#108 Beautiful Simplicity

At the risk of stating the obvious, sports are often complicated. In order to play and watch many sports well, you have to have at least a decent understanding of a whole book of rules. Then those rules are enforced by imperfect officials who don't see everything, make mistakes, and are prone to be biased toward the home team. And if that wasn't bad enough, sometimes the team that plays the best isn't the team that wins. When we watch sports we often find several reasons to walk away frustrated or make excuses if things don't go the way we'd hoped.

But what if I told you that there's a sport that isn't complicated? What if I told you there's a sport with very few rules and almost no room for official error, a sport where those who perform better always win? This beautifully simple sport is cross country*. Now technically cross country does have rules about team size and uniforms and spikes, but for all intents and purposes it boils down to this: whoever travels the whole course from the starting line to the finish line the fastest wins. It's pretty hard to cheat in cross country. You could try to cut the course or to knock over another runner, but those things are pretty obvious, and other runners would pretty well eat you alive if you tried cheating. And officials really don't have to watch for much beyond that. The trickiest thing for officials is when multiple runners finish at nearly the same time, but even then it usually isn't as hard to determine the proper order as you might think. But the best part, in my opinion, is that you can't really hide or make excuses in cross country. If some others beat you it's because they ran better than you did. Period. Sure, you can have a bad day or be bothered by an injury and lose to someone you normally would have beaten. But whoever finishes first ran better that day than everyone else. That's all there is to it. You can't fake it. You can't really get lucky and win (barring, I suppose, a horrific injury or other competitors tripping over each other).

The beautiful simplicity of cross country is what I love so much about it. On race day it was simply myself against the other competitors out there on the course in whatever conditions. When it didn't go well, I had no one to blame but myself, and that was pretty brutal at times. But when the race did go well, there was this glorious sense of achievement. I didn't have to worry that I'd just gotten lucky or been favored by the officials. That day I was faster than however many others, and that was it. That made all the hard work of training worth it. If only more of life were that simple.

Grace and peace,
BMH

*Note: Much of what I say could easily apply to track, swimming, or cycling. However, I think those sports are more complicated due to things like more equipment and more limitations on the number of people who can compete at one time.