But you know what they say--"the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Incidentally, that's exactly what I'm speculating the road to gym class is paved with. I'm fairly sure that that means hell and gym class are exactly one and the same.
None of you will be shocked to hear that I was not a particularly athletic child. I was an incredibly prolific swimmer and a decent dancer, but anything that involved hand-or-foot-eye-coordination (yes, foot-eye coordination is totally a thing, ask any self-respecting soccer player) was a little bit beyond me. My parents were of the school of thought that "if she shows an interest in it, we should let her do it--but we should also make her try as many things as possible," and after years of torturous summer camps, they finally understood that I was what you'd call "indoors-y" and preferred reading to 90% of other activities.
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| "Perky" and "Sporty" are synonyms in my mind. I'm not either of them. |
Gym class was never a problem when I was homeschooled, 1st through 5th grade. Mom and I would go on early morning walks or play basketball in the empty church gym. This is what gave me the illusion that I might actually be decent at throwing balls at things, but really shows how little I actually knew about basketball.
Fast-forward to sixth grade.
Actually, don't. I don't remember a thing about gym class in 6th grade. I know that we had one, and that, presumably, I would have been required to participate, but I was probably too distracted mooning over my sixth grade crush to remember what torture we went through.
Seventh grade, though, I remember, because that was the first year I was made to run the mile.
I can put up with the indignities of soccer, ultimate frisbee, and flag football, but running the mile is just plain embarrassing. I've never been a runner, and when I have had cause to run long distances I usually start tasting iron and my chest gets tight, which either means I'm really out of shape and I'll die young or I've got a touch of runner's asthma. I never had this problem swimming laps, but running makes me dizzy. Or at least, it definitely did when I was in seventh grade.
My teacher explained the task--we needed to complete a certain number of laps to get one mile, and then we would be done with class. Not ever having done this before, I was fairly sure I'd manage, but I was by no means looking forward to it.
About halfway through, I was seriously slogging. Three quarters of the way through, everyone else had finished and I was starting to see stars. My teacher actually had to help me down the stairs and back to my classroom because I had nearly fainted. I was humiliated. No one wants to be *that* kid, especially not me, with my burgeoning anorexia.
By the time the next gym class rolled around, my teacher had an announcement: she'd miscalculated the distance and made us run two miles instead of one. Which was a small comfort to my shame, and if I wasn't an incredibly innocent child at the time, I probably would have been thinking in curses.
Eighth grade, I didn't even try to disguise my dislike of gym class. I was very much in the throes of the Adolescent Awkward Phase, where my body was simultaneously betraying me by going through puberty, and being betrayed by me, because I wasn't eating. It was a rough time for everyone, and to my disgust, running the mile became a quarterly occurrence that I dreaded. Not only that, but games that I hated like dodgeball and basketball were being incorporated into our routines, as well as some Presidential Fitness thing that Bush introduced specifically, I think, to punish me for not supporting him in his 2000 and 2004 campaigns for president.
Not everything about gym class was a nightmare: I discovered I liked volleyball (or, at least, when compared with everything else it was downright enjoyable). Just most of it was. Everything seemed to tell me that I was not ever meant for gym class: the humiliation of without question being the worst at everything (and, like Divination, gym class is not something you can read into perfection, and YES I WENT THERE with the Hermione comparison), as well as feeling like I was disgustingly unattractive and overweight and all my bodily flaws were on display for everyone to see.
Seriously. It makes me uncomfortable just remembering it.
This was never more apparent than when the school installed plastic tile-things in the previously concrete gymnasium floor, presumably to minimize the amount of injuries and potential lawsuits. We were playing something--probably basketball--and I biffed it, because that was one of two things I did when playing sports.
1). Falling over.
2). Freezing like a deer in the headlights until someone yelled at me to PASS THE BALL and then flailing hopelessly to get the ball as far away from me as possible
Anyway, it was a really minor fall--I wasn't even smarting a little--and I got up and kept going in an effort to Be Like the Cool Kids Who Always Got Up and Dusted Themselves Off and Played Sports Well. I didn't even notice I'd split my knee open until my best friend, Becca, pointed out that I was bleeding all over the floor. I looked down, and sure enough. There was a substantial trickle of blood running down my leg, as well as several spots on the gym floor.
"Seriously," she said to me later, when I was in the bathroom putting an office-supplied band-aid on my injury, "are you made of glass? I'm pretty sure you're made of glass. I think you break easier than anyone I know."
I would have reminded her that I've never actually broken any bones, and that she was probably a lot less breakable because she'd spent time fending for her life among her eight siblings, but she was right. Skinning your knee is one thing. Skinning your knee when you barely touch a padded plastic floor is another.
High school was a relief, because you only have to complete so many credit hours of gym class, and I'd knocked those out in 9th grade and the rest were taken care of by my ballet and modern classes. Which, I was still rather physically inelegant at that point, but at least I wasn't having to run the damn mile anymore. It was also a relief because it meant I didn't have to participate in another science fair EVER AGAIN, but that's another story.
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