At what point does it stop being 'Extra-curricular' & what does it become then?

I was talking to my mum about this the other day actually. We decided once you hit the stage at which you're not just doing it for pleasure anymore and you intend to make it your career, it becomes something other than extra curricular. 'Training' works, but then I have a cousin a few months older than me who was doing 15ish hours rowing training a week by 14, he was never aiming for GB squads or anything like that, that's just the amount of training you have to put into rowing if you want to compete even at recreational level. At the same time, I was doing close to 20 hours dancing a week, and I was intending to do it professionally. But the level of commitment he was putting into what he would describe as an 'extra-curricular' activity was not far off what I was putting into 'vocational' training IYSWIM. The difference is that 'recreational' junior rowing training is almost always 4-6 days a week training, whereas 'recreational' dancing at the same age can be as little as 1 day a week.

When I then changed my mind and decided I wanted to go into acting instead, I was probably only doing 4-5 hours maximum outside drama GCSE/A level etc at school on a regular basis, if you exclude rehearsal hours which weren't consistent. I was probably dancing about 10-12 hours a week but it was for pleasure rather than because I wanted to be a professional dancer, so most weeks my 'vocational' activity was taking up less than half the time my 'extra curricular' activity was, and my cousin's recreational rowing by this point was probably taking up the time of vocational drama and recreational dancing for me put together. The key difference was that when it got to exam season, the rowing hours and the dance hours were dropped to make room for revision. The drama hours were unaffected.

So by my definition, an 'extra curricular' activity becomes something other than extra curricular (vocational maybe?) when it becomes training for a future career rather than just for pleasure, and can't be missed or cut down on hours wise in order to prioritise anything else. But whether that makes any sort of sense or not is debatable

How is your DD getting on Katy?

How old is your daughter? Mine is only 6 so we are still firmly in "extra-curricular"!!