SPORT AND LIFE
SPORTS AND LIFE
We always state that your philosophy (and ours) is “Sports and Life” and while many of us believe that the two go hand in hand, others treat this self-evident truth as merely a truism. We think it’s more and recently asked customers to tell us what sports meant in their lives. Here is what one had to say:
For me, sports and life are inseparable and have always been so, since I can remember. I remember as a kid going out for the first time with my Dad on a bicycle without training wheels. I was deathly afraid of falling, but my Dad kept reassuring me that all was okay, that I had nothing to worry about because he would be there to catch me if I fell. For some reason, I believed him and in a short while I was pedaling happily on my own. I couldn’t believe it! I still remember my Dad jumping up and down the way he always did whenever the local football team scored a goal.
I felt like I had scored a goal too and, in a certain sense, I had. I had achieved a milestone, scored a goal and conquered a fear, all at the same time. I was hooked!
As I grew older, I graduated to more sophisticated bicycles and greater challenges. Each mountain conquered or not, each race won or lost, taught me something about myself and imparted a life lesson that parental sermons could not. I learned to work hard, to not back down from competition and, above all, see the parallels between sports and life.
For instance, every time you succeed at something you’ve never succeeded before, you take things to another level, you raise the bar, and discover things about yourself you didn’t know you had. When you plan your workouts, choose your apparel and watch your daily diet in the name of sports, you are learning things about methodology, organization, physical and mental well-being. Every time you’re injured and return to a sports activity (whatever it is), you are affirming that you will not be beaten. You accept adversity and setbacks as part of life and accept their challenges because it will make you stronger. Every time you lose a competition, your mind tries to come up with a million ways to avoid doing so the next time and begins its comeback. That’s growth, that’s improvement, that’s why sports and life are important.
Many times, though not always, how you perform in sports and the things you learn while practicing them is something that has a carryover effect in your personal life, how you deal with success, how you deal with failure. The skills you acquire in one area are directly transferrable and applicable to the other. For example, a lot of people who don’t do sports often feel they’ve reached their limit. A dedicated sportsperson believes there are no limits because the result of one day’s performance has no relation on the next. You can lose one race and return to win the following one. Just like life, we always get another chance.
Well, the above opinion coincides with a lot of things we believe in at U-51 Pro. What do you think about the relationship between sports and life? Write and share with us your views, we’d like to know.
