and I at different points in our run. I hated the feeling of being watched, but he insisted it was to make sure that our form was efficient. Really, though, he just always thought we were going to cheat and skip parts of the course on our runs (which we did a couple of times, but only because we were exhausted!). I know this is the case because a few years down the line he bought us both Garmins, fancy running watches that tracked our mileage.
How nice. Totally didn’t make me feel like more of a prisoner. Nope, not at all.
I never signed up for this.
Spotlight: A Typical Training Week For Me In Middle School
Sunday: Sprints (100m-200m intervals) with long warmup and cooldown, about 5 miles total
Monday: Recovery run, about 6 miles
Tuesday: Longer intervals, a particular favorite of my dad was 7 reps of 800 meters with 3 minutes in between, that combined with warmup and cooldown was about 7 miles
Wednesday: Shorter reps, such as 400 meters on a 5-minute cycle, 6 times, again the warmups and cooldowns brought the total to about 5 miles
Thursday: Running on hills, whether the reps were long or short was almost completely random, the whole workout could total anywhere from 4 to 7 miles
Friday: Off
Saturday: Long run of about 9 miles, unless there was a race that day, then it was the race and THEN a 9-mile long run.
The schedule I just laid out for you? This is from when I was TWELVE. Please keep in mind that this is just a snapshot and that it had been going on like this for a couple years beforehand.
This training was really hard on my preteen self. My first running injury was a shin splint from when I was only in fifth grade. Part of it was the shoes I had been using, so my dad got me some higher-quality shoes, some gel insoles, and then it was back into the thick of it. Over the years I soon experienced almost every common overuse injury known to athletekind; stress fractures, pulled muscles- you name it, I’ve probably had it.
While at first my dad was sympathetic every time I got an injury, I soon noticed that his compassion was quickly exhaustible. If I took more than a week to recover from something like tendonitis, every day after his personal threshold he would start constantly asking if I was feeling better, making a habit of openly bemoaning how much training I was missing out on. Every time I talked to him about an injury I could feel developing, or just that I wasn’t feeling well, he accused me of being lazy and trying to get out of work. It was just as blatantly manipulative as it sounds, but it messed me up for years. Soon I would self-treat injuries in secret, hiding them from my dad. I would do any workout that was requested of me, because I never had a choice. To this day, I still don’t feel like I can talk to him about anything important.
My first track meet was when I was 9 years old. It was a cold January morning in 2011. Zeke and I missed the 1500 meter run because our family arrived at the facility too late, and in the 800 meter race I tripped and fell at the starting line.
My career was off to a great start.
From then on, weekend races were an ordinary part of my life. In the winter, my dad (sometimes mom came with us, usually she didn’t) would drive Zeke and I to some indoor track at some college where UAGTCA or USATF was holding a meet. In the spring it was just like this, but at outdoor tracks, which are more plentiful. This, combined with warm weather, means that outdoor track meets are much more lively and populated than indoor track meets. Some athletes (presumably not gunning for scholarships) would only tune in for one competition season out of three, but we were not among them.
In the fall it was slightly different. Cross-country meets are held at wide-open parks and fields, in races that get longer with every age group (kids 8 and under ran 2 kilometers, kids from 9–12 ran 3 kilometers, teens from 13–14 ran 4 kilometers, and high schoolers ran 5 kilometers). At least, that’s the way it’s done where I’m from.
In between every race in a track meet, there will probably be some downtime between your events. At a cross-country meet, you only have one race to do, and you just sit there watching until it’s your turn. Either way, in the meantime you get to experience a youth athlete’s working conditions in all their glory: limited access to nutritious food between events unless you brought it yourself, no bathrooms except for portable restrooms that DESPERATELY needed cleaning, and just about every harsh weather condition you can think of.
We didn’t just go to track and cross-country meets. Sometimes my dad would have Zeke and I run in various 5K road races. Even though 95 to 99 percent of the competitors were adults, we usually did extremely well, placing first in our age groups and sometimes winning our gender divisions. But running on concrete is pretty bad for your legs, so we would end up even more sore than in the aftermath of a track meet.
