Topic: Athleticism

I was an athletic child. 

I’m not bragging, it was just a fact of life; like my height or my skin color.

The only girl, I enjoyed playing “boy” games with my cousin and brothers. As a result, I loved football and baseball, track and field, martial arts… anything that required strength, speed, and agility.

It wasn’t just sports. I was good at anything physical: climbing, running, swimming. I was a natural.

When I was in 2^nd grade I joined the school softball team. I was really excited to play, but my dreams of victory on the baseball diamond were short-lived.

See, I was the only girl on the team. I was also the only black kid and both of those things made my mother nervous. This was the 1970s when girls were still expected to be girls and play with dolls.

But Tatum O’Neil’s character in the Bad News Bears was my hero and I wanted to play softball.

My mother, being the one with the car, won that argument.

When I was even younger, I asked Santa for football gear for Christmas.

I got a doll house.

That was pretty much the story of my life back then. Any athletic dreams I had were crushed under the wheels of what girls should be.

After a while I kind of gave up.

I lost my interest in sports and became one of those artsy-fartsy kids, who spent a lot of time indoors coloring and plotting world domination.

By the time I was in high-school I could barely tell the difference between a touchdown and a home run. Sports, I had decided, were for losers. Thick-necked, lummoxes with IQs barely higher than a baseball bat.

But I couldn’t completely shed my athleticism, and it came out in little ways.

Dance, for instance.

Put me on a dance floor and I became positively acrobatic and uninhibited with the sheer joy of movement.

I remember being in college and putting on a pair of ice skates for the first time. Rather than struggling and falling down, I took to it as if I were standing on flat ground – moving easily and effortlessly around the rink.

And I finally got my chance to play softball, in college, with a bunch of nerds who were more interested in tapping the keg than tapping someone out. Still, despite our less-than-serious participation, I managed to become something of a pitcher with quite a few strike outs under my belt.

But that didn’t last. I put softball behind me as soon as I graduated and settled into a sedentary adulthood.

That is, until I started going to the gym.

It was slow going at first. After years of not being athletic, I had to rebuild my strength and stamina. But it didn’t take long for me to get into the swing of things.

I started taking yoga every morning before work, and I got really good at it. Then I moved on to cardio and weights in the evenings. When I wasn’t at the gym, I was walking for miles at a time.

There were a couple of years there where I was so active that I would have put the childhood me to shame. And I loved every minute of it.

In fact, I loved it so much that I decided to go back to school to become a trainer and share that love with other people.

Things were going really well too, until I caught that flu.

With a name like “the flu” it sounds like a minor inconvenience. It actually even sounds a little cute. Like “Aww! Look at that! It’s a little flu! Hi Flu!”

But the flu is no joke. That shit can fuck you up.

It fucked me up.

I spent a week in bed, and when the initial flu passed, I lost the hearing in my left ear for two months. Worse yet, I was hit with this bone-crushing fatigue that I couldn’t shake.

I’d think I was fine and go to the gym only to emerge sweaty, shaky, and weak 15 minutes later. The fatigue stayed with me for months and would hit in earnest at the oddest times.

It took the better part of a year for me to get over it.

But the flu wasn’t done with me yet.

Over the years, I started to notice that my body no longer responded to exercise the way it used to. Instead of getting progressively stronger, I felt like I was damaging and weakening my muscles.

I started to gain weight, no matter how active I was or what I ate.

I had strange pains in my muscles and joints.

I was cold all the time and the fatigue that I thought I’d gotten over would rear it’s ugly head at the most inopportune times.

Having taken anatomy and physiology and pathology, I thought my thyroid was the problem.

Turns out it was, but that it would take six years for a doctor to finally take me seriously. By then, it was too late.

What years of sedentary living couldn’t erase, an autoimmune disease destroyed.

Well, maybe “destroyed” is too strong a word.

The easy athleticism of my youth is gone. At 48, I’m lucky if I can navigate a flight of stairs without pain. And the fatigue is a constant companion, loitering in the periphery, just waiting to pounce whenever I get sick or my resistance gets too low. 

I have to say that I miss it.

Looking back, I wish that I had fought more for my right to be an active, athletic girl. That I had claimed and owned my athleticism more. Maybe I would have turned into one of those thick-necked jocks, but maybe not.

There’s no way to known now.

I just wish I’d made the most of it when I had it.