Inspiration and Wonder from My Time as a Personal Trainer

No, no one's hired me as a personal trainer. I decided I would help my son succeed in his first attempt at competing in an individual sport: cross country running in the Public School system. He's eight years old.

My son has always struggled physically. He's not physically handicapped but he has other emotional struggles that have limited him in the past. He has always lagged behind with his fine motor skills and is even surpassed by some things that his four-year old sister can do. As his father who loves him, I have fiercely tried to help him overcome these limitations.

He's active but not a "jock." He's not a sports-oriented kid by any means. He's played soccer and it was a struggle. Mostly he doesn't participate in the games and is overwhelmed by the whole thing, but he happened to be on three teams that won A or B-side trophies so he felt proud and happy about the experience. 

Cycling is something that got into him at an early age, long before his dad could even get on a bike, so it wasn't me who influenced him. He runs around a lot, but not for sustained periods. In fact, he used to skip or hop involuntarily after taking only a few strides while running. This slowed him down in his soccer games. His coordination has been very slow to develop but it's coming along.

Even as a fat kid I had a whole lot of fun playing unorganized sports when I was a kid. I was no jock either but I had fun. In a world where obesity seems like an unstoppable epidemic, I want to encourage my kids to embrace an active lifestyle for the rest of their lives.

I started my son training about a month or so before his first race. I put him on the treadmill at home which he's used before, but mostly because he's seen me using it. He'd walk fast and hop every few steps involuntarily. It was unnatural and a little bit concerning. He loved looking at the numbers and seeing how far and how fast he was going. That continued into our training.

I got him to jog at a speed that prevented him from hopping every few steps. The treadmill forced him to keep going in a continuous, fluid motion. His heart and lungs could more than keep up at that speed. Soon he was asking me if it was time to do his training each day. He made charts to put on the wall to track his progress and even set goals for himself. I'm so proud of him.

Quickly, the hopping disappeared and he was getting faster and faster, covering the 1.2 KM distance of the race. He started running 1.2 KM at 10 minutes and 40 seconds. As he progressed, he pushed himself further to beat his "record" times. And he did, shaving 30 seconds or more off when he tried hard. I told him that you try to shave one or two seconds off when you're doing this sort of thing but he proved me wrong time and time again.

His last training session on the treadmill came in at 6:12. When we started, I had hoped he'd get down to 7:30. In the qualifying race he came in 14th and got to go onto the final race of fifty kids. We never dreamed he'd do that well. In his final race he came in 23rd. We call him the 23 fastest eight year old in the city. Had he shaved another 20 seconds off, he'd be the fastest. It's been surreal, especially since the kid couldn't even run properly when we started.

Even now he doesn't hold his arms up in a punching like motion when he runs. Instead, he flails them around randomly. We worked on this a bit at the end and made some progress. But it illustrates how physical things don't come naturally to him.

So what have I learned?

It was an astonishingly wonderful gift to watch my son's body and technique improve the way it did in a few weeks. And it was hardly work for him. The kid barely broke a sweat. 

Even in the last week, I could see his heart and lungs getting undeniably stronger from the training he did the week before. He could do far more at the same breathing level than he did a few days earlier. An eight year old's body can repair itself and strengthen really fast. A night's sleep does the trick.

I've seen this progress in myself, measured by constant heart-rate monitoring. But to see it happen before your eyes in a person you love is beyond description.

It reinforces the notion that you are the master of your body. You can change your body and it is ready to change for you. 

Running, I hope, will be a part of my son's life until the day he dies. He needs it, not only to stay healthy physically, but for all the psychological benefits it will bring him as well.