Sport Time

The first of two posts about that which "...driveth onward fast," according to Tennyson

Necessity

Time is necessary for sports.  Football, basketball, and soccer games are governed by the clock.  Track and field have time trials.  Swimming, rowing, and cycling competitions are decided on the basis of first across the finish line. Golf tee times are organized to process a certain number of players around the course with the expectation that each hole will be completed in a satisfactory time.

Athletes sometimes explain poor performance by bemoaning “My timing was off.”  If claimed in the context of a racquet sport, it probably indicates that the athlete was too late in reacting to the ball.  For golfers, the opposite may be true: they swung too rapidly, subtly altering the angle of the club face and sending the ball into god-only-knows-where.

Philosophy

Of course, some schools of philosophy believe that time doesn’t exist at all – it’s just something dreamed up by humanity to govern when our ancestors would pause in roaming the veldt to have a meal.

The scientist Albert Einstein stated that time existed, but added that it was not absolute.  The story goes that in a conversation, Einstein suddenly realized: Time is not absolute. Meaning that despite our common perception that a second is a second is a second everywhere in the universe, “…the rate at which time flows depends upon where you are and how fast you are traveling.”

Your location and your movement speed: I haven’t a clue about understanding this and hope a reader sufficiently versed in physics will enlighten us all.

Being clueless never stopped me, however.

One simplistic interpretation of Einstein’s dictum is that it’s the metrics of time – not time itself – that are arbitrary.  That is, there's no absoluteness about seconds, minutes, and the rest.  We might just as well make note of the changes in seasons and ourselves over the-thing-formerly-known-as-time by moving rocks or tracking changes in the moon.

Another interpretation of Einstein is that in other parts of the universe, time works differently.  The In House Critic points out, as he is wont to do, that gravity on Mars, for example, is only one-third that of Earth.  Would this cause time to "pass" more quickly?  Meaning that my 30 mph pickleball serve here on planet earth might actually zip along at 60 mph on Mars? (Elon, where can I purchase a ticket?)

Or, what about this?  Perhaps Mars’ lower gravitational pull may slow the sagging of body parts, solving the conundrum of aging!  (And we won’t even start down the path of describing “aging” without some sort of time metric to mark it.)

Lackluster sailor

I recognize that Einstein gave us relativity and the evolution of the universe, but as far as athletics are concerned, he was just a lackluster sailor (frequently becoming lost) and never played any organized sports.

That’s why some might quibble with Al about time. For example, Natalya, a 55-year-old member of the Age-defying Athletes Project (ADAP) community, explains,  “I was on the swimming AAU Olympics track, [when I] missed trials by 1/100th second.  One bad day, crashed career.” 

Absolutely inarguable time was Natalya’s downfall.  It was definitely there.

ADAPers react to time in other ways, too

What’s more, very real time worms its way into other aspects of sports played by Age-defying Athletes.

For example, Langley, a 74-year-old golfer, attributes her decision to take up the game due to the availability of time:  “[My] husband and I were in bed on a Saturday morning and I said I had something to tell him:  I want to play golf.  He replied that he was happy he was still in bed, because otherwise he would have fallen over.  I told him that if we don't do something together, we'll kill each other or divorce.  He wanted to wait and borrow equipment, but I said, no, we are going to the store today and making a financial commitment - bought clubs, clothes, etc.  We could afford the sport and I now had time.  All in.”

Another golfer viewed time almost as something to break through:  “I was horrible [when I first began].  Took a long time to get OK, and I'm athletic.  Had expected golf would be easy for me.”

For Reynaldo, the “60-something” marathoner, time is a goal for his runs:  “[I want to] mostly finish at adequate time.”

76-year-old tennis player Felicity had been a runner prior to taking up the sport and describes time as a metric:  “When I worked in [city], my colleagues and I would walk at lunch hour.  It got to be a habit.  Then we started running during lunch.  At first, we had to change into new clothes because the building didn’t have showers.  But then we moved to a new building with showers.  This one was also located in an office park with lots of high rises.  In those days, of course, we didn’t have any sort of personal distance trackers, so we measured our distance by how many times we went around the various buildings.  After I retired, I kept up my walking and running.”

Longevity

A fascinating corollary to this discussion about sport time is the creation of longevity for Age-defying Athletes.

As reported before on this Substack site, the Copenhagen City Study and the Royal & Ancient research have demonstrated that tennis players and golfers, respectively, live longer than do their non-playing contemporaries.

Investing time in play today lengthens the amount of time available tomorrow for more play.  And as people age healthily into their 80s, 90s, and, dare we say it, 100s, how will they perceive time?

As fourth-graders, it never seemed that 3PM would roll up on the schoolroom clock.  But 60 years later, does time still drag?  Or has it, as Einstein hinted, sped up for the geezers who might be viewed as being in a different “place” on this planet or who might be traveling at a different rate than younger folk who have more years left (all things being equal)?

WIIFM?

Time may be a shape-shifter, but we agree that something is there - if only because our pickleball games and soccer matches have evolved into different looking and different feeling experiences than what they were in the-thing-currently-known-as-the-past.

We also can agree that time is not infinite.  Don’t waste it.  Now is the time to give bicycling a try.  Now is the time to check out the rowing club, the archery range, or the adult softball team.

Time may be fuzzy, but it definitely won’t be there tomorrow.