Long before I learned the word ‘hubris’ Little Athletics taught me a valuable lesson | Sian Prior

When I was a child, our dad constructed a high jump bar out of scrap wood in the back yard. The risk of copping a splinter on the way over definitely helped you to leap higher. He dragged an old mattress on to the grass for my brother and I to fall on to. When that bar was raised half an inch and you scissored over the top without knocking it flying, you felt like an astronaut who’d finally made it to the moon.

There was long jump, too. Instead of a sandpit we had a dirt heap, but because we lived in a sand-belt suburb, the landings were soft. Occasionally there’d be some compost mixed in with the stuff you dusted off your bum after a jump. Eggshells and potato peels weren’t so bad. The leftovers from Mum’s crock-pot stews were best avoided.

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For a while we also had a competition which involved jumping off the garage roof on to the mattress. We usually saved that one for when the parents weren’t around.

My brother and I had long legs, good for jumping high and long. When it came to running, though, we were chalk and cheese. He could run around the back yard for an hour without raising a sweat. I was more like our grandfather Lloyd Jones, a sprinter who’d played for St Kilda in the 1930s.

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Grandpa Lloyd used to drive me to the oval at the local high school once a week, where he’d instruct me to take off my shoes and run as fast as I could on the soft grass. He’d time my 100-metre sprints with an old stopwatch, show me how to take off quicker, then make me do it again.

By the age of 11 I was the second fastest girl in my primary school. A few years earlier, in 1972, Raelene Boyle had won silver in the 100 and 200-metre finals at the Munich Olympics, so coming second didn’t feel too shabby.

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Grandpa Lloyd suggested I should start going to Little Athletics on the weekends. The competition would be stiffer, he warned. I wasn’t worried. I was too young for the Olympic Games coming up in Montreal the next year, but there’d be another Olympics four years after that. By then I could be giving Raelene Boyle a run for her money.

So one Saturday morning, Mum drove me to an oval in the neighbouring suburb and signed me up for the 100 metres race at Little Athletics. “Do you want to do the 400 metres too?” she asked. Running in a straight line was usually my thing, not in a circle. The idea of ending up in the same place you started seemed a bit boring to me, so I’d never tried this distance before. But why not?

I lined up with all the other girls and when the starter gun fired I did exactly as grandpa Lloyd had instructed – I took off like a rocket. The curved track disappeared under my feet, and I was soon leading the pack. By the 100 metre mark, I was definitely going to win.

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But then something strange started to happen. The air somehow got thicker and my lungs were being squeezed. My long legs were losing propulsion and there were still 250 metres to go. A few girls began overtaking me, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t regain the lead. There was acidic pain in my calf muscles and a stitch in my side. By the 350-metre mark I was coming last, dragging myself to the finish line, clutching my side and gasping.

The shame feels as fresh today as it did all those decades ago. At the age of 11 I hadn’t heard of the word hubris. If I had, I might have understood better what had just happened. It could have been a valuable life lesson. I could have asked grandpa Lloyd to train me how to run further than 100 metres. How to pace myself and save my energy for the final dash.

Instead, it became a lifelong pattern. Rushing at challenges as if only speed could succeed. Racing towards work deadlines. Pushing myself into new careers. Jumping into relationships. I copped quite a few splinters along the way – losing jobs, squandering love – but it has never been boring.

• Sian Prior is the author of Childless: A Story of Freedom and Longing and Shy: a memoir (Text Publishing)