“Did you have fun playing?”
The question greets me almost as soon as I get home, stumbling ruddy and bloodied into the house. It’s an innocent query from my wife, filled with good intention, but I bristle a little anyway.
Did I have fun “playing”? She knows I’ve just spent four hours in the summer sun, running 15 kilometres and overcoming 30 obstacles – pushing through an early-morning physical challenge filled with electric shocks and frigid water, vertigo and claustrophobia, exhaustion and dehydration.
I scan her face for a flicker of happy bemusement – some sarcastic smirk or telltale wink – but there’s not a hint of either. Slightly confused, I ask her to repeat the question.
“Did you have fun,” she pauses, “playing?”
Instinctively I blurt out “Yes”, and surprise myself in doing so. After all, I’ve just finished a Tough Mudder – a popular, yet more-than-a-little-bit-stupid endurance event combined with a boot-camp obstacle course. It’s staged all over the world, and has many copycats and contemporaries, too, from the Warrior Dash to the Spartan Race. Perhaps I’ve been leaning too heavily into their promotional nomenclature – tough, warrior, spartan – to think of the challenge as anything more than something to defeat … or survive. (In fairness, the event was conceived at Harvard Business School in 2009 by a former British counterterrorism officer as a test of physical strength and mental grit.)
And yet that question – “Did you have fun playing?” – is so sweetly earnest and disarming that it reveals a truth I should have spotted a mile away, but which I completely missed until now. Right from the outset this thing was about play – from the very first obstacle in fact, a kilometre into the race, when the running trail disappeared … or rather was submerged into the bottom of a lukewarm artificial lake. One by one we slipped down a muddy embankment into the swampy brown water before wading – chest-deep through a churn of reeds and stinking sludge – to the other side. Emerging into the humidity of the morning, sopping wet and somewhat smelly, you had to smile – almost immediately, almost reflexively – at the silliness of it all. The sheer folly. That’ll wake you up. And that was just the beginning.
There were balance beams and rope pulls, and exercises where you carry 27-kilogram sandbags around a car park. We crawled through dry tunnels and muddy tunnels, watery tunnels and smoky tunnels. We scaled short walls and tall walls and leaning walls. We climbed nets strung up in the centre of artificial waterfalls and hoisted ourselves out of great wet pits cut into the soil.
Like the best and worst of those in armed forces basic training, we crawled through mud on our bellies under barbed wire, and we clambered on all fours through dangling exposed wires designed to give random electric shocks. For one obstacle – dubbed Arctic Enema – we climbed onto a steel platform then leapt into a pool of ice water. The shock of the cold knocks the breath from your lungs like a gut-punch, especially when you’re forced to dive completely underwater, submerging fully to get under a barrier and to the end of the pool. (For good measure, you’ve got to do it all again in a second pool, too.)
Playing?
Yeah, actually, we were. Think back to your childhood, and the muck and fear and effort that play once involved. Think of how messy you used to get. Think of the risks you used to take. Think of the countless times you returned home with a cut knee. And think of how seldom we do things like that – things that make us dirty and afraid and bloody – once we become adults. For a few moments on the weekend, I was a middle-aged boy.
In the race to splash through one waterlogged obstacle after another, I was reminded of the way toddlers play at water tables, or kids frolic under lawn sprinklers, or teens spring up the steps to hit the highest waterslide. In the race to clamber over an enormous wooden structure, I was reminded of the big treated-pine A-frame at Murrumbeena Primary School in 1984, and my first attempt to scale it – specifically that moment near the top when the height became suddenly terrifying, and the only way forward was to throw a leg over and hope it would gain purchase on the other side.
On the Funky Monkey obstacle – a row of incline monkey bars and a trio of steel rings to finish – I thought of the way I used to make the monkey bars my own on any playground, traversing three bars per swing, skipping two at a time on my way swiftly across a sea of tanbark. In the adult version on the weekend, I got just three handholds into the obstacle before my fingers gave out under the strain of 100-plus kilograms of body weight, sending me splashing down into a pool of brown water below with an ungainly, ignominious flop. Damn, it was fun. But was it actually play?
“Play is something people are still arguing about, because it’s hard to pin down, hard to define,” says Dr Kate Renshaw, a Ballarat psychologist and podcaster also known as Dr Play. “It can be really personal, but there are two core elements: it’s freely chosen, and it elicits enjoyment.”
An obstacle-course endurance event might seem like it dances on the edge, she says, because I expected it to unlock some dour competitive mindset. “But you realised along the way that it wasn’t about competing or winning, and that you were in a flow state and laughing,” she adds. “You found yourself in a state of play.”
Ask any preschool educator or kindergarten teacher – or just sit down and watch an episode of Bluey – and you’ll notice the premium we now place on play for our children. Modern parenting freely acknowledges the critical role it performs in hitting intellectual and physical milestones – but it’s so much more integral to living than that. The absence of play, in fact, can be catastrophic.
When Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees were deprived of their preferred methods of play – roughhousing, tickling, chasing – they became hostile, even homicidal. US play expert Dr Stuart Brown found something similar in humans. “His early-life audits of complex criminals in prison – the hardest of the hard – found a consistent lack of warm, loving, play relationships, and play deprivation,” says Renshaw. “It’s part of the fabric of humanity. Without play, we don’t develop as social and emotional beings. We don’t develop the ability to be creative and collaborative.”
And yet we tend to forget about play later in life, don’t we, unless we make constant, conscious decisions to bring it into our world? It doesn’t have to be a marathon trial of agility and stamina, either. “I think the easiest way in adulthood is to ‘snack’ on play in bite-sized pieces,” says Renshaw. “Car karaoke. Music and dancing while cooking. Banter with your kids at meal time. Once you get started, it snowballs, too.”
It pays to pause and recognise it as well, which is simple enough if you just ask yourself a few questions in the moment: Am I having fun? Am I laughing? And perhaps the most important: Am I losing track of time?
I definitely was – that’s an emphatic yes to all three – and I emerged from the effort with a garish orange headband and T-shirt, a finisher’s medal and a beer, along with a shocking sunburn, a torn calf muscle, a patchwork quilt of bruises blossoming blue, purple and yellow, and an outfit badly in need of a wash. I got home and stood in the driveway, in fact, so my son could spray me with the hose – giggling as he power-rinsed a layer of fetid mud from Dad’s arms and legs and face.
Some of it was no doubt still stuck to me from my favourite obstacle: Mud Mile. It’s an alternating sequence of mud piles and mud pits, one after another, like filthy great corrugations in the earth.
You start by slipping into the slop, then clawing your way up the next slope, trying to get a foothold or a finger into the various divots and ditches carved by the mudders who came before you. You can’t help but lose balance and fall, slipping back into the muck, colliding with people along the way. Once on top of any peak, you turn and extend help to those behind you, knowing it’s almost impossible to do these courses alone, without others pushing and pulling you through.
I did it with my brothers, so it was all too easy to be drawn back to the memory of one day from when we were kids, when Mum let us walk across a slowly evaporating billabong in the country. The surface was cracked so we thought it was bone-dry, but it was more like the skin on a bowl of soup. Our feet plunged through the claggy surface into wet clay, then slipped in the sludge until we had brown feet and knees, elbows and arms, faces and bums. The way we picked up the mud to throw it at one another was natural, automatic, almost inevitable, like the summery equivalent of a snowball fight. It was furious and filthy and fun.
We were definitely playing then. I’m glad we’re still playing now.
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