My oldest son has a beach run this weekend. I thought that I would take him for some practice runs before we actually hit the beach on Saturday. I would imagine that as a 6 year old, 2km is a pretty major distance! I was amazed at how excited he was to go running with me. I suppose that he has seen me go off running and has thought it pretty cool and so he will get a chance to do what dad does. Yes please, dad the hero! We set off at rather a brisk pace and I was absolutely blown away at the amount of effort he put into his running, he just ran and ran and ran. We did stop a couple of times and at the end he really stepped it up a gear and sprinted for home. Once again I was amazed at how children are able to apply their minds and do things that you would never have thought them capable of. One aspect of my life that I am looking forward to is introducing them to possibilities – I can’t wait to be my children’s biggest fan!

One of the interesting things that happened on the run was that we passed stacks of people. Stacks more passed us in their cars! OK - not that interesting. All the people that saw us immediately realized that we were on a bit of a training run together. Every single one of them ended up with this funny smile on their faces which said “that’s so sweet”. So it may also have been a bit of gas but I like the way I have interpreted it! It certainly gave me that warm feeling that I am doing the right thing, spending real time doing things that my children want to do.

The other interesting thing and completely unexpected consequence of our running training has been the amount of conversation that we have had. We have had 20 minutes of quality talking time on each of runs. I have learnt tons about my boy, about school, about his friends, about what he did, about what he thinks about things, well really just all about his life. If you have young kids, you probably share my frustration in that I cannot get much out of them over the dinner table about their day. Most of these conversations are quite contrived and hardly deep. Now I eagerly await our runs, not for the exercise, but for the gift of getting to know my kids.

One more interesting thing was that I was able to slip into dad the coach mode and my children actually listen. Perhaps their blood is pumping a bit faster with the exercise and this turns on the listening section of their brains – can this be proven as a scientific fact? I think we all found this valuable as many of the coaching lessons that one learns in sport are things that can be applied to life; pace yourself, set some goals, sometimes things are tough – need to work through it, etc.

My youngest son was also dead keen to join us and so we all ran a bit of our route together. If you were wondering, my 3 year old runs 600m with only 1 short walking break – not bad when your legs are shorter than my shin!