#Regular Funk Crusher

[michaelcameron]

My Year In Sports

A few years ago I went through a real funk and to deal with it, I started going for walks. At night I would walk through my neighbourhood, sometimes for a couple of blocks other times for a couple of hours and while I walked, I got my head clear and figured out what I was going to do to turn myself around.  While I did it, I really started thinking about what made me happy because I realized that my work, despite what I had always thought, was no longer doing it for me.  I knew this because in the months that my business  lost money, I was unhappy and in the months that I was profitable, I was still unhappy.  It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy work anymore, I still did, but it wasn’t everything like it used to be.  Once I figured this out, I began to really examine what made me happy and one of the things that I realized was that some of my happiest moments in my life were during my teens when I was playing sports with my friends.  I loved mountain biking, playing tennis, doing karate and running and I realized that I had to get back to doing those things.  There were great stress releases and at that time, I definitely had a lot of stress in my life.  

With that, I started making sure that I was getting out on a regular basis and just doing something because sitting around the house and worrying or going to work, wasn’t helping me.  One of the things that I did was I began playing badminton.  I had played a lot in high-school and while I wasn’t great...or even good, I had a lot of fun playing it and so I started playing Monday night and Thursday during the day.  The first Monday night that I went and played at the Magna Centre (the community centre) was a pride crusher.  Within the first five minutes of playing I was quickly relegated to the far end of the gym.  The far end of the gym was a little like the Island of Misfit Toys where the less skilled players lived and struggled, but like an ugly ducking that just came into their looks, I quickly became committed to climbing the social ladder (like a teen flick from the 80′s without all the angst) and making my way to the opposite end of the gym where the good players were.  Over time, as I played, I remembered how much I loved the game and each day that I went back and played, I remembered more, learned something new and my game improved and while I never got to play with the really good players, I did improve and take a couple of steps off of that island.  My interest in badminton eventually faded and I needed to move on to something different. 

Since badminton, I’ve gone to hockey school (for adults...it wasn’t a Billy Madison kind of thing) and started playing shinny at lunch, taken up climbing, gone back to training in BJJ and karate, and revisited skateboarding and tennis (two from my youth).  While I’ve jumped around from activity to activity, I’ve realized a few things.  First, the people that I do these activities with are the reason that I love doing them.  I love seeing my BJJ friends, climbing with my buddy that insists we call each other Hans and Frans and form a climbing team called Climbing Walls and Crushing Balls and when that asshole shows up at hockey, I steer clear of him.  Second, I’ve realized that I like being crappy at things because it lets me experience the greatest improvements.  Really great athletes are maxing out their skills and so when they improve, they do so in minuscule increments.  This is really impressive if you’re going to the Olympics but we all know that unless the quality of athletes takes a massive nosedive, I’m not going and so it’s not for me.  Call this attitude whatever you want (most likely childish impatience) but I like experiencing big strides of improvement and I experience those early on when I take up a new activity.  So, last week for example, when I finally got above the lip of the pool while skating (a pretty basic accomplishment), it was a really exciting, scary and satisfying moment for me.

Finally, I realized that I just like staying busy and not getting into too much of a routine because that predictability doesn’t do me any good.  Sometimes life seems a little like Groundhogs day when I wake up on a Wednesday morning and I know exactly what’s going to happen that day.  But, for those thirty to sixty minutes when I’m going to be running, jumping, skating and shooting and feeling these great little moments of success and achievement, those moments are often some of the greatest moment of my day and if I don’t know what they’re going to be or when they’re going to come, that’s really exciting for me, gives me something new to look forward to and keeps me feeling good.

Stay active.  

[weekends-freiburg]