Al Kyte's Life Take-Aways

   

I wasn’t enjoying the party.  There was nothing interesting there to capture my attention. Then a young man arrived and all that changed.  He had just returned from the Calavaras frog jump where his frog had won for the second year in a row.

I was instantly curious.  What process or preparations did it take to win such a prestigious event?  We talked and he told me he had first entered a frog three years before.  That frog had failed to even jump when the competition started.  He had noticed that some of the people who entered frogs had a “stable” of frogs, not just one.  He thought about that.

A month before the next year’s jump, this young man went to a slough in the nearby San Joaquin valley and captured as many frogs as he could.  Then he systematically began to hold his own competitions between his frogs.  Soon he began to identify those with the most impressive jumping tendencies, and gradually narrowed the field to his “final four”.

In the week before the celebrated contest, he held his final trials and drove to the site of the jump.  He was successful.  His best frog won the event and was crowned the champion.  When no-one was looking, my new friend returned his winning frog to a well-marked spot in his home slough and kept a “look-alike” frog for the photo ops.

Now, a year later, he had repeated that process and won for a second year in a row.  As he excitedly finished his account of these events, one of the party-goers near me asked him,  “Do you like to eat frog’s legs?”  The young man blanched, seeming to turn three shades whiter and replied,  “What?  Eat your athletes?”

That turned out to be a pretty good party after all.