Doctoral Delusion column: Sports Sadness

Original to be found here: http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/columns/0032793-doctoral-delusion-sports-sadness.html

I need someone to take all the sports off the telly, please. Also someone to do all my marathon and water polo training for me. At the moment, sport is the biggest distraction to my thesis. If I’m not watching it, I’m training to compete in it. Wimbledon, the Tour de France, the Commonwealth Games – I’ve enjoyed every minute, almost definitely to the detriment of all the writing I’m supposed to be doing.

I can’t help it, I just love sports. If you’d pegged me when I was 18 and told me that six years later that was something I’d be saying, I would have walked into a wall laughing. I hated sports at school. I didn’t grow above 5 foot 2 until I was 18, and my competitive drive went into academia. It doesn’t win you many supporters in the PE department when you just don’t care.

Also, I think my teachers thought it was funny when I could barely put the shot past my foot, and when I hit myself in the head with a javelin. (Admittedly, that was hilarious.)

But Cambridge had a funny way of putting sports right in front of me, like it does for so many people, and since then athletic endeavours have filled a substantial part of my life. Most of them have been team-based, and it’s here that the summer falls down - undergraduates are the driving force behind 90% of Cambridge’s sport, and when undergraduates aren’t here, the sport stops. There are town clubs, most notably for rowing, but also for other sports, and there are the exceptions; grad colleges like Hughes Hall and Darwin run graduate sports throughout the summer.

Largely, however, the sport is gone, and with it, a ready made chance at socialising. Training on your own is lonely, boring, and not as effective. Other people push you to do better – academics or sports, that’s just the truth. I’m a slow runner, and my last long run was 15 miles, on my own. That’s two and a half hours with no one to talk to, and my iPod gave out on the last three miles. Faster, better runners than I undoubtedly aren’t bothered with this, seeing as they don’t run with music and they have pacing and splits and the will to go faster.

I, unsurprisingly, do not have the will to go faster. I have the will to grimly hang on for 15 miles, preferably whilst talking to someone, and if I’m training on my own that small pleasure is denied to me. Come back, undergraduates. All is forgiven – your peppy youth, your swarming tendencies, your essay crises. I need someone to train with, or that grandma who I lapped on my last run is going to set her Jack Russell on me. I can’t stave off a terrier attack on my own. That’s one sport I just can’t get along with.