Many weight-loss experts give this advice for choosing an exercise routine: “Find what you love and then do it!” I assume a lighted bulb is supposed to appear above my head, ding! Aha, so that’s how it’s done. Ohhh-kay. This week I’m going to start . . . uhhhhh . . . now what was that calorie-blasting activity that sounds like fun? Hmmm. Sorry, no flashing bulbs. No dinging bells.
Problem is, I love sitting. Sitting and reading, sitting and watching TV, sitting and having coffee with friends or talking on the phone, sitting and doing puzzles, sitting and sewing, sitting and writing, sitting and cruising the Internet. Oh, I do like to stand sometimes—long enough to bake something yummy that I can then sit down and eat. When I’m in a feisty mood, I might sit outside. How time does fly when I’m sitting.
I’m not naturally inclined toward sweat-inducing activities. But I haven’t always been such a sitter. I recall a time—long, long ago, on a playground far, far away—when I did like exercise. It was called recess. My schoolmates and I would run and teeter-totter and jump rope and swing and climb monkey bars and play tag and four-square and hopscotch. We had fun.
Then one day everything changed. Recess disappeared. In its place we got P.E.—physical education, PhysEd, gym class. Whatever we called it, it held little resemblance to recess. Next thing we knew we were donning double-knit uniforms, picking teams to find out who was the most popular, and tallying sit-ups and pull-ups and rope climbs for a President’s Fitness Test award—which, by the way, I missed only because my softball throw was a few inches shy of the arbitrary distance requirement.
Recess had been a welcome break from the books; P.E. was a cruel intrusion of dodge ball attacks, reduced GPAs, and scarring rejection. And dare we fail to mention every chubby girl’s nemesis, tumbling? Oh, the humiliating memories!
During sixth grade, my P.E. teacher heard two of my friends and me grouse about how much we hated gym class. She said, “Well, if it makes you so miserable why don’t you just go to the library instead?” Hey, nobody needed to suggest that twice! The next time we were on our way to P.E., the three of us turned right instead of left and high-tailed it to the library—our home planet! Three happier eleven-year-old girls you could not find that day.
I don’t think the teacher even missed us the first few times. We definitely did not miss her! After a wonderful week of P.E.-free bliss, the librarian presented us with math worksheets to complete during our stay in the library. I guess we were supposed to view that as punishment. But we were all good students who would happily do extra brain work any day of the week if it got us out of P.E. When that didn’t dissuade us, our teacher got one of the other sixth grade teachers to bring us into her classroom to do our extra work under her beak-nosed supervision. Still, not a problem.
Eventually, our teacher gave up trying to be clever and just told us we had to come back to gym—which of course we did. But that short reprieve is still one of my favorite memories of P.E.
I’m pretty sure P.E. was intended to instill in children a lifelong love of sports and exercise. Sadly, I suspect some of us came away instead with a lifelong distaste for anything that smacks of gym class. A softball game breaks out at a church picnic? Count me out. I had my fill of teammates upset with me for dropping a ball. Just going to the gym can conjure feelings of defiant inferiority toward naturally thin exercise enthusiasts.
It may take the rest of my life to exorcise the P.E.-conditioned insecurities that swirl around all things athletic. I hope someday I can recapture the simple joys of recess. To once again view exercise as a refreshing respite from the stuffy, stressful classroom of life.
For now, the best advice for me should probably be “Find what you don’t hate and do it.”
