From parkour to freediving: How I tried 35 different sports
My name is Ira, I am 27 years old, and I decided to try 50 kinds of sports in a little over four months. But in order to tell what led me to this, I will go back a step.
For a year and a half, I wore sneakers every morning, stuck headphones in my ears, pressed the "Run" button in my application, and ran out of the doorway. During this time, I changed several apartments, work, met with different boyfriends, but one thing was consistently and beautifully - every morning I started with running. Now I remember this with the same feeling as childhood or first love.
Than only I have not tried to do this in my life: dancing, tennis, cycling, yoga, swimming, even bought a subscription to a cool fitness club. But every time in a few months, I caught myself looking for a reason not to go to the gym. Then I start to suffer from the thought that I have to go there. Then I release myself from this suffering, having made the decision after a long torment to leave the sport for a while. Then one evening I suddenly decided that I would go for a run tomorrow morning. And since then came out every day, no matter what happens. I was really addicted to the state of flight that the run gave me. To the music, the rhythm, the pleasant feeling from the soft landing on the asphalt of my sneakers. I ran wherever I was, and was happy.
First, I had enough to run three kilometers every morning, just for my own pleasure. But very quickly it became interesting to try to run more and fit in a certain time. A year later, for the first time I took part in the massive White Nights race and ran 10 kilometers out of an hour. Not a great achievement, but it was important to me. Then there were 10 kilometers at the Moscow Marathon, I felt fine and wanted to build momentum. In March I registered for the half-marathon in Sochi and began to prepare for it, I even took one lesson from a professional trainer. I had to run more, and I liked it. True, I began to notice that after long trainings (more than fifteen kilometers) my knees hurt for several days. I thought that this was the case for everyone, smeared them with warming compounds or wound an elastic bandage. My relatives were distressed by my pains, and several times they advised me to go to the doctor, but I didn’t want to even hear about it - the doctor could forbid me to run the half marathon.
Having run it, I was happy! But she was not going to stop there. Of course, I had to take the main height of any athlete - a marathon. Outlined a training plan - now went out for 10-15 kilometers every day. After a week in this mode, I was full of energy, but with difficulty I went down the stairs from pain in my knees. And finally decided to consult a doctor. I took this as a formality. Then there was an MRI, the surgeon's appointment and his verdict: "You had better stop running." In the first seconds I didn’t seem to understand and asked: “How?” - and here I came to the meaning of his words. The doctor continued to say something, but I no longer heard him. At first she held back, and then exploded and burst into tears in her voice, spreading mascara on her face. Before my eyes flashed pictures of all my runs. As I ran, and running in any case gave me strength. He was like the best friend and the perfect medicine - and this friend was gone. “I'm sorry. Find yourself another sport,” the doctor told me goodbye.
I sobbed, leaving the office, and a few hours after. Then I wrote a post on Facebook, where everyone sent me rays of goodness and advised the same thing - to find another sport for themselves. The first few days I could not even hear about it. I ran across the apartment at things related to running: heart rate monitor, uniform, gels, bottles of isotonic in the refrigerator. It's like finding a reminder at home after breaking up with him. Not only did they deprive me of my favorite sport, the goal that I had lived during the last few months, to run a marathon, also became unattainable.
At the weekend, in order to distract myself, I dragged myself to ride a bike with friends. I was driving and I thought that the bike was cool, but still not running. And then it dawned on me: since I have to choose a new sport for myself, I’ll come to this seriously - I will try, for example, fifty kinds, and I will choose one of them. The idea immediately took shape in the Challenge, my friends supported me and helped me to put on different kinds of sports in order to make sure that there really are fifty of them. Now I know that there are a lot more of them, and perhaps I will not stop at fifty. On the same evening, April 17, I posted a video on YouTube in which I promised to try fifty sports before the end of the summer and write a post about each post in my blog. There was no turning back. The key point was that the challenge looked impressive even in comparison with the marathon - no less a worthy replacement goal.
From that moment it all began. I was constantly searching for studios, recording for trial classes, studying and on my way home writing posts to my blog with reviews of sports in which I had just taken the first steps. Sometimes it was possible to go to 4-5 workouts a week, sometimes there were breaks. I must say that finding good studios, understanding their schedule, signing up and arriving was not such an easy task. I let out a big cry for friends and colleagues and received a lot of advice from them. But the most valuable thing was when they took me to workouts with them - as if they opened the world of their favorite sport for me, which they adored as much as I once loved running.
Gradually, my idea and blog began to gain popularity, and even strangers began to contact me periodically. Basically, they wrote to me about the sport, which they madly love, and offered to go to practice with them. So I, for example, got into Dmitry Sautin’s school in diving. Periodically, I summed up the intermediate results, recalled all my trainings and compared them. To date, in my piggy bank 35 sports. Interestingly, most of the trial workouts in decent studios are free. But there are paid ones, and very expensive ones, so I spent about the same amount of money as I would have spent on regular exercises of the same sport.
Most of all I liked boxing, football and freediving. Perhaps, if something else more beautiful does not appear, I will focus on one of them or even on everything together. Boxing is an endless burst of energy, after training comes amazing peace, as if there was no long hard day and exhausting load. Football turned out to be a surprisingly beautiful sport: a huge green field illuminated by searchlights, fresh air and excitement. And free diving is about the ability to relax, to be distracted from the hustle and bustle and as if to soar in space without gravity.
