Why do some men and women enjoy participating in sporting events and some don't?

I don’t see you as enjoying physical exertion or fun, but rather fulfilling a competitiveness in you.

I enjoy sports, but not team sports, and not really competitive sports. I have always loved skiing, rock climbing, distance open water swimming, but not playing football of baseball or tennis.

For me, it is a matter of feeling my body move, of feeling in touch with my environment. I don’t enjoy competition if I am good at something or not.

It is a different way of getting validation.

I really like the feeling of wearing myself out and simply enjoying my body while I can. I’m 52, past my peak physically. I’ve never been any kind of champion, but I take pride being in better shape than most my age.

I’ve never been attracted to team sports or competitions. I’m not very coordinated, so I can excel at strength endurance, but not at catching a ball or swinging a racket or bat.

My sports have been cycling, running and Krav Maga.

So odd. My comment has disappeared. If this posts twice, sorry.

@zenvelo when you said, “I don’t see you as enjoying physical exertion or fun…” did you mean literally ME? Or did you mean “you” as some sort of other generalization.

@Dutchess_III Literally You as self-described in the posting along with the question. No other context or knowledge except what is stated above.

Hm. Interesting. How did you come to that conclusion? Was it really based on this one post or were you pulling in what you’ve known of me on Fluther all these years? Can you be specific? I am really curious.

Participating is fun unless you are with over competitive players. As an adult it’s about exercise and de-stressing. If guys can pal around and talk shit to each other it just brings the stress down even more. It was the same when playing coed softball. I mountain bike but don’t really race, that’s my sport of choice. I was very competitive in track and wrestling as a teenager though.

I like some physical activity and games, but I like the things I like, and not so much other forms.

My favorite physical activity is exploring an interesting place on foot.

Games I liked best included playing war on a playground, dodge ball, mock sword combat with yardsticks, rubber band wars, dart gun wars, water balloon wars, bottle rocket wars, dirt clod wars, throwing rocks at fleets of sticks representing ships, building sand castles to resist waves, mock hand-to-hand combat, orienteering, hanging out in a swimming pool doing freestyle whatever, chasing each other, trying to sneak places without being seen, etc.

And a game our whole class would play called “British Bulldogs”, where players try to get from one side of a playfield to another without being tackled by the people in the middle, with those who fall being added to the catchers until there are few left.

I started disliking sports when we got rule-oriented annoying PE teachers in middle school. They wanted us to wear shorts, shower, go out in the cold, do warm-up exercises, do exercises for fitness, obey them, and play games with strict rules that got in the way of free thinking and natural use of the body. Basketball pissed me off – what? You’re supposed to do what? Bounce the ball for every step, or something? Except the people who get approved as doing it right aren’t actually doing that? Egad why? No thanks. Then their version of swimming: you must do certain movements and breathe under water. I would rather fight them to the death in hand-to-hand combat.

I have more of a warrior and adventurer relationship to physical activity, and a strong aversion to obedient do-it-this-way and by these rules games, unless I like the rules. American Football is kind of interesting to me – most other sports have me thinking “why?” I liked orienteering because they give you a terrain map, a compass, and places to get to, and you get to figure out any way you can to do that. That speaks to me.

Well, granted, in middle school you are given more structure, all the way around, than you are in grade school. It’s part of preparing you for the real world. I guess I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to have rules apply in certain games. What fun would it be for some one person to just grab the basket ball, hold on to it and charge down the court, not giving anyone a chance to play?
Did you have a choice whether or not to take PE @Zaku?

@Dutchess_III You mostly describe competitive team sports. The one individual sport that you were involved in you gave up after three months. Your premise is “is it some sort of instinct to prove “I’m better than you!”?... why do some women, like me, also enjoy it?

When I read that, I see you coming from a place of competitive sports where you are naturally proficient, and you like doing it as part of a team.

I am in no way physically gifted to be in the top tier of activities I enjoy, but I do like the endurance and the ability to use my body. But for me it is individual, not team, and not a contest.

I really, really enjoyed Ta Kwon Do. It’s really no more of an individual sport than, say, boxing. You do spar, and there are matches, but slowly gaining the flexibility and accuracy that was required to be good was enjoyable. I practiced alone, in the basement, a lot. I hung a plastic golf ball from the ceiling as a target. I gradually ratcheted it up, too, to kick higher and higher.
I got a small mat and put it on the wall to practice kick- slapping it hard.
However, then I became all “born again,” and became somehow convinced that it was some sort of sin because there are philosophical (read “religious” overtones.) As I said, I left for a stupid reason. However, I did stay on at Mr. Kim’s and lifted weights, until my membership ran out 3 months later. But yeah, yeah, lifting weights wasn’t as much fun as it is really solitary.

Gosh, I loved those summer evenings. after a day in the sun, playing sand volley ball, a little sunburned, a little tired, feeling tight, just relaxing on the patio with a glass of wine. It was beautiful.

No, there was no choice about taking PE in my middle school.

I didn’t say I don’t want any rules. I appreciate rules; I’m a game designer. It’s just a matter of things such as what the rules are, whether I like them, and whether I get to choose whether to participate or not, and the attitude of the people involved. The issue for me is when the rules and/or attitude is something I don’t relate to. I can get into some games, but many sports I just don’t relate to nor find interesting nor fun.

What insight I got about “real life” from those PE teachers, was that a lot of people are closed-minded and like to be petty tyrants about little domains they manage to get themselves put in charge of. And, that those people are generally best ignored and avoided as much as possible. For example, once one of them said it didn’t seem like I wanted to be in their class that day. I said, “Mhmm.” They got upset and told me I would receive a zero for the day in their notebook (for their unfailable ungraded required class) and that I must leave and go report what happened to the head of the middle school. So I did. The middle school head thought that was really funny, laughed and invited me to hang out in his office, and offered that I could check out his bookshelf unless I’d rather do some homework or something.