For the record, I get anxious very easily, and I HATE in-person competitions. From the day before a race right up to the starting line the day of, I was a nervous wreck. I tried telling my dad that competition wasn’t my thing, but given how he treated my physical injuries, and given society’s general track record with mental health, you can guess how that went.
That’s not to say it was all bad. Actually, throughout my entire running career, I’ve accumulated some very funny stories from workouts and meets. If you want to hear some of them in a future article, I’d be happy to share. Anything to make those years feel like less of a waste.
Middle School:
For the first half of my K-12 experience, I was constantly bullied for being “weird”, and teachers and administrators did nothing to stop it, instead suggesting that I should be more “normal” (basically, the typical neurodivergent experience). Things got a little better, though, when I joined my middle school track team. My previous three years of running experience put me leagues above the rest of the female middle school distance runners (even though middle school track races only went up to 1600 meters) in the entire district. At least every spring, kids had to put SOME respect on my name for bringing in a guaranteed 10 points (5 for the 1600, 5 for the 800) every meet, carrying the whole team on my shoulders. It’s worth mentioning that my dad still had me (as well as my brother, when he got to middle school) doing my regular workout schedule along with my team practices, a trend that continued through high school. Since the team workouts were extremely light in comparison to what I was used to, it wasn’t a big deal.
It was around this time, however, that I noticed the toll competition was taking on me. Physically, I was often exhausted and had trouble paying attention in class. Mentally, I felt isolated from my peers because I knew that none of them could relate to my (fruitless) quest for athletic greatness. Sure, some of them played sports for school and clubs, but my training was on another level, harsher and more demanding than most of them could comprehend.
My dad assured me that I was better than them, that I was more disciplined and mature than they were from all of my hard training, but I longed to be one of them. I longed for the freedom to hang out with people my age after school. I longed for a life where weekends were liberating and not nerve-wracking. I longed for a life where all I had to after school was homework.
I just wanted to be normal.
High School:
Now, I should mention that the main reason my dad had Zeke and I doing track and field and cross-country was so we could hopefully get sports scholarships and not have to pay as much for college. Zeke ended up with a full ride to an in-state Division 1 school and I, much to the chagrin of my dad, ended up fleeing to a Division 3 liberal arts college several hours away (partly because I liked what I saw of the school from the brochure and website, but mostly to get away from him).
So when high school came along, my dad wouldn’t shut up about how this was the final stretch before college, our last chance to increase our worth in the eyes of college and university coaches, our last chance to put a price tag on ourselves (a totally normal and healthy thing that every person should set out to do, obviously).
When I started preseason cross-country training going into ninth grade, I was one of only a couple freshman in a horde of sophomores, juniors and seniors. Surprisingly though, I held my own extremely well. Only two of the girls on the team were faster than me (they were both seniors, as well as long-distance runners who did track and field and cross-country), so immediately we, and a couple of the other girls, filled in the slots of the varsity squad.
My high school running experience was one of several extreme ups and downs. On one hand, I did very well most of the time, and got to travel to lots of interesting locations, especially for cross-country meets. On the other hand, this is where my history of extra training with my dad started to make less of a difference. Puberty, and its end result for each individual, was often the deciding factor between the superstars and those at the back of the pack.
This is when I went from disliking the sport to hating the sport. I trained really hard, just as hard as the girls from fancy charter schools, but I just ended up with worse results due to factors largely out of my control. This contributed to several mental health problems, which I have previously discussed and will continue to do so in future articles. In the end though, a small school in the New England area saw the results I was putting out, and decided that they wanted me on their team. They offered me a solid-paying scholarship (not a full ride, but still), and I graciously accepted.
Obviously, I’m not the only one who has felt the negative effects of youth sports. Increased injury risk, excessive pressure to succeed- these are all pretty common.
