Support women's sports and SHARE this story with your friends!

I love our family.

This morning, after the kids and hubby left for school and office, I was thinking what a wonderfully wacky and athletic family we have.  Our kids, a 14-year old son and 11-year old daughter, wanted to get up at dark-thirty (in multisport terms that means "pre-dawn" which was 5:15 this morning) and hit the gym before 6:00 AM with their parents. I asked my son why he wanted to workout so early. "It would be a fun way to start the day," he said. "The jacuzzi and a swim just sounds so good right now." My daughter told me that she likes to get her workouts "done in the morning." She's been running regularly since last Thanksgiving and she joined the local club cross-country team this Fall. Our kids think that running and working out every day is normal.

I think that is so cool.

Pierre Bourdieu, a French anthropologist,  said the goal of a family, culturally speaking, is "social reproduction". Whether it is our conscious intention or not, our kids repeat our lives in one way or another.

Social reproduction: Praxa and doxa

In An Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu’s ethnography of the indigenous Kabyle tribesmen of Algeria, Bourdieu explains his materialist (socioeconomic) and post-modern social theories within the context of interpreting Kabyle cultural practices (Bourdieu 1977:vii).  In particular, Bourdieu makes a decisive break from his French structuralist predecessors by analyzing the human agency and strategy behind the practices of his Kabyle informants, or, what Bourdieu calls their culture’s assembled practices or praxis. Bourdieu believed that “society is constructed by purposeful, creative agents” who create their culture “through talk and action” (Erickson 2008:187). He believed that a cultural group or a society is united in “systems of relationships" and praxis and that have a natural order or "orthodoxy" that is promoted by the dominant group or authority. He calls this cultural authority, it's doxa (Bourdieu 1977:169).

Our family is a prime example of what happens when two athletic ex-Ironman triathletes have kids.

Our family praxis is based on working out together. There are usually workout clothes and sports equipment somewhere on the floor of our house, water bottles on the kitchen counters, HEED and Cytomax tubs in the cupboards and wet suits and beach towels drying in the tree by the backdoor. We "play" every day. Nearly, every day since they were born our kids have seen Mom and Dad leave the house for a run, swim, bike, surf or do some other physical activity, alone or with friends. By watching us, they've learned that working out is fun and makes them feel good afterwords. With friends, it's like a playdate. Soccer, rugby, swimming, taekwando, running, and junior lifeguards, our kids have been on a competitive team of some kind since kindergarten. When not competing, they are usually doing some sport just for fun like surfing, playing around on their skateboards or riding their bikes around town with their friends. Working out is just part of our family's daily praxis. It is a part of our daily routine like brushing our teeth is in the morning.

Our kids have seen their mother push herself to try qualify for Boston and have their seen their father race the Big Sur Trail Marathon with the flue. (He survived fine thank goodness. We figured he scared the flu right out of him with that run--the old "in-hospitable host" theory of flu recovery).  They have also seen their parents go back to school and take entrepreneurial risks so they can be more competitive professionally and happier personally. We have had set-backs, been injured, and have bad days like everyone else, but pushing ourselves physically and mentally is a positive value in our family's doxa.

If all of that sounds too good to be true, I don't blame you for thinking that. And, that is why I'm writing this.

How did we get our kids to join us and not rebel against our healthy multisport lifestyle?

They gotta wanna

I think it is, in part, just as Bourdieu said: social reproduction. Our kids are only mirroring what we are doing every day. If they saw us read, compose songs, drink a lot of beer with our friends, or work longer hours instead of working out in the outdoors--they would probably seek and mirror those behaviors instead.

