How I learned to enjoy exercise in my twenties
I was your typical anti-P.E. kid growing up. I’m not sure what the primary cause of it was.
It could have been because I’ve always been quirky, eccentric and I never got on with popular kids who were good at sport.
It could have been the fact I have dyspraxia. If you don’t know what dyspraxia is, it’s a co-ordination disorder, and it affects people in very different ways. I remember when Doctor Who introduced a dyspraxic character and in one episode he was scared of climbing a ladder and I made a video where I made joke about ladders being scary, and I got a comment from someone saying “oh, so it’s okay to make fun of people’s disabilities now?” I’d forgotten that the character was dyspraxic because I’m dyspraxic and I can climb ladders and ride bikes.
A lot of the time I just forget I’m dyspraxic. My parents didn’t mention it that much when I was growing up. I just got diagnosed with it at some point that I can’t remember, and it stayed at the back of my mind ever since. My parents probably didn’t want me to feel like I was different to the other kids, so they didn’t bring it up much, but it definitely affected the way I engaged with exercise when I was growing up because my entire history with P.E. was just one of falling over and getting hit with things. That said, I can’t blame the dyspraxia for all of these incidents. I remember one time I was in the queue to take the bat in a game of rounders, and one of my classmates stepped up to take the bat, swung it back, and the bat flew out of his hands, spun through the air, and it hit me right in the face. I was just standing there, minding my own business, and then suddenly a massive bit of wood was flying through the air in my direction. I had to get stitches.
Anyway, so I was never exactly co-ordinated, and so I was always rubbish at any of the games they made us play in P.E. The result was that the teachers never took a shine to me, unlike in other subjects where I was always fairly good and well-liked by the teachers. When they see a kid is struggling with something, you’d think that would be an incentive for a teacher to make an extra effort to excite them about the subject, but P.E. teachers appear to be exempt from this expectation. I can remember approximately one time that I got a compliment from a P.E. teacher. It was during a gymnastics class where they set us a task of coming up with a move and performing it in front of everyone. I did a stupid walk with my tongue out and my eyes rolled back. It made everyone laugh, and the teacher gave me third place for showmanship.
Aside from that, I was rubbish at all sports and would look for any excuse to get out of it. Whenever I was sick, notes from my parents to get out of P.E would get reused for weeks on end so I could just spend the period sitting on the side lines doodling in a notebook.
Around the age of 15, I dislocated my knee. The reason for the dislocation is actually quite pathetic: I bashed it on the side of the sofa while closing the curtains. Suddenly I was on the floor with my knee poking out at the wrong angle, screaming in pain and my mum was running in with a pale white face looking terrified. The ambulance arrived and gave me gas and air and I managed to reset my own knee somehow. I got away with some bruising, nothing major. They gave me some exercises to do and told me to put ice on it and said I should be back to doing in exercise in a couple of months.
I used this excuse to get out of P.E. for an entire year.
I dislocated my knee again the next year (not on purpose, I swear) and this time I had to get a cast, so that made it seem even more legitimate when I got the cast taken off and told them “I had my leg in a cast until very recently”. Apparently, you can get away with calling seven months ago “very recently”. I was a bit of a politician with the truth as a teenager.
It could have just been jealousy that I wasn’t as good at any of the sports we played in P.E. as my peers, and my resentment built up so much that I would rather do nothing than try at all. I was never a very competitive kid, and my anger came out a lot during P.E. This was extra notable in one lesson where the teacher had gone to the equipment cupboard and a bully who had been made captain of a team was picking kids, and he was making fun of me and my friends. I really didn’t want to be there that day, so I snapped, went over to him, and yelled in his face to stop being such a dick. To my surprise, he backed off, and ever since then he seemed apprehensive around me. I’ve since learned that when he grew up, he got sent to prison. I don’t know what he did, but I like to imagine it was something violent. If only so I can tell myself that one time I made a violent criminal shit himself.
Looking back, I think the major reason I rejected exercise for so long was that P.E. is taught completely wrong in this country. All that would really happen was we would show up, get changed, go out on a field, and the teacher would tell us we were playing rounders, football, rugby, or whatever sport it was supposed to be that week, and then go around berating us if we did it wrong.
When I got to sixth form, my school had gotten some special funding on the proviso that they made themselves a specialist sports school and put some branding all over their promotional materials. They’d tried the same thing with drama a few years prior, but they failed to get it. I don’t know how they succeeded with sports because it was easily the worst-taught subject they had. My history teacher who I really got on with was always complaining about how terrible the P.E. department was. I remember her saying “I show up with a really detailed lesson plan, they show up and just go ‘right we’re going to play football today!’”
