I Regret Wasting Whole Days of My Life on Sports

On college football and craft coffee and making the most of time

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: how did I spend an entire day watching “Intervention”?

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Course 1

The Main: Portland-Style Pour-Over Coffee

There was a time, not too long ago, when I cared about college football. I say not too long ago, because I’m still young as ever. Contrary to the current evidence– gray hair, a budding interest in bird watching, a wounded knee that’s taken weeks to heel for no reason other than my white blood cells are taking too many smoke breaks during their shift– I can assure you I am not grown up. Exhibit A: cash me outside, cranking the volume on fun.’s “We Are Young” as I sing along with plenty of gusto. I assure you it’s authentic and real because I am still young– how bout that?

And then I think how the band fun. (ugh, that stupid, pretentious period) was really just two members of The Format, who released one of the best pop albums of the early aughts that nobody heard about, which we listened to on CD, unironically, in our tour van while getting to shows using printed MapQuest directions, and I quickly shut it all down because I don’t need the intrusive thoughts to win and tell me that no, indeed– we are old.

I know this, even if I don’t believe this. And nothing tells me I’m old more than college football.

In the decade before I crowd-surfed to “We Are Young” at my wedding reception, time seemed to be of great abundance. Like an unlimited resource, like toxicity on X or bricks in Catan when all you need is ore, time was a huge blank canvas waiting to be filled. Entire weekends– sometimes weeks!– just sat there, empty mad libs with the theme of “Dumb Hobbies” just waiting to be filled out.

I had time for everything. Opportunity, in spades, lay open at the feet of my Vans. I had a choice to harness the abundance of time given to me, to learn new skills or polish existing ones. To explore the great outdoors of Pennsylvania through grand hikes or long trail runs or bike rides through the back country roads. Volunteer, play guitar– anything. Hours to write about my experiences on the road and in restaurants or random odd jobs, the life journals of an aimless twentysomething in the birth of the digital age. I’m not saying it would’ve been worthwhile to anyone but myself, but it would’ve been better than doing nothing.

Instead, I chose football.

Live sports are okay (unless it’s 25 degrees outside)

In the days of BM (before marriage) and especially the days of BC (before children), I was focused on sports. Or distracted by them. Focused on a distraction, I guess. Give me a blank weekend in October with a group of friends who were single and ready to stay single, and we’d tear up the town. Translation: we’d find a dime-a-dozen sports bar with $3 beers and feign interest in a critical college matchup between two top-25 football programs. An entire Saturday can be spent this way– consuming alcohol in between cigarette breaks, getting excited for kids whose names I no longer remember to throw a ball down a grass field over and over again. Then we’d get to wake up on Sunday and watch the adults do it.

This wasn’t every weekend, of course. Football only lasts for a third of the year, unless you’re an Alabama or LSU fan living in the deep South, in which case it’s every breath of every second for the entire year. There were other times in the fall when I wouldn’t watch football, days when I’d sleep in until noon, binge eight episodes of Entourage pirated off Kazaa then rush to throw my restaurant uniform in the dryer before heading off to work and arriving five minutes late.

Sports dominated my waking hours, as did fantasy sports. I would meticulously build my fantasy baseball lineup each morning from April to October, ensuring that I had the best chance at winning $50 after a couple of hundred hours of work managing an entire baseball roster. There were years when I could rattle off the stat lines of the top 200 players in baseball, from hit-by-pitch rates to strikeouts-per-nine ratios.

When living with fellow aimless dudes in those days, the talking heads on ESPN were a near constant presence in our shared living spaces. Sometimes we’d watch the same episode of SportsCenter three times in a row, because what else was there to do when there’s nothing to do?

It wasn’t just the guys, either. On one occasion that’s still talked about in our household with hushed, reverential tones– my girlfriend (now wife) and I watched “Intervention” for 8 hours straight on a Saturday. We could’ve done anything, and we chose that. Maybe it was just me. Maybe I needed the intervention.

For you, maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe it was pour-over coffee, a thing that almost had me in its tendrils before I broke free into the “no time for that kind of bullshit” existence of a stressed out parent. I see friends or influencers or random people obsess over coffee and the art of making it. It’s so intense with pretense that the word “coffee” seems too blue collar for whatever it is they do, like a blunt tool smashing a Chemex carafe to pieces (I googled “glass pourover coffee thing” to get the name of that). Chemex– as if you graduated from Stanford with a degree in molecular biology, that little corner counter space acting as a set double for Breaking Bad: Barista Boy. Let’s be honest: you’re just bored and trying to be interesting. Aren’t we all?

