Since I was a kid, I had an inclination towards sports. Not a passion, more like a thing. I was never the best at any, but I liked most sports and anything that had to do with running. I was a kid so I did not comprehended nor considered the health benefits of it, it was just fun. The place where I grew up was not very famous for any sport, and the common mentality was that you can not build a career in sports. So I took that advice and always considered sports as a past time, a side thing one should do for fun.
At grade school I played most sports as a part of PE, but Volleyball was the one that felt most natural. It was kind of an individual sport (contactless), yet very much a team sport at the same time. So I liked it, and I played it through high school. I played and competed with my high school team. Even though we never won any significant competition, I still loved it.
After migrating for college I realized that in my country, cities are "one sport cities", take it or leave it. Bitola was a handball city at that time, consequently it was very difficult to join a volleyball club and continue my hobby. Simply, there were no volleyball clubs there.
Welcome individual sports.
The first thing I did was Ping Pong (Table Tennis). It was fun, but soon I hit a ceiling, and there was no where to go from there. I played with the best kids in my school, and I was among the best. There was no one to learn from. Mind you, this was before Youtube.
After that time I started experimenting with extreme sports. They were mostly individual, so I did not had to rely on clubs existence, nor finding people willing to play with. Also most of them had inverse logarithmic learning curve, which I like, so technically there is no ceiling you can hit, you can always self improve, even at a slow pace. And the improvement is individual, no rush, no pressure. In a sense most of them are kind of freestyle. Wrongfully named extreme, I would call them freestyle sports and I learned to love them throughout college.
This was a long intro into the next several posts that I will put out and link them here once they are done. I will address each sport I practice, what they mean for me, what they brought in my life, what I learned from each and how it made me a better person, both physically and mentally. Ah, yes, the injuries I have sustained as well😋
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