The Radio's Advice

On a hot summer's day, about six or seven years ago, I received the weirdest running advice I have ever been given.

My Dad and I were driving along on the suburban roads of my neighbourhood, I forget why, but it probably had something to do with errands, when we flipped on the radio to a baseball game. The game was more or less background noise as my dad and I talked, but suddenly the announcer was screaming and shouting like he had been placed barefoot in the middle of a hot desert.

Me and my father stopped to listen to what the hullaballu was all about. It turned out the center fielder made an excellent catch to perserve his team's lead. The announcer wouldn't stop praising the player who had made the catch and that is when he uttered the advice that will stay with me forever, "And that's why you run on the balls of your feet, so your eyes dont bounce up and down."

It sounded like weird advice, advice that upon experimentation proved true, but weird nonetheless.

I have not really needed it in my running career yet, save the one time I used it to avoid meeting any trees face to face when going down one particularly steep hill in a forest. But I've tried to wring some sort of life lesson out of the radio's strange tip.

The more I thought, the less anything I came up with made any sense. It may have been the fact that I had been pushing buggies for six hours and I was going slightly buggy (pun attack), but it probably had more to do with my overthinking of the wise words.

I realized that I shouldn't just try to get something out of the words that just wasn't there. What I should have really been doing was appreciating the quarkiness and yes, wisdom and strange beauty of those words that described the amazing way in which a talented player caught a ball.

It is important to draw wisdom or knowledge from things in life, like a radiant sunset, a literary masterpiece or a giraffe's kiss. However, at times, simply appreciating things for what they are turns out to be the way we can truly get something from that piece of advice or amazing novel, instead of overanalyzing it or manipulating it to be something it's not.

If you wonder constantly about why Mr. Bean never talks in his movies and try to figure out if it's an allegory for some social injustice in society instead of laughing at his wacky antics then you'll miss the whole movie and the whole point.

So simply enjoy the simple things in life and if you ever want to track down that fly ball in life, make sure to run on the balls of your feet.