Last night (February 6, 2025), leaving the Middle School basketball game, I lost for the first time in a footrace with one of my children, in a typical boy-parent “I’ll race you to the car” moment.
It was bound to happen: at nearly 17 years old, he’s working out every day and currently outweighs me by at least 20 lbs. He might even be taller than me, but I’m not willing to concede that race just yet, because we’re very close on that metric.
What’s especially strange about the whole thing is that while I may have technically lost the race, I won in so many ways.
In the summer of 2022 (or maybe it was 2023) I was giving my kids a hard time about how they needed to work harder in the offseason, and doing general dad “back in my day” posturing.
One thing led to another, and I found myself lining up in the yard to run wind sprints. I had probably had a beer, and clocked in at 235 lbs.
I took off, completely un-warmed up (just like last night, for the record!) and made it approximately 40 yards before my legs couldn’t keep up with my torso and I toppled over.
Worse, my lungs couldn’t expand and contract fast enough to get oxygen into my system, and I had a moment sitting on my porch where I genuinely thought I was going to pass out or worse. My heart was beating out of my chest, and I needed at least 5 minutes to regain any semblance of a normal existence.
I wish I could say that was the moment I decided to get serious about my health, but that moment needed some more rocks to form on the bottom.
Fast forward to the grass beside the middle school last night.
As backstory this time around:
- I still have not sprinted even one time since that fateful somersault I tried to play off in the yard.
- For a time last year I was really into walking, and even had gotten into doing what I’d consider “cardio” by walking the large hill in the woods behind my house. I haven’t done that consistently at all over the past 6 months or so.
- I’ve been doing some body-weight exercises maybe 15 minutes per day but really nothing that’s gotten my heart rate up for anything over a few seconds.
- The only thing that has functionally changed is my diet, having gone no-carb carnivore in April of 2024, relaxed to a few no-carb veggies in September of 2024.
So, in a less-formal-than-I-would-like start, my boy said “ready, set, go” and we launched out across the yard.
My Achilles tendon has been acting up for a few days (happens when I stand too much at work) and feeling it getting tender I wisely made the decision after about 10 really hard steps to ease off and take the L, but I still ran at what I’d estimate to be 90% capacity all the way across the lawn (maybe 75 yards at most). I don’t think I could’ve beaten him at 100%, either.
“That’s right, you’re slow old man!” the boy bellowed across the dark parking lot.
Then, in what I can only describe as a nearly out-of-body experience, I walked around the minivan, and got in the driver’s seat.
I was mildly winded, at best.
Reader, I don’t say this to brag. I say this because it has been a tectonic shift in my understanding of my own body. I’m still processing the ramifications of what “cardiovascular health” even is at this point. I thought that the way you get to a point of being able to sprint without being winded is to run long distances, or to get your heart rate up for 30 minutes every day. That’s the way I’d always “gotten in shape.”
I would have confidently told you yesterday at this time that, while I have lost a bunch of weight, I need to be doing more cardio because I’m not really in great shape.
That’s probably true to a certain extent. What is categorically untrue is (whatever I would have said about my ability to sprint). Welcome to 2025, where Ben gets to wrestle with his grasp of how his own body works.
So yeah, the boy’s right about one thing: I lost fair and square. But if you ask me, he’s dead wrong about that “old man” bit.