Wwhen I was 17, my rowing coach announced that taking a day off was unnecessary. That one time of the week I left school at 4pm and watched Neighbors was gone now I think that’s probably why, when I stopped rowing, I stopped doing any exercise at all. I’ve had enough. Exercising for me equated to hard dedication and someone yelling at me all the time. So I didn’t do anything. Which in retrospect was a bad idea because there were times in my life – getting RSI when I was trying to write a book while having a full time job or having a baby and getting overwhelmed by anxiety – when exercise would have helped immensely.
It was when I got out of infancy, moved to a new area but worked from home, that I felt the pull of being part of a team again. But I didn’t know how or in what sport – there was no way I was going back to rowing.
There are many “back to…” sessions for various sports – hockey, football, lacrosse – but I’ve never been to any of these games. Then one day a neighbor knocked looking for a sub for her netball league team. I was OK at netball at school so I said I’d do it. It was during that match that I realized all the latent competitiveness that drove me at school to become a junior world rowing champion was still very much there. And when I got rid of it, through sports, it took the pressure off other areas of my life.
A friend of mine went back to lacrosse after her therapist told her competitive sports are great for building emotional resilience (the ability to deal with stressful situations, challenges, and adversity). This was exactly why, without me consciously knowing it at the time, I started rowing as a teenager. It was a counterweight to the cliquey, results-focused, all-girls school I went to – where the headmaster scolded us for the “dazzling array of Bs and Cs” in our exam results. It was competitive, but in a different way. I discovered that popularity does not depend on the whims of the clique, but on the ability to work together to move the boat. By the time I got to the GB junior squad, that resilience was more important than ever because the pressure was on, there were blood tests to check performance levels, our heart rate monitors were set to beep if we weren’t working hard enough, people’s blisters went to the bone and once I remember being too exhausted to get up off the floor to go home.
I’m naturally competitive. And while that’s good when it comes to sports, it has the downside of building up adrenaline in areas of life where it’s not useful. It’s almost impossible to relax because I feel like everything could be done better. But when I started playing netball, I realized that every week it was draining the pockets of stress that had built up in my everyday adult life.
Being a writer is a brilliant job, but working in isolation gets lonely. The main communication with the publisher or agent is around the time of book publication or submission of the first draft. For much of the year, it’s tumbleweed – just you and your characters who are essentially extensions of yourself or versions of how your own brain would approach a problem if you were, say, a murderer.
Working alone and tracking other people’s careers through social media can lead the best of us to paranoia. Staring at a screen all day wreaks havoc on the neck and back. And while it’s great to come up with the ideas, it’s the ultimate frustration when you’re stuck with a blank piece of paper or pages of revisions that want a solution; it is there when you eat, sleep, walk to pick up your child from school, watch TV. There is no escape.
But there is a break for me now that comes from picking up two of my teammates and driving to a netball game every Tuesday night. It’s half an hour on the court where the only object of interest is the ball. And, as a defensive player, stop the other people from getting it. It sounds ridiculous, but I can go to sleep and replay the feeling of a good interception (but equally lie awake there lamenting a terrible pass or game-losing penalty). We play against people who are much better than us and some who are much worse. There are girls straight out of uni, at the top of their group, whining about them as young as 25. Women in their 40s and 50s who have to bring their kids with them, set them up on iPads because their partner is out or there’s no babysitter – and that weekly game is just as important to them, for whatever reason, as it is to me.
This is where friendships differ from the norm. In our league, we don’t know each other’s background. In some of the opposing teams, against whom I have played for years, I do not even know the names of the players. But we say hello. We congratulate each other. I know how they run, catch, pass. I know their tricks; I know if they get angry if they are marked too closely or happily push me out of the way with all the strength of their body. In my team, we don’t have jobs in common or children of the same age, as one can usually have with friendships, nor have we met each other’s families. But we are bound by a shared desire to play and to win (which we often don’t). We train together. We celebrate our victories or whine about losing or bitch about how we were wronged together on the court. And over the years, these bunch of strangers became my friends. The drive there in the car is 10 minutes of life problem whining, but on the way home, after the game, everything feels a little better.
It reminded me of the things I loved about being a rower at 17; that your team were the people you trusted to want something as badly as you did. You didn’t even have to like each other, but you had to respect their talent, their dedication and their effort. The sports friendship is one based on the knowledge that you all show up in the pouring rain, freezing cold or fierce, sweaty heat because it makes life better. And then you go home to your normal life.
Where Junior Worlds was my ultimate goal as a teenager, what’s so great about my weekly netball game now is that it doesn’t matter. It’s competition for competition’s sake. It goes around in an endless loop of the same teams and the same players – you can beat a team one week and lose to them the next. You can walk away if someone yells at you.
This is not the cliché of school sports – these adult teams are made up of strong, determined women of different ages, shapes, sizes and fitness who are simply there to compete in a game they love with people they respect . It’s something I thought I’d never do again and in the grand scheme of things it’s a very small change – less than an hour a week – but it’s definitely improved my life, maybe even built my inner strength .
OK, so I was still crying (in the John Lewis underwear department) when I got an email saying I had to rewrite the book I’d been working on for a year. But that evening I went to play netball. I started the game in a really bad mood – apologies to whoever I marked – but as it went on I actually felt my emotional state change. Netball is so fast and strategic that there is no time to think about anything other than where the ball or your opponent is. Essentially, the game gave my brain a half-hour vacation to focus on something other than the junk job news while I processed and destroyed it behind the scenes.
Plus there was the real physical release of the exercise, burning through the adrenaline of the shock and dispelling the cortisol of the stress. By the end of the game I was still confused, but I had some perspective. I can’t say if I was more resilient than if I hadn’t taken up netball. But what I can say is that the game itself, and the act of playing on that team, allowed me to escape the realities of life for enough time that I could calm down and rationalize what had previously felt devastating , was less after that. Which I suppose is exactly what emotional resilience means.
The Fifth Guest by Jenny Knight is published by HQ at £8.99. Buy it for £8.36 from guardianbookshop.com
