What would my life have been like if I'd been sporty?

And similar days-between-the-years questions

Sunday Blog 214 - 21st December 2025

"I wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been sporty," I found myself asking my very sporty husband recently.

Ours is a union of very different people. For me to have ended up with a sporty non-drinker is as unlikely as Trump deciding that perhaps he is not the expert in, well, anything. Yet here we are.

I’m not sure what prompted my sporty what-if question. Some possible influences;

1. I’m listening to Brene Brown’s latest book, Strong Ground. It has a lot of sports and coaching metaphors. I mean, a lot. If it’s important to Brene, it’s important to me.

2. My social media feed is full of images of the stretching exercises I need to do in order to finally achieve the suppleness I dream of. It’s all in the ankles, apparently.

3. Meanwhile, thirty years into a regular yoga practice without achieving the perfect forward bend, nose pressed to knees, I’m thinking maybe my run is just too late.

Hence my question.

A couple of years ago, my social media feed was full of knee stretches. I began to incorporate daily knee manoeuvres into my daily routine. As I was holidaying with others, we all began to embrace our heavily accented tutor as he took us through the sequences of exercises. But that didn’t last. I found an abandoned video on my desktop entitled “Chanje Legs” because that’s exactly how he pronounced it.

Whether the secret is knee stretches, or ankle stretches, is there just a cut-off point in your youth when if you are not sporty you lose the flexibility option forever?

Dodging sport in 1970s Perth was actually quite strenuous. Choosing not to play netball made me just as big a schoolyard freak as my lack of access to commercial TV shows. There was so much in the playground I couldn’t follow. Because our family culture was all about education and marks. While other families (like my husbands) went to the beach and surfed for hours, our most energetic workouts were mental. The marathon of mental dexterity we would subject ourselves to in order to come up with the best next line in the latest “sung to the tune of” song. You could hear our brains whirring with the effort to think of a rhyming lyric with the right amount of mockery. Or we might vie to be the first to have read the full works of Jane Austen, including Love and Freindship (sic) and Sandition.

Another action shot of me reading in bed in the 1990s, to match the picture of me reading Jane Austen at Versailles

“How do you think your life would have been different?” darling husband asked.

“Maybe I would be more flexible. And I would have been more confident.”

So many awkward 1980s and 1990s moments came from my almost total physical ineptitude and green inexperience. Trying to board a yacht and losing my footing, dropping a shoe in the Swan River. Feeling panic if someone asked me if I wanted a game of tennis. A decade living in Europe avoiding any kind of holiday invitation that might include skiing.

“I would have been more embodied, less in my head,” I continued.

But he’s moved on to other things, and I’m left to finish the thought for myself. So I decide to be grateful that I found yoga 30 years ago and be happy with my rickety knees and that even though I can’t always touch my toes, I can be more embodied in my third act in life. I can still do yoga every day.