Activity Post #2

At the start of this year, I challenged myself to find new and more innovative ways to stay active. I interpreted this as taking on new activities and opportunities which I could use to maintain my physical wellbeing in an innovative way using whatever was available to me. In this short period of time I have taken on new experiences ranging from fishing to golf and everything in between, some of which are things I never expected myself to be brave enough to try despite my initial doubts. In hindsight even though not every single experience was suited to my tastes I have no regrets about making the most of the opportunities I was presented, knowing full well that not many people were lucky enough to experience the sports I did especially in the midst of a pandemic.

Golf

When I was younger I always considered golf to be an “old people’s sport”. You may laugh now, but if I’m being completely honest, I just didn’t get the hype of standing around on a grass field watching someone carefully swing a club for an hour till the ball meandered its way into the hole. I must admit though that my judgement is is probably biased since all my life all I ever took part in was dynamic sports seeing that at no point in football, badminton or tennis was I required to stay still and be patient; it was always about a flurry of movement, anticipation and agility.

In addition to that I didn’t think that golf required much skill, I mean how hard could it be to swing a club and hit a ball right? Right… well you see that’s actually not at all true and I had to find out the hard way. My little brother actually took to golf  quite easily last year after he played for fun while we were on holiday while I on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with it. When my parents took Dimitri to his first golf lesson, I good naturedly argued that I wouldn’t see myself playing golf with my friends anytime soon and so I didn’t go but one day  I actually ended up waiting for him at the course. It took place on artificial turf with a bunch of modified elevation levels to duplicate an actual field. I sat there watching him for about 30 minutes till I got restless, even now, I don’t consider golf much of a spectator sport, it’s more like chess, careful and calculated with  LOTS of patience and waiting. Either way, his instructor took notice and asked if I would like to head over to the other side and maybe take a swing or two and I said YES! relieved that I could finally stop counting the seconds left for his 2 hours to be over. I swung confidently thinking that I was going to replicate a Tiger Woods move just like on TV but of course, I missed. I had no technique, the wrong stance, wrong posture and wrong weighting – this is where the difficulty comes into play. Eventually his instructor came around to help me out and gave me a couple pointers on how to stand, where to swing, which muscles to use and how to follow through and believe it or not after taking quite a while to set myself up, I managed my Tiger Woods swing!! I’m kidding of course, but hey, it was a big improvement from what I did before. Now I still don’t go as frequently as my brother does and I would say that it isn’t exactly my favorite sport, but I still go and take my shots whenever I drop in, to each their own right?

My Tiger Woods Swing 😉

More Vacation Activities

Another 3 things I tried this past quarter was going body boarding, kayaking and even fishing. Now I had actually been kayaking multiple times before so this wasn’t necessarily my first rodeo but it certainly was the first one where my kayaking partner and I nearly ended up getting beached… We were just so busy enjoying the morning sun and trying to detangle our oars from the lotus roots that neither of us realized that we had ventured into the shallows which had dried out thanks to the warm weather. Thankfully it didn’t require much effort except for getting down knee deep in mud to use teamwork to drag it off of the mudbank, it wasn’t exactly what I would call pleasant but it wasn’t the worst case scenario either, either way I enjoyed it! Next up we decided to go bodyboarding. This had been something that I had been greatly looking forward to because pretty much everyone who had visited Karpaha Sands raved about the beach, and as you may already know the beach is my happy place. Body boarding was a great way to relax and just work some of that stress from school off just rolling with the waves and laughing heartily whenever one of us got wiped out, it also slipped my mind a few times that this would be one of my last summers in my home country so it was a great memory of sorts to keep and naturally a good break from the intensive usual regimes I follow during the weekdays.

Last but certainly not least was personally the most shocking encounters for me. My brother has been an avid fish lover since he was a little baby and now that we were surrounded by water he was literally jumping with excitement at the thought of being able to go fishing. I obliged seeing as I had seen Jeremy Wade countless times on the Discovery channel making catch after catch of monster fish and I had thought ‘Hey! This could be my lucky day!’ What discovery channel doesn’t show you however is how truly intense the whole experience is. I’m quite a softie when it comes to animals so when we actually caught a few decently sized fish like the length of my arm I wanted nothing more than to return is safely back into the water because seeing them thrash around the boat wasn’t my idea of fun. I dive, to protect animals not kill them, but sadly for us a lot of the ones that we caught ended up being dinner for our guides. That aside, the physical aspect of fishing comes from the sheer strength and willpower that is needed to fight against the fish that attempts to swim away, it burns your arms and is a constant tug of war till the fish wears out and then another battle to wrestle the hook out of its mouth. All in all I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed that experience too much simply because of my moral dislike towards it, but I do believe that catch and release is enjoyable just not when you don’t have the right resources and the odds of the fish surviving are low, in hindsight my positive takeaway from that of course is that I got somewhat of an arm workout, but I doubt I will be trying that anytime soon again.

First time fishing