Commitment to sports

This is going to be a strange post. It’s about my personal struggle with committing to athletic activities that I start but never end up following through with. The cycle goes like this: I find a cool sport to do, start doing it, get really into it, and a few weeks or so later, I lose all interest and abandon it forever. I hate myself for it, but I haven’t, in my twenty five years of existence, found a good way to deal with this.

I used to take really intense kickboxing classes a couple of years ago. It was an extremely high intensity workout three times a week that kept me in great shape. I loved every minute of it as well. I moved up the belt ranks really quickly and was having a blast. It went on like this for six months, until suddenly I just…lost all interest. It happened very suddenly and came out of nowhere. Every time it would be time to go to kickboxing class, I’d have absolutely no motivation to go. I forced myself to keep going, but the little dedication I could muster eventually died out in a few weeks and I never went any more.

An eerily similar pattern has followed with every sport I’ve tried. Running, biking, basketball, skiing, swimming, weightlifting, and even kung-fu. Keep in mind though, in those initial few weeks that I do it, I get really into it. I order all sorts of equipment, gear, and mentally prep myself to have a great time. But the inevitable day comes where I don’t want to do it anymore, and it’s quite frustrating to deal with.

I wasn’t raised in an athletic family that encouraged exercise, so there wasn’t much coming from my parents’ side in terms of passing on the buck when it came to sports. Even in school, I would try to skip gym whenever possible and try to sneak into the art studio or the library to spend time there instead, so I guess feats of athleticism were never in my radar. When you don’t grow up doing that one sport, it’s kinda hard to just jump into something new, even at the relatively young age of 25. This is likely why I gravitated towards more mentally stimulating activities as a child, like reading science-fiction books, playing narrative-rich video games, and watching lots of suspense/thriller films.

The irony is that I’m acutely aware of the importance of regular exercise. We need  to get our heartbeats above the resting levels three to four times a week in order for the heart to properly pump blood to all essential organs and muscles. We need  to break a sweat a few times per week in order to prepare the body for more taxing activities later. We need  to flex and stretch those muscles that don’t get used on a daily basis sitting in an office all day.

And yet, here I am — trying out lots of different things and not being able to stick with any of them. Plenty of people find it very easy to go to the gym every other day and lift some weights. They’ve probably doing it so long that they’ve managed to ingrain it as a part of their lives. I lasted five months and then tapered off. The anxiety that I feel from knowing that I’m not doing the best thing I can for my body is almost on the level of existential dread that you feel sometimes when you start contemplating the vastness of the universe. That’s when I freak out and start doing a hundred push-ups. It’s a weird feeling.

Most of the time, I just try not to think about it and do things I enjoy. I’ll boot up my favorite videogame and have a blast. I’ll sit down with a good book and read into the night. These are things I’ve been doing for a very long time and feel comfortable doing. There’s no physical activity that I resonate with strongly enough that I crave doing it. It’s an oddly bittersweet thing and one that’s been on my mind a lot lately, so I had to put it down in words. Maybe over time, I’ll figure it out, but for now, it’s a strange struggle between ebb and flow — like a wave that crests too early and breaks too soon, never to reach the shore.