Alliance Soccer Complex

I’VE HEARD ABOUT something called a runner’s high. I’ve heard how it matters for a woman’s body that has been diagnosed with PCOS to move and sweat. But exercise has never been fun for me in a way that sticks. I hike fairly often at Radnor Lake and I go to a workout class called b.fab.fitness, but it’s never a long-term love.

Because of PCOS, which again stands for polycystic ovary syndrome, my body doesn’t change much when I exercise. That can be frustrating because of a lot of weird baggage I have about the purpose of exercise and the size a body should be and how one begets the other. We are in a beautiful time in culture where body differences for women are more understood and accepted. Diet culture is losing some grip on the minds of people, but that doesn’t totally undo all the things I learned and thought and heard as my body was maturing. So, sadly, some of that baggage exists and it doesn’t make exercise all that fun for me.

When we recorded an episode of our EnneaSummer series, Enneagram coach and expert Seth Abram mentioned how each Enneagram number has a different type of exercise and way of eating that works best for it. I had never thought about that, but I googled it as soon as our conversation was finished.

Enneagram Sevens need to play, it told me. The idea clicked immediately. My mind jumped back to a younger time in my life, a time when a soccer ball was never far from my feet, when rolling around on grass and slide tackling and chasing other players and the ball was the most fun I could have.

At the time we were recording that episode, I hadn’t played in a game since high school. Two full decades. But suddenly I knew what was missing from my exercise life—fun from sports. I wasn’t having the kind of fun that felt connected down to my bones and down through my history. And I hadn’t had that level of fun in exercise since the end of my senior year of high school.

There are challenges to being a grown-up, and part of those challenges is that adding responsibilities often costs fun or costs hobbies (like my dad with chess, though clearly he’s still got it). We only have so many hours in a day and so much to get taken care of and often fun feels like this luxury and bonus that’s not worth making time for or carving out a way to keep in our schedules. Exercise had become a chore in my life. It was always an exchange, never a gift.

But soccer had always been a gift to me. It was hard, I wasn’t THE VERY BEST at it when I was a teenager, and there were times I quit when I should have persevered. But I loved it. I loved the team aspect, I loved the beauty of the game, and I loved watching the ball in motion.

But what does that mean for me today?

THROUGH TIM, I met Stacey. Stacey and Tim met when Tim was playing football, and now Stacey was the trainer for the Nashville Soccer Club, Nashville’s professional soccer team. I had been to parties and meals and church with Stacey before, but I had also watched him on the sidelines of soccer matches. So I shot him a little text on a Wednesday, and we met up for coffee on Friday.

I teared up just as we sat down. I explained to Stacey how much I missed soccer. I told him how exercise was never a great thing for me but sports always were and are. I told him how I needed fun and how soccer was always fun, and then I asked him to make me a soccer player again.

He smiled because he’s very kind, and he said he could do that.

I WAS TEN MINUTES late for my first session. I ran into the bathroom of the massive gym and changed and jumped out and found Stacey. The gym is split into three sections: volleyball, basketball, and soccer. The soccer area is covered in turf and Stacey had laid out little cones on the ground with a soccer ball in the center. I took a deep breath and stepped forward.

An hour later, covered in sweat and red-faced, tears dripped from my eyes. I cried because that hour was SO FUN. I cried because my foot connecting with a soccer ball is also my guts connecting with something more—with middle school Annie and with those outside games and the smell of the grass and the sound of a shoe sending a ball downfield. I was back there and I was happy.

It’s all about connection anyways, isn’t it? With God, with others, with ourselves—yesterday and today.

My first day of soccer wasn’t easy. In fact, I felt a little bit like a fish out of water in some ways. It had been so long since I kicked a ball, besides playing in the backyard with the Barnes kids. I’ve watched hours of soccer on television or from a seat in a stadium, but the footwork is very different when it’s your own two feet and they are the feet of an amateur.

HOBBIES AREN’T ALWAYS going to be easy. Fun isn’t always easy. But those words, fun and easy, aren’t synonymous.

Pretty regularly at soccer practice (that’s what I call it), Stacey makes me do this very intricate footwork pattern that is really hard for me. I do not, for the life of me, understand why my brain cannot get around taking the ball from my right foot and pulling back and sending it, like an L, behind my left leg, and then using my left foot to grab it and pull it back to the center. I’m usually not in a great mood about it. We’ve practiced this same move for weeks and I still can’t get it and he keeps making me do it even though I STILL CANNOT GET IT. I don’t want to get mad at Stacey, but I don’t know where to channel my frustration.