There were several water sports with boards; now I understand the differences between windsurfing and kitesurfing, a board for simple surfing and glanders, I understand how to catch the wind in a sail and kite and what are the features of wakeboarding and wake surfing. Three surfing trainings started with tears, because I am very afraid of the waves and was ready to come up with any reason to quit and not go. The fact is that at the age of 13 I almost drowned in the Atlantic, and the waves since then have been one of my biggest fears. I put on a wetsuit, took a board, approached the surf line and seemed to fall into a stupor: I couldn’t make myself step further, trust these waves. What made me do it anyway? I think the memories of some other, even steeper achievements. For me, only this always works. "You jumped with a parachute from a height of four thousand meters - will you really get scared now and you will not be able to ride the waves?" - I say to myself and take a step, preferably without looking.
Not without a fight: I attended classes in various martial arts (karate, wushu), boxing, capoeira. At the lesson on capoeira, no one came except for me, and therefore we worked together with the coach and his young son. It was especially strange when the coach took out musical instruments and said that capoeira begins with playing music. He himself played a Brazilian instrument resembling a bow, his son pounded the drum, and they gave me a rattle. This lasted for about twenty minutes, and in addition to the game, we also had to sing in Portuguese.
Hand-to-hand combat turned out to be the toughest. I got into a group that has been involved for quite some time, and everyone there got used to sparring. In fact, the whole lesson consisted of an hour and a half sparring - I was paired up with different partners, they all wanted to train and therefore beat me mercilessly. No matter how much I asked to slow down a little and not to beat me with all my strength, this did not reach anyone, because they were used to fighting. I will not hide that it angered me so much that I myself was glad to throw out aggression in strikes.
We were pleasantly surprised by aerial gymnastics - pole dance and air rings. As a child I loved to hang on trees or crossbeams, climbed on them like a monkey - residual skills were very useful. Acrobatics, balancing act and parkour turned out to be quite complex. I signed up for a parkour class as an adult group, but when I came, I found out that it consisted of guys, 14-15 years old, who were frolicking and jumping with might and main. It turned out that this is a purely teenage sport, not particularly interesting for adults. I called out, but I felt strange in the society of schoolchildren.
Before practicing hot yoga, I was warned that I had to go on an empty stomach and drink before taking more water. But when you have a new sport every day, a new equipment, instructions and warnings, you stop remembering them. In general, I caught myself drinking coffee with cream and tasting a nutty sweet bar ten minutes before the start of class. In an amicable way, it was worthwhile to postpone the workout, but I did not. To say that I barely survived her is to say nothing. The main role was played, probably, by coffee, but it seemed to me that I would faint from the heat right now. Fortunately, everything ended well.
There were also rowing, and shooting from military weapons, and tracking in the mountains, and much more. As I expected, the most boring sports are those that best allow you to pump a figure: aerobics and all sorts of fitness. In team sports (badminton, football), I always complexed that I let down the guys who took me to the team, because I can hardly do anything.
In general, many people told me that the very idea of trying a bunch of sports at once was a real amateurishness. I cannot achieve any success in any one; I will feel all the time worse, losing and will not get any benefit. But I would not say that. First, oddly enough, in one lesson you can learn a lot about the sport, take the first steps in it. Understand whether he is interesting to you, if his idea and philosophy are close to you. Secondly, if you are in principle in good shape, then the first steps in many activities are not so difficult. Plus, they complement each other: I was taught to stand on my head in a balancing act, and then I proudly demonstrated it on capoeira. Thirdly, it is useful for the body to change its type of activity all the time - it allows you to stay in shape, be ready for anything. Today you play badminton, and tomorrow you do classical ballet. Today, to a shiver in your hands you conquer the climbing wall, and tomorrow you swim in a different style in the pool at Luzhniki.
Separately, I will say a few words about fears. I am in fact a terrible coward, and in most of the classes I had to overcome myself very hard. I got up on my hands on acrobatics (even with the support of a coach). Jumped from a springboard into the water. I tried to perform simple tricks on a longboard. Each time a lump compressed in my throat, and I wanted to run away and quit everything. And I am grateful to myself that I did not quit.
But still this is not the most important thing. The main thing is the people I met on my way, real fans and professionals in their field. In appearance, perhaps the most ordinary, but when you observe them in action, there is nobody more beautiful in the world. I talked a lot to people. About why they chose this sport, about their first steps, about what they want to achieve. With middle-aged women who want to master boxing. With teenagers in the classroom parkour. With climbers in a mountain shelter at an altitude of more than four thousand meters. With surfers at the station. And I realized that for many of them, sport gives the strength to live on - experiencing problems at work, quarrels with a partner, and just occasionally rolling anguish.
The world of sport is great, and everyone will find a place there. Since I came up with this challenge and run my blog, several of my friends found it thanks to him that they had the strength to try something that they had long wanted. Someone went to the same studios that I recommended. Someone chose others, but still went, tried, and then, perhaps, stayed. And this is also very important - with my idea I helped not only to survive the separation from the run, but also to someone else to find myself.
Photo: Ira Filimonova / Instagram
