By Chloë FitzGerald

Sport was not my category. I filed myself under something else early on — books, ideas, arguments, the life of the mind — and closed the door on the rest without many qualms.

My parents had been sporty in their youth but didn’t particularly push me in that direction. The biggest influence on me was my grandmother (Nana). She taught English literature, loved Henry James, and instilled in me a passion for fiction and is who I credit with my choice to study philosophy and specialise in ethics. She was brought up Quaker — the British kind — and had long since stopped believing in God, but she believed firmly in seeing the good in people. Despite loving watching all sport on the telly, she also had no interest whatsoever in physical activity herself for its own sake. She would only consent to walks with a clear destination — preferably a pub — and plenty of conversation along the way. Even the word ‘body’ made her shudder.

Nobody in my family saw sport as particularly important. There was an unspoken hierarchy: physical activity was fine as a hobby, but the mind was what mattered. Academic success, being clever and well-read was the real currency.

I was actually a fast sprinter, and I loved swimming. But I couldn’t catch a ball reliably, and at secondary school my tennis game suddenly plummeted (probably because I needed glasses) and I simply gave up. I only enjoyed things I was good at. If I couldn’t excel, I wasn’t interested in trying.

So I chatted through PE lessons, got shouted at by teachers, and felt collectively humiliated alongside most of my classmates when we were bussed to a state school to play field hockey in the cold and mud in our terrible PE kits. When sport was no longer compulsory, I stopped doing it.

In my twenties, I took up half-hearted running to keep in shape — thirty minutes maximum. I swam when I could because I loved the feel of my body in the water, but I still lived principally in my head.

In my thirties, pregnancy made it impossible to keep ignoring my body entirely. I realised I was a mammal in a way only breastfeeding can teach you. And I took up yoga, which was the first physical practice that made me connect my mind and body. Having moved to rural Catalonia, I also started running for pleasure in our beautiful surroundings, and running for longer than half an hour because I wanted to.

Then, just after turning forty, almost by accident — watching my son do judo one afternoon and feeling something I can only describe as envy — I started jiu-jitsu.

I was terrible at it. I’m still not good in any conventional sense. I feel slow, awkward, and uncoordinated in ways that have nothing to do with catching a ball and everything to do with a body that spent four decades being treated primarily as a vehicle for a brain. There was also something about being brought up to be a ‘nice girl’ (hello again, Nana!): I had no siblings, had never experienced rough-housing, and rolling around on the floor trying to get someone in a submission hold – particularly a massive man – was new territory in more ways than one. There were sessions where I drove home feeling defeated not just physically but psychologically. My teacher recognised from the beginning that my mind was my biggest enemy and he still says to me ‘Don’t think! Just do!’

But something else happened. I discovered I build muscle quickly. I found that I liked feeling strong — something distinct from feeling thin or healthy or any of the other things women are mostly encouraged to aspire to. My body, which I had spent four decades ignoring and underestimating, turned out to have things to offer that I had never bothered to look for.

Nobody told me this was possible. Or if the capacity was always there, it had been buried under forty years of a story that turned out to be old data. Collected young, never updated, mistaken for fact.

The stories we tell about what we’re not tend to start early and stick, because we stop questioning them. A verdict reached in childhood, on thin evidence, shaped by forces we couldn’t see at the time, starts to feel like a fixed feature of the self.

I work in implicit bias research, which makes it particularly uncomfortable to admit how long I carried an unchecked assumption about my own physical capabilities without noticing it was an assumption at all. The hardest biases to spot are the ones we hold about ourselves. They don’t feel like biases. They feel like self-knowledge.

I’m still not good with a ball. But I’m more careful now about what I let that mean, and about which doors I decide to close without enough evidence.

And I love that my four-year-old daughter wants to be strong when she grows up, does judo, and regularly asks if she can feel my biceps.

Chloë FitzGerald is an academic turned coach and facilitator. She helps people and organizations navigate uncertainty — whether it’s a career transition, cultural adaptation, or learning to work sustainably with new technologies like AI.

Photos: Miriam Gironès