Standing on the Sidelines

Someone once told me that if I had never failed at anything, then I wasn't trying hard enough.  At the time, that idea seemed ludicrous to me. I like to win. I like to look good. I like to succeed. Why would I try to fail? Strangely enough, in one area of my life, I have learned to appreciate failure. In the rest of my life, I'm still working on it.

I moved to Canada in the middle of high school from East Africa. Having grown up in a culture of soccer, I had learned to play the sport, and play it fairly well. Unfortunately, in small-town Canada, playing soccer wasn't an option unless you were five years old and wore a Timbits uniform. My school did, however, have a rugby team, and being relatively athletic, I figured I'd give it a shot. At the tryouts, my coaches discovered that I was fast, kicked well and had a rather foolish disregard for my general wellbeing. I became the fullback, whatever that meant.

Game day. I had two whole practices under my belt, and the cocky assurance that came with being a starter. We won the coin toss to start the game, and the ref handed me the ball. But I didn't know what to do with it. Our practices had reviewed positions and tackling, and a few passing plays. I knew how to place kick for a conversion, and how to throw a lateral pass, but I was at a loss as to how to start the game. Taking pity on me, the ref quietly explained that I was supposed to drop-kick to the other team, and they would catch the ball. I had done drop kicks in soccer, but a rugby ball resembles a football on steroids…oblong and unwieldy. I dropped the ball, my whole team watching, swung my foot, and missed.

That moment stands out as one of the more embarrassing ones of my athletic career. I had turned over the ball in the first second of the game. I wanted to quit and crawl into a hole. From now on I would be known as the new girl who can't even kick a ball. That night I went home and practiced the infamous drop kick for hours. And I still wasn't very good at it, but at least I managed to get a foot on the ball. For the next several weeks I practiced, over and over and over again. When I finally connected, and sent the ball exactly where I intended for it to go, the rush of accomplishment was unbelievable. There was room for improvement, sure, but I had done something that I had failed at a few short weeks ago, and I had done it well. What's more, over the course of the rugby season, I learned to play a sport that I really loved.

The first time I hit the weight room, hoping to improve my athletic performance, I felt the same sense of bewilderment and embarrassment. So many pieces of equipment, so many people who looked like they knew what they were doing, and I had no idea where to start. But I fumbled around, asked some questions, did some research, and came to love weight training. The beauty of it? There is always something I can't do. No matter how strong or fast or flexible I get, there's always something just a little too hard for me to do. So I try. And I fail. And then try again. And the day I get it right is amazing, just like making that drop kick. I can always do better, but I've accomplished something I had failed at.

Once I stopped viewing exercise as a goal to reach, but instead as an amazing journey of triumphs and failures, an entire world of possibilities opened up. I could play it safe and sit on the sidelines. I'd never screw up and look like an idiot if I did. But I'd never accomplish anything either.