IT'S A DAD'S LIFECompetitive sports and raising children are more similar than one would think, writes Adam Brophy
IN TOM Humphries's Locker Roomcolumn last week he paid tribute to Mark Kennedy's football career, which is approaching a close as his 32nd birthday looms.
To say Kennedy's career was toploaded would be akin to pointing out the same about Dolly Parton's appearance - he delivered a phosphorescent sparkle for about five minutes before cranking down to a dim 40 watts for the remainder of his ultimately frustrating time as a pro.
The reason the column about Kennedy captured my imagination was possibly because he was the first wonderkid to emerge after I had left adolescence behind. I witnessed his arrival with envious adult's eyes, feeling the evaporation of childhood dreams in the knowledge that I was a generation beyond this kid.
Now he's at the end of it all - well, the end of the top tier - he can hack forever having perfected the art in the last 12 years, and he's still a kid.
I was reading about Mark Kennedy and his unfulfilled potential as I lamented my own inability to progress at sport. My sporting attentions, such as they are, now focus on distance running as it requires no skill apart from the ability to stand upright and move at a faster than walking pace shuffle for protracted periods.
You have to be rather grim and willing to endure boredom - glamorous it is not.
That did not stop me justifying to the rest of my family my flying to Cork for a half-marathon event recently, while they braved eight hours of bank holiday weekend traffic to come and support me.
It did cross my mind during the 25-minute flight that the missus would take a longer time to coerce the brats into the car, and for a moment I felt guilt.
But it passed as I reminded myself that I needed as much rest as possible to prepare for the event and that this had been planned as my running weekend away long before it was hijacked as a family break. When they finally arrived, the nippers were siphoned off to grandparents and aunts and uncles so my focus would not be disturbed.
Peace, quiet and a planned diet were adhered to with the single aim of maximising potential.
I ran the race in exactly the same time as I had done the previous year, which was pretty damn slow for a beginner and can only be described as languid for someone who bothers to get out there three times a week to go lollop around parks.
There was no sense of achievement, only a niggling concern that I've been running in circles for no reason. The kids greeted me at the finish line vaguely interested in whether I'd won or not, but even they seem aware at this stage that it's mid-table obscurity for me forever.
I'm afflicted with a dose of the "What's the points?" If there isn't an outward sign of progression, what's the point? If you're repeating the same events as previously, what's the point? If you still feel like weeping when the alarm sounds in the morning, what's the point? If your arse is beginning to sag like a jowly wino's cheek and you're sure you can spot the beginnings of varicose veins in your wiry, amateur runner's calves (cheers, genetics), then what's the bleeding point?
If I'm getting like this after a shoddy half-marathon in west Cork, what must the last 12 years have been like for poor auld Mark Kennedy?
Sport makes a monkey of us. It demands that we be in its thrall, promising that glory is within our grasp. To a point, that is true, in that glory can be found just as much in completing a certain task as being the best in the world at whatever that task may be.
But what is beginning to make sense to me is that glory, however paltry and localised, is not the point at all; that it's the seemingly unending chug around the Phoenix Park on a Sunday morning that makes running in events worthwhile and, to that end, it is the relentless trudge with the kids that makes having them worthwhile.
It's not the big events, the birthdays or communions that really stay in the mind. More the atmosphere of the daily march. And that's why I'll continue running half-marathons at the pace of a blind, one-legged geriatric, but the next time I'll drive to the start with the nippers and stop conning myself that it makes any difference. The trudge is worth it, as Mark Kennedy must have figured out long ago.
abrophy@irish-times.ie