This past week my
mother was able to come down to visit my family and I. She brought with
her my running t-shirt quilt. This quilt has shirts from high school and
some from when I began to run again. It was nice to see the shirts and
reflect on how things went during those races. One of the shirts came from
my senior year in high school. The theme that year was "No Wicked
Sloths." It stems from the speech that our coach gave us before the
regional meet. If you are not familiar with this parable, it is a common
Christian parable that can have many different versions but all have the same
message.
It talks about a king
leaving his servants (3) for a time. One
servant was given 5 things, another was given 3 and the last one was given 1
thing. What the servants were given
depends on the version that you might have heard. We had been told that they were given talents. The story goes on to say that the servants
that received 5 and 3 talents wanted to please their master and did what was
needed to double their talents. While
the servants that received 1 talent was so afraid to lose this talent that
they did not use it at all. When the king
came back, the servants that doubled their talents pleased the king very much
and were rewarded. When the last servant
gave back the king the single talent the king proclaimed the servant to be a “wicked
sloth.” This servant did not use their
talents to grow their talents.
I think that this
parable works very well with runners if you have certain talent(s) and do not
work at trying to make them or yourself better then you are wasting those
talents.
I see this in many teams, some of the kids come in with so much talent that we as coaches get
excited for what lies ahead. However if these athletes are afraid to use their
talents they will not expand those talents and see what they are truly capable
of. Then there are those athletes that
might not have the talents that the others do but they are not afraid to use their
talents they find through using their talents that they become more talented
than they ever imagined. As a coach,
these athletes are what make the team what it is. These are the athletes that others should
look up to and try to emulate. We as
coaches and runners also need to look inward and try to figure out if we are
being a wicked sloth or are we using and trying to expand our talents.
