mindfirerunner

Babe Ruth is thought of by many as the greatest baseball player of all time. We all know about the “curse of the Great Bambino” and the Red Sox trading him to the Yankees in the off season of 1919 and not seeing a title for decades to come. Baseball is a great game. We take the day off of work and pull the kids out of school to go to Opening Day every year. We don’t realize what a mentally challenging sport baseball is though.

Our oldest son plays competitive baseball and over the past year we’ve seen him develop immensly as a player, but it’s always interesting to see a team crumble before your eyes and wander what on earth is going through these boys’ heads. My husband put it well. He said, “Baseball is a game of failure”. He’s right. How many times do you strike out, or a fly ball caught, or are thrown out at the bag? Every time a batter steps up to the plate, we hope and anticipate (if we’re rooting for that team), that they’re going to hit a homerun, but how many times does that happen? Yet, we continue to play the sport. We continue to go to the games, and we continue to haul our kids across town three times a week for practice just so that they can continue to play a sport that ends in failed attempts time and time again.

We experience the same with running. We go to races that don’t function the way that they should. We get frustrated that our times are worse than we thought, and aggrevated by the elements. We get leg cramps and have to walk, or stomach cramps and end up puking, but we continue to get out there and run. It doesn’t always work out the way we think it will or should every time. We feel like we have failed, but truth be told we only fail if we never try. So go out there and knock one out of the park. You might strike out a few times before you get there, but eventually you’ll hit that homerun. You might even pick up some fans along the way.