I bring myself to the stadium again, in a borderline state between stress and comfort, where the real emotion is undefined, grasping to categorize itself, at least in a positive or negative classification… The stress is not about being here, the stress is about not being somewhere else.
I don’t know how many have tried hard at sports, while also fighting at a high academic level or a highly demanding job (the kinds that stay inside your head for 24 hours…). During my masters degree, although time to train got slimmer and slimmer when exams and final presentations approached, I was never fulfilled with the kind of enormous guilt of ‘sacrificing’ time, personal growth in one single area, and total devotion to one field - after all, so many masters students participate in collegiate sports…
‘Throwing’ myself inside a PhD in Italy, I am finding a million psychological obstacles, that can be the result of complex functions of my living existence at this time… I don’t know, but the pure positive psychology of doing sport has been molested, trapped inside a mingled thread of outside reproach, personal need, obsession, and dreams.
I have found myself in a different kind of world, where although characters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are being marveled at, they are hardly emulated…
I have quit mentioning to Italian professors or classmates my being involved in systematic training and competitions. What used to be my pride and distinct personality feature in the United States, is now the element of misunderstanding and condemn. I am faced with an interpretation of serious sporting as a loss of devotion to something else, academic, of the highest level. And chances are, that when one’s mind are half of the time on some other dream, focus is lost. At least that is the common way of thinking.
I do not think single-mindedly. I have been training for sports since I was eight, while being a good student, drawing, painting, and learning how to play the piano and later the violin.
Although very good at school, academic obligations often felt like a hundred stones were being piled up on me. I suffocated, but thrived. The one thing that felt like ‘prison’, I follow until the end… It’s a ‘sin’ to throw away gifts… No? 
I look around me in the university, and see gloomy faces, all the time. They become so serious on their architectural talks, recalling on the works of their famous Vittorio Gregotti, that mind you, hardly any other culture knows about…
And then compare that look to the expressions of a coach working on the track. The eyes sparkle with anticipation, the cheeks are flushed, the mouth screams or smiles - emotions grow and perish. It’s not fun and games, it’s kinetic science.
But why can’t everything be in the spirit of GOOD SPORT?
I missed the aim of this thread… Interpret, and rant, if you feel… I surely had to.
Sport is our life and I, personally, am not giving it away for anyone. And this holds true for a DAILY basis.
The rest can look gloomy and deprived, or exercise on Wednesdays and Sundays.
I will not deprive myself to fit in.