How To Successfully Manipulate Yourself Into Not Hating Sports

Written by Eldis

I hate sports. I always have. I did not like PE in school, I never dreamed of pursuing a successful athletic career, and for the final year of the annual mandatory soccer competition between the schools in our district, I managed to convince my teacher that I'd do great as a cheerleader instead of a player, allowing me to just stand on the sidelines and yell out rhymes I had come up with previously, rather than run after a ball. Sports and I are just not a good combination. It’s like fish and lemon pie. Or a cold quattro formaggi pizza and a Nutella topping. Or Bellatrix and pink flowery dresses. It makes nobody happy to think about, and the world would be better off without it.

There is, then, very little that can explain my joy upon graduating high school. I was finally free not only from annoying classmates, persistent teasing and that one frustrating English teacher I could not get along with, but also from those endless, torturous hours of PE I had to suffer through multiple times each week. Also no more maths, but that is a different story on its own. I was free to pursue the thing I am really passionate about: sitting still and reading, preferably with a large mug of tea and a couple of chocolate chip cookies to keep me company. With no more mandatory sports at uni, I was free, free, endlessly free.

Emphasis on the "was".

You see, reading isn't always the healthiest thing to do. Sitting hunched over, a book squished between myself and my laptop, holding down the pages with my lower arms whilst typing out a summary as I'm reading along, is not the greatest posture to hold for hours on end. Especially not when combined with reading for fun in the evenings and plenty of scrolling on my phone. With the additional fun complication that I have always been a Worrier™. I regularly introduce myself, jokingly, as "Hi! I'm Eldis and I worry." Do any of you know Doney Meryl's Christian picture book The Very Worried Sparrow? Because I have always related to that sparrow. And a fun fact about worrying: it's not just a mental thing, it is a physical thing too. It settles in your muscles.

And my muscles, after suffering through all that for well over two decades, decided to protest. And protest they do. Loudly and painfully.

In other words: I have had chronic back issues for the past 8 years or so, and, in the last two years, my shoulders and neck have decided to join in on the fun.

And I am. In Pain™.

I can still function, and I can pretend like it doesn't hurt - I'm very lucky in that sense, I can still move and go about my day like any other human being. But it is not exactly pleasant, to say the least.

Enter my darling mother, someone I love very much and who is, as I have mentioned in the Quibbler before, a very wise woman. And a woman who really loves her children and does not want them to suffer. So she finally convinced me to actually go to a professional doctor who specialises in chronic pain.

This brings us back to sports.

You see, this professional doctor who specialises in chronic pain uttered 5 damning words: "sport three hours a week". Dear reader, my heart shattered, my world collapsed, and my hope of a glorious sudden magically easy and painless future sank through the floor. Sports. I had to do sports! Of all things!

But alas, the pain had reached a level that was higher than my disdain for sports had ever reached, even though I had not thought it possible. So I got myself a gym membership at a local gym whose vibe I liked, where, when I came to take a look, I saw other people who clearly were not sporty either. And I, obediently, started to work out. Three times a week, on Mondays,

Wednesdays and Fridays, I obediently drag myself out of bed and to the gym, where I spend an hour lifting and pushing and dragging weights around in the hope that my muscles get strengthened in the correct way, so they, instead of continually being stiff, can actually support my spine – something I'm told is a relatively important body part.

On the first day, I brought a book. On the first day, I immediately figured out that was highly impractical.

The warm up went fine. You can very easily read whilst cycling on a stationary bike. (If you are Dutch like me, you can even quite easily read whilst cycling on an actually moving bike in traffic. It is not recommended, but it works great for last-minute revisions on your way to school. Do as I say, not as I do, people.) It went wrong when I had to do the other exercises.

You see, this gym is very modern. And very high tech. So the machines where you have to push/pull/ drag weights have little screens where you can select how heavy it should be. And those screens show, when you start, a little waving path, and a little ball that has to follow the path and, like Snake or Pacman, eat the little dots on its way. This is so you will push/pull/ drag in the correct rhythm at the correct speed so you don't hurt yourself by making the wrong movements. Which is great, but means I can not push/pull/drag and read at the same time, because I have to watch the screen.

And besides, I frequently need my arms to push/ pull/drag, so there is nothing to hold the book with.

The stage, now, is set. One gym. One bookless Eldis. Three hours of working out a week. How to survive those? How to stay motivated (beyond the faint hope of no more constant pain)?

Enter audiobooks. Enter, specifically, Librivox.

Librivox is a website that is run by volunteers, and it has a whole bunch of free audiobooks narrated by volunteers. The books are all in the public domain, making their project entirely legal.

And, my dear and gentle readers. Isn't it a wonderful coincidence that I'm on a mission to read every single decently well-known English literary novel?

Yes. My secret to dragging myself out of bed at 6.45 three mornings a week to do a thing I absolutely detest and I'm not even being paid for to do (I do, in fact, have to pay to do it!) is my incessant, annoying, overwhelming love for English literature. And, at the moment of writing, Jane Austen in particular. From her finished novels, I still have to read both Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey. With Elizabeth Klatt's wonderful voice reading out the latter, at the rate of about 2-3 chapters per workout, I'm slowly pushing, pulling and dragging my way to having read all of Austen's finished works. And since I only allow myself to listen to the book when I'm in the gym, and I have forced myself to not get a physical copy to read, I now find myself almost looking forward to my three mornings of torture a week. Because I want to know how Catherine will deal with John Thorpe! When she will next meet Henry Tilney! What Eleanor Tilney will say about Catherine when the latter is forced to cancel an appointment! Is there indeed a skeleton behind the black veil in The Mysteries of Udolpho? I will only discover the answers when I'm listening, and I will only listen when I'm working out.

And that, my gentle Quibblerers, is how I conditioned myself into not hating the absolute thought of sports. With Austen's well-timed wit read aloud in a kind voice, distracting me from the fact that movement and I are as great a combination as John Thorpe and poor Catherine Morland, who might not be born to be a heroine, but is certainly in training to be one.