I haven’t quit, and I don’t want to. When Stacey and I were chatting at the start of yesterday’s practice, before I was too exhausted to talk, we realized we are the exact same age (though I’m TECHNICALLY nineteen days older than him). After we came to that realization, he asked me an interesting question. “If you could go back and be any age, what would you pick?” I think he said it would only be for a month. I asked him if I got to take my current knowledge with me and he said yes. Then I knew right away. I would go back to being fourteen in a heartbeat. I would go back to my freshman year of high school.

Maybe it was partly due to my proximity to a soccer ball and the connection it makes me feel, but I wanted a shot at that first year of high school again, especially with what I know now about my spiritual future, my body’s future, and my heart’s future. I would go right back there and hope it was during soccer season.

I don’t believe in regrets, really. I think there is something to be learned from everything we experience, but I can trace back to a couple of defining moments that absolutely shaped the rest of my life—in both positive and negative ways. One that happened my freshman year was a moment where I quit on a soccer drill when I could have, and should have, kept going. And I know that shaped my sporting future, but it also shaped my life and made quitting an option that I never really wanted to have. I’ve learned to persevere (you can read about that in Looking For Lovely), but it is a journey I could have done differently if I wouldn’t have quit that day as a freshman.

If I could go back, I would tell myself about the fun that comes from being strong in your body and in your mind. I would run as fast as I could. I would play every minute of every game that was scheduled that month and I would smile from start to finish. I would hug some of my high school friends whom I know, twenty years later, aren’t even a part of my life. I would pay more attention in history class and I would read every book assigned. And I would hurry down to that band director’s room and I would ask for a tryout, just to see if he had space for me in the French horn section.

I would make decisions about hobbies that would stick for the rest of my life.

IT’S BEEN A FEW MONTHS since I started playing soccer again, and I can tell that my skill level is returning and is maybe more precise than even when I played in high school. I haven’t been late again like I was that first day because my schedule shifted when soccer came back into my life. Everything was moving so fast that I would buzz into every meeting, skip out on exercise because I “didn’t have time,” and set alarms at meals with friends so we knew when I had to leave. But then I decided that soccer needed to win because everything needed to slow down.

I sat with a friend a few days ago and she said, “You show what matters most by what you say yes and no to, by who gets your time and your money.” It really made me think—about hobbies, about friendship, and about the speed at which I’m living my life.

WHEN CHEF MELISSA D’ARABIAN came on the podcast (episode 167), I was a little starstruck. I’ve been a fan of her cooking on Food Network for years and then there she was, sitting across the desk from me. Once the conversation got going, my pulse slowed down and my mind slowed down and we just got to know each other.

That’s the whole trick of my podcast. That’s the secret sauce. I try to forget there is a microphone and just pretend we are two people sitting at coffee trying to get to know each other or, if we are already friends, just having a convo to catch up.

So in the process of getting to know Melissa, I listened as she talked about beef stew. Her mother-in-law taught her an intricate and time-consuming recipe for the most delicious beef stew she had ever eaten, but it wasn’t fast. Each ingredient had to be handled separately and purposefully. It is one of those recipes that could take most of your day, but the payoff is an insanely delicious and layered experience.

I’m a person who wants to enjoy the experience of eating as much as I enjoy the food. I like fancy restaurants not because I am bougie (okay, not ONLY because I’m bougie) but because of how they’ve thought through the entire experience the guest is going to have. But the experience of cooking a meal is often more enjoyable than the eating of it. Cooking is medicine, right?

That’s how hobbies work. The making of the thing is just as rewarding, if not more so, than the actual product. I think back to times when women held quilting bees. They would sit around working on a quilt, talking, laughing, and sewing. The finished quilts were necessary and important for whoever received them, but the real good stuff was what happened around that circle. It’s true in book club too. I don’t necessarily want the book to end or the book club meeting to end, I just want to be in the middle of both. I don’t need to play in a soccer league or be recruited by the US Women’s National Team (but y’all know how to find me if you’re looking for a defender), I just love practicing.

Remember, a hobby is defined as an activity “done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.” And I don’t know that I actually have one anymore.

But I need one. I really need a hobby.

I need a hobby so that I don’t treat social media like a hobby. Scrolling is not a hobby.

I need a hobby so there is space in my day, or my week, to cultivate leisure time and use it wisely.

I need a hobby because hobbies connect people and I want to feel that connection.

I need a hobby because I miss Eden and there just seems to be something about the power of making a thing, creating a thing, putting time into an activity, that may remind me and give me a taste of what I long for.

So that’s why I went back to soccer—because it feels like Eden and it seems that I can almost find my way back with the ball at my feet.

And you need a hobby too.

You need a hobby because you need space.

You need space in your life because you need connection.