5 | 141 Career, family, and sport participation: a simultaneous exhibition? “As a child or student, sport was meaningful to me in terms of social contacts, so that was what I did it for. When I started working, I learned that this changed. I noticed I saw my friends during leisure time and at work, so sport became less important for me as a place to meet and maintain friends and, therefore, I cared less about sport. As a student you do it to meet people. When you have children, you also meet other parents through school. So, you have completely different entrances to your social life and practising sport became less important to me as it was before.” (Koos) “You do not want to arrange a babysitter for every trifle [meaning sport participation], because then you won’t even raise your own children.” (Martijn) Physical and mental resources From the narratives we learn that the new roles, responsibilities and activities were physically and/or mentally demanding for participants in general. Regarding physical resources, this resulted in a perceived increase in daily physical activity in many cases, mainly after becoming a professional and a parent. In particular this was due to activities that were an integral part of participants’ new life situations, like active commuting to work, physical labour at work, and caring for and walking or cycling with their children. Or as illustrated by this narrative fragment of one of the participants: “After giving birth I actually started to be more active. But that is also inherent to children. With children you can’t sit on the couch. You are more active with children anyway. You go cycling with them, you go hiking with them, you do everything walking. So in my daily life I became much more active then.” (Juliet) For some participants this put sport participation under pressure during the transition to adulthood, as – in their experience - physical resources acquired from the new event-related daily physical activities substituted or compensated physical resources acquired from sport activities: “When I came to Nijmegen, I quite quickly began to work at the university and went to work by bike. And although it is only 20 minutes, this [home location] is the lowest point of Nijmegen and that is quite a steep climb. […] You also have to take the children to school and pick them up by bike, hill after hill. I felt that I already had my physical exercise.” (Koos)
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