It's a storyteller's proverb that in the course of a long and active lifetime, you will play all the parts in a great story. For me, this was a great story. I've been the kid confronting economic disadvantage, I'm involved in an endurance sport and I'm currently a suburban parent, wrestling with all the questions of what you do for you child, what you leave for the child to do, and what you leave to plain chance. It was amazing to find so many of my personal struggles rolled into a single narrative. Thanks, Steve.
As for sports being pointless, yes they are, in a way. My sport is brevets -- non-competitive, long-distance bicyling events where the objective is to ride a pre-determined course along a series of checkpoints within a time limit. The short courses are 200 kilometers (125 miles) and the longest ones are the 1,200 kilometer (750 mile) monsters with 90-hour time limits, like the quadrennial
Paris-Brest-Paris event. There are no places, no podiums, no prizes and trust me,
nobody outside a tiny group of cyclists cares. So in that sense, it's about as pointless as you can get. But for me, the lack of extrinsic reward is one of the best things about it.
I forget where I heard it, but my favorite endurance quotes says something to the effect of, "Edurance training is fundamentally simple. You go out, you hit the wall, and the wall moves back a few meters. Then you rest and recover and go out and hit the wall again." At the risk of lapsing into complete cliche', it's knowing how to move the wall that's the real prize. Finding within myself the ability to stay with a task for the sake of the task itself, discovering how to make myself do what I don't feel like doing, and learning to suffer because it is required by the activity are the things that bring me back to the bike year after year.
Over at Podcastle, one of the fables ended with the moral: "Everybody knows better. That's the problem, not the solution." Endurance training can help you develop the mental tools to do what you know to be better, even if there's some pain involved. As such, it can be part of the solution. At least that's how it's worked out for me.