Running with Sherman by Christopher McDougall
Author:Christopher McDougall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00
* * *
—
From the time her three kids were young, Andrea had worried about the risk of brain damage from contact sports. She knew that heading a soccer ball could rock a child’s skull with nearly as much force as a helmet-to-helmet tackle, so before Ashling, Zeke, and Kelly were even old enough for Pee Wees, she was steering them away from fields and into the pool. When Zeke was in third grade and his older sister, Ashling, was in fifth, they were already swimming competitively year-round.
For an eight- and a ten-year-old, it was a grueling schedule. They had practice after school every day, with double sessions twice a week: on Tuesday and Thursday, they’d get up at four thirty in the morning; swim from five to six thirty, scarf down breakfast in the car on the way to school; and be back in the water for more laps before dinner. At night, they tackled their homework, then collapsed into bed. Kelly was only six years old, so she was mostly along for the ride, bundled into the car to go back to sleep while her brother and sister were churning out miles of laps before the sun came up.
The only ones busier than Andrea and Andy’s kids were Andrea and Andy; when Andrea wasn’t shuttling the twenty miles back and forth to the YMCA twice a day, she was working a full shift as a school nurse and attending night classes at the University of Delaware for post-grad degrees in nursing, health promotion, and health coaching. Andy, meanwhile, was commuting more than an hour each way to his job as a packaging engineer while simultaneously earning a master’s in packaging science and strapping on his tool belt every evening to build out an upstairs rec room over the garage. Whenever Penn State had a home football game, the whole gang drove three hours to Andrea’s beloved alma mater to tailgate. That’s the way the Cooks operate: family first, full calendar, fully committed.
And for Zeke, perpetual motion was just what he needed; the pool was the only thing keeping him out of hot water. “I don’t think he’d be a juvenile delinquent, exactly, but if it wasn’t for swimming, he’d have gotten into more trouble,” Andrea would reflect. Zeke and Ashling were both extremely bright, but Ashling, at least, managed to make that a virtue. Zeke was the kid who pestered the teacher with questions about chapters that hadn’t been assigned yet, and waved his arm in the air while she was explaining the math problems to announce that he’d finished already. In medical terms, Zeke was a classic proctalgia fugax: a major pain in the ass.
“In school, teachers would get annoyed by Zeke because he’d finish the work in half the time and then start entertaining himself,” Andrea would recall. “The more experienced teachers realized they had to keep feeding him extra work. In first grade, his teacher once let him go off by himself and read all day.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Amphibians | Animal Behavior & Communication |
Animal Psychology | Ichthyology |
Invertebrates | Mammals |
Ornithology | Primatology |
Reptiles |
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari(13943)
The Tidewater Tales by John Barth(12380)
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova(6909)
Do No Harm Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh(6670)
The Thirst by Nesbo Jo(6420)
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker(6321)
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Tegmark Max(5164)
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari(5101)
The Longevity Diet by Valter Longo(4842)
The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson(4554)
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy(4503)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot(4233)
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker(4180)
Animal Frequency by Melissa Alvarez(4134)
Yoga Anatomy by Kaminoff Leslie(4093)
The Hacking of the American Mind by Robert H. Lustig(4065)
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot(3965)
Barron's AP Biology by Goldberg M.S. Deborah T(3929)
Double Down (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 11) by Jeff Kinney(3893)
