Physical education is not just about training your body. It is also about forming your character.
Remember during the Greek games last semester when Kiertan did the wall sit for 12 straight minutes? By the end of it, her legs were shaking, her face was grimacing, it hurt…a lot. What was the point of all that? When she’s an adult, will Kiertan go to work in some office where they don’t have chairs, so she needs to learn to wall-sit for a really long time? Of course not. It was about perseverance, not shrinking from pain, about testing one’s self.
Teddy Roosevelt was America’s 26th president. As a child, he was often sick and struggled from severe asthma attacks, but instead of letting his physical challenges confine or limit him, he chose the opposite course, and embraced what he called “The Strenuous Life”—one that took on physical challenges, rather than running from them.
But he knew that victory came in trying, not merely in winning. Every one of you who competed in the Greek games or has put genuine effort into your fitness tests, who tries hard and fights through the pain, is in the end triumphant.
In his most famous speech, Roosevelt said:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Physical education is really an education of the soul. No matter how talented you may be athletically, don’t sit on the sidelines—get into the arena. The effort is its own reward.
Have a wonderful day.
