Gendering Sports

Recently I have gone back to judo, a sport that I trained in until I was 17, and have only sporadically revisited since. It's been a long time, and I thought I anticipated the challenges of returning to it. I anticipated that I'd get horribly out of breath, and struggle to remember techniques, not to mention their names. I anticipated that my adult body would take longer to adapt to and recover from training than my adolescent body had. What I didn't anticipate, although I perhaps should have done, was how engaging with sport would highlight my gender.