But I also think their choices are due to our high expectations and use of constant positive re-enforcement. It's the old fashioned stuff of parenting that I remember hearing when I grew up: "Don't quit," "Do your best," "I'm so proud of you," and my personal least favorite (at the time): "You have to live with everything you say and do."  With the grueling cross-country races our kids have been enduring lately, our advice has been a bit more refined, "Do your best. Try your hardest and so you don't having any regrets after the race is over," and more empathetic, "I know it's hotter than hell out here and it sucks. Just do your best." And, most importantly, and simply, "I'm so proud of you." The key for me is to make sure our kids' main motivation is internal. They have to want to do well to really excel and be true competitors. They have really believe in themselves. As my old Masters swim coach in San Diego used to say, "You gotta wanna."  Empathy coupled with high expectations are important values in our family doxa.

Old School

I'm old school. I remember how unusual it was for a girl in the Eighties and Nineties to do endurance sports. I was the only girl I knew to enter the first Los Angeles Marathon in 1986. My college training buddies were a Phi Delt and a Sigma Chi who were in my advanced running class. I think I was the only girl in that class, too –but I can't remember. But, I do remember, that my first marathon was only two years after the first Olympic woman's marathon ever at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. I also remember being criticized for running too much, for being too skinny, for not socializing enough, for not wearing dresses and for attempting races that were not "safe" for a girl like a marathon. Except for my mom who always encouraged me. As an admittedly non-athletic artist and family iconoclast who preferred books and horses to bicycles and health clubs, she  couldn't really relate to my athletic lifestyle. But to her credit, she always encouraged me to do my best with my race goals. She even bought me my first triathlon racing bike, a Specialized Allez, when I was in college. I rode that bike all over San Diego country in my twenties and decorated it with triathlon product sponsor stickers. I heard "I'm so proud of you" a lot from her and my grandparents when it came to racing.

New Generation

Nowadays, there are packs of road cyclists sporting their multicolored traditional roadie gear or triathlon lycra all over coast and local mountain highways each weekend morning. The doxa of American sport culture has changed since the days when I was a kid. Marathons, triathlons, and lately long-distance trail running ("racing ultras") have gone mainstream (Helliker 2010).  Today there are about 1.2 million triathletes in the United States, up 51% from 2007, and according to last Sunday's New York Times article, a third of them are men in their 40s (Gardner 2010). A few weeks ago, the Boston marathon sold out in less than eight hours. The proportion of women racing marathons have grown from 10% of the field in 1980 to 41% in 2009 (Running USA 2010). "Marathoning has soared in popularity in the United States. In 1976, 25,000 Americans finished marathons, according to Running USA. Last year, there were a record 467,000 American marathon finishers," according to The Boston Globe on October 18th (Pepin 2010).

Our kids are turning out just athletic like us. And, it appears to be national trend. Except, they are starting about a decade younger. Those wacky multisport events called "triathlons" and long-distance races we did in our younger years are conventional now. "Training for Ironman is the new golf!" an old Ironman training pal and multisport retail shop owner told me the other day, rolling his eyes.

I wonder what wacky sports and athletic lifestyles our kids' generation will think up and popularize? I'm so grateful they both enjoy being athletic.  It has been so fun to workout together--as a family.

_________________________________________________________________________________
Resources

Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977 An Outline of a Theory of Practice, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, Pp.248.


Gardner, Ann Marie 2010 "Triathletes, Swim, Bike and Run for Youth," New York Times, October 24, 2010, R12.

Helliker, Kevin 2010, "Making marathons even tougher," Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2010; Retrieved on October 26, 2010, from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703960004575427561884547420.html

Pepin, Matt 2010 "Boston Marathon sells out in a day," The Boston Globe, October 18, 2010; Retrieved on October 26, 2010, from: http://www.boston.com/sports/marathon/blog/2010/10/boston_marathon_sells_out_in_a.html

Running USA 2010 "Running USA's Annual Marathon Report," Running USA; Retrieved on October 26, 2010, from: http://www.runningusa.org/node/57770

Support women's sports and SHARE this story with your friends!

• Triathlon
• Sports
• SportsPLUS
• Family/Parenting
• Multisport
• Ironman

View Original Post at multisportmama.com

View multisportmama's Full Profile