I felt like a kid on Saturday when I was listening to Olympic swimmer Josh Davis talk to the kids at the Schiltterbahn Kids’ Triathlon orientation.
Davis gave the kids swimming tips that’ll help them during next week’s event, and you could tell that the kids were appreciative of the inside information.
But the thing that I don’t even think Davis realized was how much he inspired the parents at the event.
I listened to this Olympian talking about the hardest battle they’ll face is showing up to compete at the triathlon. It’s so much easier to sit at home and play video games than to prepare yourself for life’s challenges.
“Always try your best and you’ll be a champion.”
That was the message that Davis was trying to instill in the young kids, but I have to say that I took those words to heart.
As a first-time father with a 7-month- old son, I am always wondering what I want to instill in him to give him the tools to succeed in life. You want you’re child to be a good person and have a better life than you have, but you also would love to give them those moments that will shape their lives and who they are.
When I was 10 years old and growing up in Michigan, there was a young kid named Terry Fox, who was a cancer survivor with his right leg amputated. This 19-year-old kid got up off his couch and stopped feeling sorry for himself and decided to help all those kids who were suffering in the cancer clinics in his home country of Canada.
He decided to help and attempted to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research, that was poorly funded back in the early 1980s.
I watched the Terry Fox reports on television every night to see how far he ran that day. Fox ran a marathon a day — 26 miles — and sometimes farther if it meant raising more money.
He did this without any fanfare and no corporate sponsorship that was being thrown at him, but at the cost of the sincerity of his run, which he called “The Marathon of Hope.”
Fox managed to run over 3,300 miles on a prosthetic limb that was nothing like the state-of-the-art prosthetics they have today and single-handedly raised $24 million on his own — still a record for money raised by an individual.
That was a moment that I would call a marker in my life.
I never met Terry, but I’ve had the honor of talking with his brother Darrell Fox and I have organized Terry Fox Run’s in several cities and hopefully will do that in New Braunfels in the fall.
I’ve never forgotten the inspiration that Terry gave me and I felt the same feeling today when talking with Josh.
The point is that you never know what moments will shape you as a person and I really hope that my son Liam will have many moments like today that will help shape the person he is going to be.
But what I also learned is that what Terry and Josh have in common is that they didn’t set out to inspire, but just make their lives meaningful.
I sit here and think at how my life is meaningful and the thought of being my son’s father is meaning enough for me.