On top of this, I hate the idea of people doing sports for money. The argument that it gives kids for whom college would normally be out of the question a fighting chance falls apart on the follow-up question of why college is so expensive and inaccessible in the first place, but that’s a discussion for another time.
People often talk about how demanding and soul-sucking the entertainment industry is on performers of all kinds, but will then turn around and glorify competitive athletes for their “discipline” and “strong work ethic”. Just like death, controversial takes from me are inevitable, so here goes:
Anybody who thinks that child actors being abused behind the scenes of Nickelodeon are more tragic than high school football players who get permanent brain damage in pursuit of affordable college is a hypocrite. This shouldn’t be controversial, but whether it’s show business or sports for college scholarships, child labor is bad. And yes, some kids who think they want to do these things have to be told that that’s not what they really want. The responsibility that these career paths bring should be beaten into their heads like when they ask for a dog for Christmas. They should know what they’re getting into.
College:
Just like when I started middle school and high school, I was overprepared coming onto my college team (this didn’t last that long, though, as we started getting new recruits against whom I was hopelessly outclassed). I was, again, in the top seven on the girls’ team, so I went to all the meets. The venues we went to, however, were even more interesting and exciting than in high school. I may have hated running by that point, but I loved being part of the team.
The biggest difference from the rest of my career, however, was my coach. Before college, my dad always had some say over my workouts, but now I was completely under the control of a coach who wasn’t my dad. I use “control” fairly loosely, though, because he wasn’t like my dad at ALL. Not only were his workouts considerably easier and his expectations looser, but he prioritized effort over results. This turned out to work very well, churning out a lot of great athletes under his watch, but it was very jarring for me.
Something interesting came out of this, though. Over time, though, my college coach started to notice that I was different than the other girls. I put much more effort into every single part of every workout (not to say the other girls didn’t put effort in, but for me, every repetition was a race), I was much harder on myself when I didn’t meet my goals, and I was overall much more jaded and cynical. Somehow he could tell that I wasn’t doing this sport for me.
My dad made no secret that he disliked my college coach and his training plans, and often told me to do extra training behind his back. My college coach didn’t like this, but my dad insisted that without it, I would fall behind. One time in the winter he called me and told me to do a workout of 20 * 400 meters. The next day when I showed up to college practice, my college coach wanted to know why I seemed to be in pain (I had to do the whole workout on concrete, since the grass was covered in snow), since the rest of the team had taken the previous day off. When I told him the truth, he got very mad at me. He said that as long as I was on his team, I followed HIS plan. I thought this was fair, but my dad didn’t. He said that my college coach was going to ruin my career.
He was just mad that, for once, somebody cared whether or not I actually enjoyed myself.
However, some transparency is needed on my part. Before my sophomore year of college, my coach called me to inform me that, for various performance-related and personal reasons, I was losing my scholarship. I would have to work hard in the upcoming season and hope to get it back (this was before the season was canceled altogether due to COVID).
I was devastated, but also relieved. I knew that from then on, I would have trouble paying for college, but I kind of looked forward to working my way back up instead of treading figurative water (again, before COVID shut the season down). My dad, however, was furious with me. He accused me of skipping out on runs, eating junk food in secret, and basically just not taking the sport seriously. I didn’t bother trying to correct him.
So I went back to my team a few months later after training with my dad, and I was ready to redeem myself. The resulting outdoor track season, however, was not up to my old standards. At that point, I had just accepted that I was past my prime. I knew that I wouldn’t be as good as I had once been.
I didn’t know it yet, but this season would turn out to be my last.
If I had to pick one thing in particular that turned me away from the sport, it was the constant feeling of inadequacy, a feeling that persisted no matter how hard I tried. My training doesn’t stick with me as much as other people; I have to work harder to maintain “good shape” than others.
A couple years ago, when the concept of transgender athletes in sports started taking off, the most popular argument against it was (and still is) that cisgender women are being unfairly disadvantaged and having their hard work stolen from them.
