The first sport I ever had to engage in was dance. My parents’ story is that I kept running into walls, and so out of concern, they enrolled me in baby dance classes at the age of three. I have a clear memory from one of my first classes, of getting lost in a profound daydream of performing for an audience. The teacher had to call my name SEVERAL TIMES because I was too lost in thought while blowing kisses at my pretend audience. For my first ever dance performance, we performed as baby bumblebees, which I think probably fit thematically with the chaos of a bunch three-year-olds dancing around a stage. I’d stay in these dance classes until I was 12 and only ever be mediocre, but they did provide meaningful time learning to move my body, even if I did find the dynamics of socializing with my classmates to be confusing at best. The reason I was allowed to quit, at last, was that I was going to start training for the cross country team. Our school only had a high school team, but students in the eight grade were allowed to try out for it and students in the 7th grade allowed to train for the team in anticipation of joining. I joined as a baby trainee and plodded along, slower than slow, behind the rest of the runners. Even the other 7th and 8th grade kids could lap me. That summer, I ran almost every day. By the time we came back in the fall of my 8th grade year, I was keeping pace with a number of the other runners, much to my surprise. With the test coming up, I pushed myself to keep up with them as much as I could.
While staying with my grandma that fall, I pulled a copy of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe off the shelf. I read it once, then again and again. Though the boy in the story ultimately protests by refusing to win a race, it wasn’t the meaning of the story that stuck with me at the time, but the feeling of running, the solitude and the motion, in the story, that lodged itself into my brain. It might have been the first time I actually felt somewhat seen by a short story. The night before the test, I sat on the floor and visualized completing the mile, running it under the time limit, making it onto the JV team. The next day, at school, it was my turn to take the test. This was a special test, just to determine if an 8th grader could meet the athletic requirements to be on the high school JV team. It might have been a state thing because I remember the rationale was that the kid had to prove they were physically developed enough to keep up. I don’t really know why it existed. I do know that the high schoolers didn’t have to take it.
It was just me, one girl, and one boy from the middle school who were trying for the team. The boy went first and made it, long skinny legs and all. Then, it was my turn to run with the girl. She was taller and faster than me and sped ahead, finishing in more than enough time. I kept up my pace, running as fast as I could without running myself into the ground too early. The minutes ticked by. With each of four laps, I only just made it in a quarter of the allotted time. The entirety of the high school team gathered at the edge of the track for my final lap. They started to scream my name. I ran faster. They screamed harder. I pushed my feet into the springy track material and sprinted for the final eight of a mile, over the finish line with only a few seconds to spare. I’d actually made the team. It was one of the first times I’d wanted to do something that was a long shot, and then had actually been able to achieve it.
Running had already been my comfort, but now it was something I could be proud of. Running, at first, three miles, then five, then twelve in a day, after school, through parks and past stores and up and down residential streets lined with houses and apartment buildings, all before ipods were very accessible, when there was only silence and my thoughts — gave me a chance to seek refuge in my own thoughts during those early queer years.
That, and considering, I’d later have my first experience with gay sex in the back of a cross country bus on the way to an away meet, I certainly don’t regret pushing myself to join the team. There is so much of me and my identity wrapped up in those cross country days. I feel like I owe the sport a lot for giving me a place where I could move my body but be in my head.
Comments
i love this roundtable! i’ve been reclaiming sports gayness as a comically unathletic person (which is partly due to my disability but didn’t know that until relatively recently) after a childhood of being really, really bad
i played a bat-and-ball sport for ten! ten years of my childhood and tragically i was bad at throwing, catching, running, and hitting. strategy and rules, however, are my forte, so i’d holler advice from my spot warming the bench and earn awards like ‘most enthusiastic’
in a twist of fate that i find deeply funny i now help coach a baseball team for a special olympics offshoot in my town, where we modify rules and actions for our players’ access, and turns out knowing what advice to holler is exactly what coaching is!
For most of my childhood I thought I wasn’t athletic because I thought I was fat (I wasn’t, I was just bigger and taller than my many thin friends) and because I didn’t run very fast. But after discovering my 🙌one true sport🙌 of rugby in college and coming to a new understanding of my body’s strength and power, I looked back and realized I had always been super athletic! I did gymnastics and figure skating when I was little, then swimming in middle and high school and was a pretty good second base softball player who made all the teams from elementary through high school.
But rugby really changed my life. The love (queer and friend) on that team and joy of having my size be explicitly praised and valued was incredible. I played all through college, then for a couple of years after with a club team, then when my body developed new disability while I was in grad school I volunteered to help coach the undergrad women’s team and taught a whole new generation of big young women/woman-adjacent folks to love their power. Truly nothing has ever brought me quite as much joy as transforming timid players who spent their lives trying to make their body smaller to GET BIG and enjoy their strength. It still makes me teary!! Plus getting the chance to mentor all those babies through the queer team drama was quite an experience…
Have you seen No Woman No Try on Amazon prime?
What you say about rugby’s validation of bigger, stronger bodies really comes across in this documentary. I found it interesting and surprisingly emotional!
This is so good. I’ve been thinking about this for days now.
My mother signed me up for like every sport – gymnastics, soccer, volley ball, swimming, tennis. I tried them all and I was just bad at most of them, although I did love swimming lessons. It took me decades to realize that part of why my mom wanted me to be in sports is that girls weren’t allowed to play sports when she grew up in the 50s and she really wanted me to enjoy the post Title IX opportunities that she didn’t have. Plus, she was naturally athletic and I was not. I just wanted to be left alone so I could go read my book in my favorite tree.
Between my undiagnosed ADHD, my lack of coordination and not much natural ability, organized sporting activities involving adults telling me what to do just weren’t my thing. I did love jumping rope, roller skating, kick-the-can and other kids playing outside type activities.
I mostly grew up in a Midwestern college town where football was the civic religion and in high school I rebelled by hating football and all competitive sports.
As an adult, I still don’t care much for sportsball but I do love walking and hiking and moving my body.
I really need to hear this “gay sex in the back of the team bus” story now