The idea of turning into a home coffee chemist seems interesting, I’ll give you that. Like the Portland version of smoking brisket, weighing grams of ingredients and fine tuning the temperature setting in search of the perfect pout. But I don’t have time for that. Coffee is ground on most days, grind on a good day, press the button and go.

As with binge-watching football, the fact that I considered coffee as a hobby seems absurd to me now. While I’d like to say that marriage changed me, I’d be lying. Kids changed it. Any parent knows it’s true. The idea of obsessing over anything in the morning or watching anything for hours in the evening, uninterrupted and without falling asleep, sounds insane. A whole day of mindless television viewing seems like something out of science fiction, only achievable by cloning myself once or twice over. In fact, such a scenario is nightmare fuel– if I were to accidentally lose a whole day to television or somehow be trapped into it, I would spend the entirety of that time wondering how to break free so I could clean the car or shampoo the carpets or dust every surface in our house. Which I’d then waste on social media during “breaks.” But that’s besides the point.

The entire idea of lingering or bed rotting or self care has achieved exit velocity and left my lived experience. Not just as a thing of the past, but as a thing of a parallel universe. Another life that I once lived, that other people are still living, that exists and breathes and is now flourishing more than ever thanks to restructured playoff formats and better televisions and 24/7 gambling and Doordash and UberEats. Something I am no longer a witness to, nor will I be likely ever again.

The closest I came to popping my head through the sonic layer of that multiverse, a rebirth if there ever was one, happened last summer when a college friend came up to visit for a weekend. Instead of kids’ soccer or baseball games or a long run with old friends on a Saturday morning, we got up later than usual and walked a few blocks to check out a new coffee and bagel place that opened up in my neighborhood.

This was significant because until now, the area had been dominated by only one other bagel place– Towson Hot Bagels– which served as a beacon of hope for the hungover and hungry on any given Sunday or Saturday. When I first moved to Baltimore, I often found myself there among the weary throngs, surrounded by sweatpants and gym shorts and tangled hair and bloodshot eyes, vestiges of battle from the night before.

Since having kids, the word brunch has slipped from our vocabulary. Sometimes I think about it and it all seems foreign, the idea of it and the word itself, the way that words sound if you say them twenty times in a row. Sometimes I question if it came before or after rizz. The whole idea of it sounds sus. But lo and behold, the brunch hour still exists and I wasn’t dreaming. When we walked to the bagel shop that morning, my friend and I bore witness to that magical hour, the meeting of breakfast and lunch, when post-college kids and untethered adults respawn after a night of revelry.

I’ve never felt so much like a foreigner in my own country, in my own city of Baltimore.

A town within a city, Baltimore is a network of neighborhoods. It’s often called Smalltimore because you’re bound to run into somebody you know whenever you leave the house. It drives my kids crazy to no end, because I leverage those chance encounters into 20-minute conversations about anything from skateboarding to organic farming to the decaying sewer system under our streets. By way of living here for a third of my life and my kids going to school in the neighborhood and my elevated profile within the running community, it’s almost impossible for me to not see someone I know when I step outside my door.

And yet, for the entire hour we spent in that bagel and coffee shop– all I saw were strangers. Like NPCs in the background game of my life, they stood in line, paid for their (overpriced) bagels and coffee, sat down or went outside, and then left. A revolving door of likenesses, I struggled to place faces and names and any identifying characteristics. Give me a tribal tattoo or a Grateful Dead lyric– even a Hollister hoodie!– to show me you’re alive, I begged. None of my people existed in this space.

Like Timothee Chamalet going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, I was a complete unknown.

At that moment, I realized that no matter how loud I screamed “to-nai-ai-ai-ai-yait, we are youuuuung” in my car with the sunroof down, I was old. I knew it, but I didn’t really know it until then. I had to come to the bitter realization that those large slabs of time, hanging from a calendar like the choicest chunks of dry-aged beef before landing on an all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet line and shoveled into the hungry bellies of singled out twentysomethings, were no longer on the menu for me.

The rest of that Saturday went like this: we played some disc golf, we had some drinks while doing so, and then we came back to my house, where my kids were playing soccer in the parking lot before going to bed shortly thereafter. Maybe we watched some episodes of “I Think You Should Leave,” which I didn’t have to pirate because I’m now rich enough to afford a Netflix subscription. We went to bed before midnight, instead of staying up until 4 a.m. drinking Pinnacle vodka and Monster and lighting a two-by-four sock torch before shooting my neighbor’s crossbow into the back fence (all things that happened in the years BC).

