Grit, Guts, & Glorious Winners

It’s time for our Friday Conversation! Value Adjusted Phineas chooses the topic this week, so here we go!

Value Adjusted Phineas: I’d like to talk about something pretty dear to my heart today: endurance sports. I like them a lot.

As a kid, and now, I was never particularly “talented” or…uh…”passable” when it came to sports that involved things like kicking, throwing, catching, or doing anything involving other human beings. Normally, my adventures with these sports begin with me getting hit in the face.

Endurance sports, though, I’ve been able to manage those. I can typically do things like running, biking, inline skating, and cross-country skiing without getting a black eye. Endurance sports are great. They’re highly accessible, easy to learn, and pretty darn good for the ol’ cardiovascular health.

As a result of this stance, I’ve always wondered why there’s so little focus on endurance sports in our world. In the world of sports reporting, there’s nary a mention of endurance sports, despite the fact that there’s something going on in endurance sports at just about any time of the year. The only time the Tour de France even gets mentioned on ESPN anymore is when someone is caught cheating.

Perhaps more important, the world of sports education turns a blind eye to endurance sports. In school, gym class consisted of: football, soccer, basketball, racket sports, weight lifting, field hockey, and baseball. If there was time, there might be a unit that involves running.

I mean, my high school was in Wisconsin. We have, what? Three months without snow in the year? Have a unit on cross country skiing! It’s only 6 miles to one of the finest sets of trails in the mid-west! But, no, we have a unit where we go to a local bar and bowl, instead.

This lack of attention makes very little sense to me, especially in schools. Lifelong activity is VERY VERY VERY important. Why focus on activities that require specialized skills and multiple participants when individual activities with huge health benefits and low barriers to participation exist?

DJ Fabulous Fred: Well, I don’t think our aversion to endurance sports is anything surprising. For one, endurance sports are boring and hard. At the same time.

Look at American attention spans, we can’t pay attention to 45 minutes of soccer. We need commerical breaks at five minute intervals in everything to even begin to pay attention. We like to do activites that we like to watch, and no one likes to watch endurance sports.

When was the last time anyone said “Oh man, did you see when Chris McCormack’s nipples started bleeding in hour five of that triathlon? That was fucking awesome!”. Never, that’s when.

Anyway, we all know that endurance sports are just a testbed for the performance enhancing drugs that will create our next generation of supersoldiers

Value Adjusted Phineas: Wait. Are you claiming that cross-country skiing is boring? One could make the argument that it is hard, but I would counter: cross-country skiing is no harder than trying to hit a ball the size of a fucking orange when it is thrown at you by some barbarian in your gym class (2x your size).

But…boring!? You would claim that cross-country skiing is boring? You would call THIS boring!?

DJ Fabulous Fred: Ohh, the old exclamation mark-question mark combo, you’re bringing out the big punctuation guns. Well, yes, I do think cross-country skiing is boring. You have to remember that most of us weren’t born in northern Wisconsin. Most of us didn’t grow up cross-country skiing. Most of us don’t consider lutefisk a food group. Most of us don’t look like this:

(Value Adjusted Phineas)

I mean, looking like that, how could you not like cross-country skiing? I do like the ironic mustache by the way.

Value Adjusted Phineas: The Swedish Chef is an upstanding member of the world community, and I, as a person of Swedish descent, am proud to share his heritage.

But, fine. If all you fat fucks don’t want to take my advice and pay attention to or try cross-country skiing, or any other sport that actually requires you to MOVE YOUR FUCKING ASS MORE THAN 100 FEET AT A TIME for that matter, that’s fine by me. You guys have fun dying of cardiovascular disease.