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10 pounds down 32 pounds to go!

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

gym class is the root of all evil, or the summer my mom thought i was anorexic

since i got on the healthy lifestyle bandwagon i've been thinking alot about my history with exercise. pretty much that would be gym class. 45 minutes a day, three times a week, pretending like i did whatever it was we were supposed to have done. i hated gym class. the only good thing about gym class was when my best friend holly was with me. holly was alot more talented with sports than i was, there's a shrine to prove it, so she wasn't as afraid as i was but we both hated it.* i was up nights thinking about how much i didn't want to go to gym class. class itself was rarely dissapointing in being fucking scary.

there's a feast of reasons to hate gym class. you could not be picked for a team and have to wait for the teacher to place you on a team while everyone on that team groans loudly.** you could get hit out in dodgeball within nanoseconds of the game starting, depressing. or you could have to do gymnastics on balance beams and springboards with no training at all. the latter happened to me in 6th grade. holly was with me and we successfully bullshitted our way into getting no further in our gymnastics careers than performing summersaults over and over again. take that kerri strugg. we got really good at pretending we had run a mile, climbed over a wall on the backs of our classmates(why?), and did a running slide under the volleyball net(again, WHY did we he have to do that?).

the only time i remember doing something without fucking it up was in seventh grade when we were tested in our ability to do sit-ups and push-ups and the like. they counted how many we could do and wrote it down. i think this was my favorite gym class ever. the summer before 7th grade i had decided i was fat and i was determined to do something about it. so for hours every day i holed up in my room and did sit-ups and push-ups while watching re-runs on wnds.*** however sad and misguided, i kicked ass on that gym test. so much so that one of the whiniest skinny girls**** i ever knew had the gaul to ask me if i was lying about how many sit-ups i did. i was really proud that day. i don't know what happened to that kind of willpower and singlemindedness but i have the strangest desire to see if my tv could pick up wnds in bar harbor?


*her parents have a case full of the medals she won ice skating and they refuse to take it down.
**the only goal i ever scored in my whole life was on my own team, so i guess i can understand the groaning from my newly acquired adult perspective.
***this was the new england independant station and the only station i received on the tv in my room, it adds appropriately to the sadness of my 12 year old life. i should also mention that this is the summer my mother decided i had an eating disorder because i would only eat toast. i just really liked toast, and i was too lazy to cook anything else for myself during the day. i remember she took me out to lunch at friendly's to get me to eat something and then she wouldn't let me order ice cream because it would make me fat. irony?
****her name is emblazened on my brain. she's the same girl who convinced my 8th grade history team to perform a dance for a class project. THE HORROR!

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