The rest of my other Saturdays go like this: Wake up extra early to write, make a pot of coffee in our Mr. Coffee maker with a reusable filter. Hopefully get a couple hours of writing in before the kids wake up. Go on a run. Do chores around the house, or likely something else we had on our schedule. At some point, we’ll watch an hour of sports, in person. But it’s real life, my kids on a field and not some other parents’ kid in a stadium that I’m watching from my couch or a bar stool while the rest of the world moves on outside. Maybe we’ll go on a hike or a bike ride or play chess or Super Mario 3 as a family, as we did yesterday. And then we’ll put the kids to bed and clean up the kitchen and we’ll watch a movie or read a book if we can escape the allure of our phones. That’s it, pretty much.

The college football championship game was played last Monday night (I think). I forgot about it until the next morning, and in two years I won’t even remember that Ohio State won. It’s how I treat most sports these days, outside of the occasional playoff game. Even baseball, a sport which I love and follow, only gets ten minutes each morning to watch a condensed recap of the night before. That’s enough.

With kids and life and everything else going on, I just don’t have time for watching sports. I barely have time for coffee. Unfortunately, I too often fill the little gaps with social media, though I’ve been doing much better recently. I’m not perfect is all I’m saying, and I’m certainly not judging you if you enjoy passing your time watching sports. There’s a valuable community aspect to watching sports and rooting for teams, which is why I still love sports as a whole. I just don’t have a bunch of extra time to spend on them.

Everyone talks about how kids take so much freedom away from your life, how after kids you won’t have time for brunch or watching a movie or taking a nap after a long run because it’s off to some two-year-old’s birthday party at a trampoline park. They’re right, you don’t have time for that. Very little time for yourself and your hobbies, unless you really love chaperoning small children to other events involving small children.

But because of all that, I also don’t have time to waste on frivolous things that mean nothing, like passively watching whole days of college football and trying to remember why I care about Ohio State vs. Notre Dame while drinking a whole bunch of alcohol to make me forget.

It gives me pause to think about those giant repositories of time I once held and gave away to impermanent events that I neither remember nor cherish, like tossing 10,000 Bitcoin for two Papa John’s pizzas. And if it wasn’t football, it was something else. It is one of the things I regret, because I could be so much further along.

I’m glad I don’t have whole days to piss away anymore. Losing that freedom has made me more free than ever. I now value my time because I have a framework of how precious it is. How little exists, how fast it goes, and the ways I can bend it to make the most of it when I can. The best part of all– I don’t waste it on myself anymore. I get to fill it with a family that I care about, and that has given me a far greater return than any wide open day filled with nothing but time to waste. Also, watching a kid try and get out of a winter coat is far more entertaining than any college football game. And seeing them score a meaningless soccer goal on a random Saturday morning gives me far greater joy than any overtime win in any bowl game, Rose or Sugar or Super or otherwise.

We were young, but now we’re older. And while I probably won’t be setting the world on fire, I’ll at least be keeping the flame alive. Unless the Orioles make the World Series– then I’m watching every minute of every pitch and when they win, you can bet I’m burning this town to the ground.

On that night, I will be young.

Course 2

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

In a classic Baltimore story of coming up even stevens, a neighbor posted in the “Stolen Bikes Baltimore” Facebook group that she found a Trek bike in the middle of the street that a guy had just left there and walked off from. After trying to locate the owner for a week, she gave up and said she was just putting it back outside because she doesn’t have room for it. So I messaged her and told her I would gladly take it off her hands, if not for me, then for someone else. We met up, she gave it to me, and now the bad karma from my Subaru break-in last month has been evened out.

I was looking for a gravel bike and this coincidentally had upgraded gravel tires (brand new) and it’s also my size. Just needs a rear brake and cable, but after that we’ll be in business!

Pretty cold temperatures for running this week, but managed to get almost 30 miles for the first time in a month and a half. Finished the week off with a nice 10-mile long run up to Herring Run park, but the whole path was still covered in snow and ice which made for a pretty dicey experience. I’ve been weightlifting for the past six weeks and have really started to notice my running getting a lot better.

Other things I wrote this week:

• Brooks Glycerin 22 Shoe Review for Believe in the Run

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to the most recent episode here.

Ingredients List

🎵 : “Interventions and Lullabies” by The Format // Probably one of the most underrated and little known emo albums from the early 2000’s. Every track is a gem and “The First Single” is one of the best feel-good pop songs ever written.

📖 : “Serena” by Ron Rash // Finished this book this week. I really enjoyed the time period and the pacing of this book, though the narrative was a little disjointed between viewpoints. Overall a pretty solid tale of revenge and descent into madness, and the descriptive elements of Appalachia were really beautiful. Apparently a movie was made about this, starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, that never even saw theaters because of how bad it was. Pretty wild.

📺 : “Severance” Episode 2 // I originally thought this episode was too drawn out with too little information, but Wide Foot Jarrett convinced me it was a great episode with all the right details. He mines Reddit theories so I don’t have to. And for that, I am grateful.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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