I’m not talking about injuries, just the next-day, overall aching that so often accompanies long activities or sports. Especially ones new to your body, such as riding a horse or playing paintball for the first time.
For me it was going to a “pick your own” strawberry farm around 8 years old. Even that young, squatting and bending down to pick ground-level fruit made me hurt so much I vowed to gladly pay someone else to do it from then on. (I have much respect for farm workers from the experience.)
Now that I’m old, it doesn’t take much. My five-year-old complained about foot pain after two long days at Disneyland, but it passed before we got to the airport. I’m about to take some more Aleve two days after and I’m contemplating a mini foot spa. Oh, to be young.
For me it was my first job as a legal adult, working in a lumber yard pulling green chain and sorting specialty units of lumber. The pain kept me from sleeping for a couple of days and from sleeping well for a couple of weeks before I got used to the work.
There wasn’t really anything, recreational or otherwise that I remember from childhood though. I was a pretty resilient rubbery skinny little kid
I grew up on farms, so I was used to a lot of manual labor. After awhile it’s no big deal, just boring repetitive work. When I was about twelve, I made the mistake of helping out a friend hoe their field of sugar beets when their dad ran away with another woman. It took four of us three days. Holy crap, I couldn’t stand straight for two days when we were done. And I even had to supply my own hoe! Never again.
When we moved into our previous home, I was about age 38. We brought in our own boxes of small stuff, and I went up and down the stairs about 50 times in one day. Because I had never yet experienced sore feet and I was stupid about such things, I wore flip-flops that day.
I remember lying in bed that night so exhausted that I couldn’t sleep, and my feet were throbbing and hot, especially between the big toe and the next toe. It was the first time I had ever experienced anything like that. Nowadays, of course, hot sore feet are a constant thing.
I hope they meant “aching”, because hurting after unfamiliar exercise is not a sign of aging. The error caused me to read this topic, which I wouldn’t have done otherwise, so I suppose that’s a plus for the OP.
The earliest I can remember that was specifically tied to an activity was probably in my late 20s after a day bicycling or working out. However, I did get growing pains occasionally while around 8-10 or so: pain in my limbs for no apparent reason. So they could have been caused by physical activity, since I was too active during the day to pin it on any one exercise, or they could have just been symptoms of my body growing.
Splitting firewood with a maul or a sledgehammer+wedges. Something I did with my dad whenever he had the opportunity to acquire firewood, e.g. when construction crews were clearing a wooded lot to build new homes, so it wasn’t a regular thing. I think I was maybe 11 when I first started doing it in earnest, and boy, my upper body was pretty much wiped out the next day. Getting older didn’t make it easier; it didn’t matter what your age was, you felt compelled to swing like a motherfucker every time, especially if you were using a maul (wedges were more forgiving because you didn’t have to drive them through the wood in one hit).
In getting ready for boot camp when I was 19, I started running 5 miles a day. I hadn’t run in months, and on the second day MAN was I sore! I could barely walk. Thankfully I kept at it.
At the age of 15? 13? somewhere in there, I volunteered to do that 20-mile walk-a-thon, where you went around the neighborhood and collected pledges based on how many miles you actually completed. Don’t know how many pledges I got, but I did go the full 20 miles. Took all day, too. Walked with a group of friends and we were pretty lackadaisical about it, I think. Truth is, I don’t really remember anything about the walk, or even the pain/soreness I felt the next day or three. I only remember that I did it, and it was the greatest physical exertion I’d ever done to that point.
Went to a 2 week bicycle camp when I was 11 or 12. My thighs got a workout. There are parts of Washington State which are flat. That wasn’t one of them.
