Sunday, March 27, 2011

For the Kids | My Motivation To Be Healthy

Sorry, no video today.  If you can stand it, you simply get to listen to me blab for a few minutes.

I'm the youngest of three boys.  When I was younger, I would play basketball with my older brothers and their friends.  I remember my dad would open up the gym to our local church on Thursday nights during the summer and all my brothers' friends would show up to play.  My dad would play with us (and do pretty well).

That tradition morphed over the years, and now there's a group that plays every Saturday morning at 6:00am.  The group is much older now, but none the less a good tradition.  Whenever we're home, we go and play, and my Dad will still come out and play with us every now and then.

My brother and I were reminiscing on our Thursday night games one night and he said, "You know, when my kid is 16, I would hope that I'm in good enough shape to play with him like Dad did with us."  All the males in the family really bonded on the basketball court and I realized later, how my Dad used those opportunities not only as a chance for us to have some fun, but for him to really exercise great parenting skills.

I've thought back on that conversation time and time again.  When my oldest son is 16, I'll have ventured in to the land of the 40s.  A couple months back, I got a few injuries (pulled muscles) from doing simple things that I did all the time growing up.  That was a bit of a wake up call.  At the rate I was going a year ago, I probably wouldn't have been on pace to be able whoop up on my sons when I'm 40.

Much of what I'm trying to do today to stay healthy is not for the short term, but instead the long term.  I valued so much the opportunity to play basketball with my Dad and do other active things with him (we went on a pretty big hike in the Haleakala Crater pretty often when we were growing up), and I hope that I can provide those opportunities for my sons for as long as I am able.

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