Country Strong

 

You may not know this, but I grew up country. My hometown had three stoplights and often only one of them worked. We lived about a mile from town, surrounded by family farms. We were bordered on one side by Highway 11 and by Southern Railroad on the other.

I was not a member, but the FFA (Future Farmers of America) was a big deal. The 4^th of July parade featured horses, bicycles, tractors, and the high school marching band.

There were about 4000 people living there then—about the same number now. Boys that graduated from high school often went to work in one of the local factories. If you grew up on a family farm, you likely followed that tradition.

I started working on those surrounding farms at about age 12. I also had a newspaper route and several yards to mow but that’s part of another story.

My first job was hauling hay for Jimmy Greenway’s Aunt Marie. At lunch, she fed us a mountain of fried chicken and a variety of vegetables. I was too tired to eat anything the first time I worked there.

Two doors down from where I lived was Dennis Williams and his wife, a school teacher. With his brother, Mr. Dennis owned the family farm about a mile away. The brother lived on the farm and Mr. Dennis lived near me.

Back then, there was this thing called a “tenant” farmer. Those people were provided with a house on the farm and paid for their work. They usually had the opportunity to farm a piece of land, usually put into a tobacco patch.

The tenant farmer on the Williams’ farm was a Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown and his wife lived in a small house on the farm, near the railroad tracks. A slight, grizzled man, I thought he must truly be ancient, but he was probably younger than I am now.

Mr. Dennis was even older. He would drive the tractor. I would pick up the hay in the field and set it up on the wagon. Mr. Brown would stack the hay. Then we would head to the barn to store it away.

Again, I would toss the hay up into the hay loft and Mr. Brown would stack it. Then back to the hay field again. Field after field, we would clear the bales of hay. Throughout my teen years.

We had a few weights at the high school I attended and, after winning the state championship in football, we got this fancy multi-station weight machine. But we didn’t need all that because we were “country strong.”

That meant that we spent our summers hauling hay, hoeing and putting up tobacco, shoveling grain, and, well, you get the picture. We didn’t have to adjust to the heat when fall sports rolled around because we had spent our summers working under the hot sun.

We had no idea how much we could bench press but we knew how far we could toss a 60 pound bale of hay.

When my son reached his teen years, he started helping local people that were still putting up hay in bales. As he entered high school, he definitely spent time in the weight room, but his summers also included lots of farm work and heavy lifting. I believe it served him well.

Young athletes tend to get caught up with the latest greatest. They think you just have to have a strength coach, personal trainers, position coach, masseuse. All the things. When what they really need is just to put in the work.

Lift, throw, push, pull. Work hard. Move heavy things. Sweat. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.