I get why some female athletes might feel like this, but honestly, I just have to laugh. Why? Because, sure, trans women have biological differences from cis women, but early in my career I noticed that such disparities exist between cis females as well. In my teenage years, it didn’t take long for me to notice that my results were behind those of girls who were leaner and naturally stronger than I was. It sounds like a bunch of excuses, but it actually takes courage to admit that some people are just destined for greatness in their chosen paths (well, mine had been chosen for me), while others will never be as good as their competition.
Simply put, I was not built for success as a long-distance runner. I‘m not naturally fit or trim like the other girls on the cross-country starting lines, and I put on weight much easier than other girls as well, especially noticeable in the indoor track meets during winter, when everybody’s capacity for outdoor training is cut. Every time my dad tried to put me on track towards a “competitive weight” (he wanted me at about 120 pounds), it ended poorly. Ever since I ended puberty, my usual weight is around 132 pounds, assuming a reasonable eating plan and exercise routine, so losing weight required drastic changes. But the closer I got to 120 pounds (between concentrated efforts of eating less “bad food” and running extra miles), the worse I felt. Every single time. I just ended up feeling empty and exhausted, as well as hating myself for not being naturally thin. So I didn’t have the muscle for sprinting, and I was too fat for distance running. I also hate competing. A recipe for disaster.
Even after the decade I put into this sport, I wasn’t who I was expected to be. It just wasn’t in the cards. All I have to show for it is chronically-tight hamstrings, crippling anxiety, and a strong affinity for bagels and classic rock.
Quitting:
I distinctly remember the day I quit; it was this year, a few months ago, on a Sunday evening. The previous day I had been feeling very self-conscious about the shape I was in and didn’t like the idea of dad watching me run like he always did; My dad ignored me, called me insecure and lazy (which hurt coming from him, despite me hearing this a thousand times before), and said that he WOULD be meeting us at our usual state park to watch us run, and there was nothing we could do about it.
Zeke saw how much this was bothering me, and came up with an unironically brilliant solution: to drive to another state park (the same distance away from Dad’s house as the usual one, but in the opposite direction) and run there while Dad was waiting for us where we agreed to meet him!
It actually worked, but that’s not where the problem was.
When we pulled in to the parking lot of the other state park, I suddenly came down with a panic attack. Even though Zeke and I had several advantages over our dad, most of all our ability to use mom’s car (at this point my parents were divorced and lived about 20 minutes apart, and we were living with our mon this past summer) without the obligation to tell our dad where we were going, I was still worried about what he would say. I was worried that he had somehow caught on, and was driving over as we spoke.
At that point, I decided I had had enough. I pulled out my phone and, in a long and frankly outrageous text conversation, I broke off from the sport for good (I called my college coach later in the day and told him that I was quitting; he took it much better than my dad).
I can’t thank Zeke enough for helping me articulate myself there. Thanks to them, I took my first big step towards self-determination. From that moment on I was free to enjoy the remaining years of school life I had. Now, looking back on my early years, I wish I could do them over again without the pressure of competition. However, I choose not to dwell on these feelings, and instead appreciate the time I still have.
Now, I haven’t given up on exercising as a whole, because it’s good for a healthy lifestyle. But it’s different now. Nowadays I go for walks around town, and jog on the treadmill at the gym. This time, though, there is no pace I have to hit; I can just enjoy the feeling of being active. I love being able to do things at my own pace.
Since returning to college after quitting running, I’ve participated in more campus events and made a couple of friends. I’ve even discovered my passion for journalism, which takes up the spare time previously occupied by sports. I always knew that I liked writing and was good at it, but since I had the idea in my head that it wasn’t as lucrative as a sports scholarship, my love of writing fell by the wayside. It feels good to rediscover my old passions, now that I have empty spaces that demand to be filled.
Which is why, next time on Left-Hook, I’ll be talking about something I actually like for a change, a topic that really excites me. What is it?
Well, you’ll just have to wait to find out!
Thanks so much for reading. Until next time, stay on the hook!