Me and my friends always complained about the P.E. department being so rubbish, but we kept being told to stop complaining because the extra money would apparently also get spent in other areas. This was never true. I swear by the time I was in sixth form there were about twenty P.E. teachers on staff. We’d see hordes of them in tracksuits walking past classroom windows between lessons.
I remember one history lesson where we’d been learning about the great depression, and our teacher was going to make us watch The Grapes of Wrath on a VHS on a massive bulky outdated TV that had probably been in the department since the 1980’s.
We then told her that the P.E. department had a plasma screen TV and a DVD player. (This was 2007 and these things were luxuries at the time).
“You’re kidding!” she shouted. We swore it was true.
She left the room and went to have a look. She came back furious.
It was great having Ms Traill as the one teacher who understood how weird the school’s obsession with P.E. had become, an obsession that never actually led to a marked increase in the quality of the teaching. We still just showed up and were told “right its tennis today”.
I still remember a run-in I had with a P.E. teacher where I was trying to use the “my leg was in a cast recently” excuse, and I also mentioned I had coursework I was behind on, coursework for a subject I actually needed to get into university. The teacher got angry and told me that I was still expected to show up for P.E. Even if I was just sitting there doing nothing. Really upset, I remember Ms Traill found me between classes and invited me into her classroom and we sat down, and she wanted to know if I was doing okay. She said “y’know, you can go home if you need to. No one’s going to care if you missed a P.E. lesson a year from now”. It meant a lot.
I then went to university and never had P.E. forced on me again. As mentioned in previous entries, my mental health went seriously downhill at university and I was searching for an answer for it, and didn’t quite understand why I kept seeing the word ‘exercise’ in leaflets the doctors gave me and web pages I’d visit when I went looking for what I could do to improve me mental health. The teachers at my school had utterly failed to explain any of the biological side of the benefit of exercise. I didn’t even know what an endorphin was. I didn’t know that diet and exercise were key components of a healthy lifestyle. Well, I did sort of know it because the phrase gets used all the time and it sounds obvious, but I hadn’t had it explained to me WHY diet and exercise were key components of a healthy lifestyle. No one had explained it in layman’s terms that “okay, so when you’re body is put under stress during exercise, it releases a chemical that helps you relieve stress”.
All that P.E. had been about was competition and teachers playing favourites. I never learned anything except the fact that other people in my class were twats when you put a ball by their feet.
I wasn’t quite in the state to take exercise that seriously at university. I tried jogging very early in the morning a few times because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I was never overweight (somehow, given I lived almost exclusively off takeaways and junk food during this period) but I was still very self-conscious when out in public. I was dealing with a lot of social anxiety at the time. Then one day I got back after running, sweaty and horrible, and found our boiler was broken, so I had take a stone cold shower. It took another week to get it fixed and I just gave up in that time.
It wasn’t until 2017 when I hit rock bottom in my mental health struggles and threw everything at getting out of it. I decided to start pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I went swimming with my partner, which was the first time I’d been swimming since I was a kid when we had regular swimming lessons. Like all P.E., swimming had left a bad impression on me and I never did it again after age 12.
So on this random decision to go to the local pool and finding I enjoyed it, before I knew it, I was being convinced to sign up for membership, which included access to the gym. Since I was paying for it anyway, I decided to start going once a week, just to try it. Turned out I liked it.
I was put off the gym in the past because I was always thinking in terms of social awareness, which is what puts people off gyms. People say they don’t like the idea of people looking at them. I understand it because I was there myself: if you’re out of shape and going to a gym, you don’t want people looking at you and judging you compared to their own healthy bodies, but people don’t actually look at you in the gym. They’re more often than not just focused on what they’re personally doing. Maybe they’re talking to friends, but people do leave you alone, and that was the difference between my experience of the gym in my 20’s and my experience of P.E. when I was in school.
I was going to the gym on my own, not competing with anyone else. I wasn’t expected to be there by a third party, this was all my decision. I could stick my headphones in and just run on a treadmill or lift some weights and lose myself in the mindless repetitive activities. It helped me find this sense of peace that I was missing in my daily life. I started increasing the number of times I went, and I’ve kept it steady at between 2 and 3 times a week ever since. Not too intense. Some people are very strict with their exercise regimen because they want to improve their appearance, get ripped, but that’s not got anything to do with why I go to the gym. I find I can really switch off on a treadmill or a weight machine or a rowing machine. I put all my worries to one side and just focus on what I’m doing.
When the gym got taken away from me during lockdown, I got annoyed obviously, but I started exploring other options for exercise. I took up jogging. Downloaded some weight training apps on my phone. It wasn’t the same, but I kept at it because it had been very important to me. I was overjoyed when the gyms opened again. Everyone kept trying to warn me off of going back again because this was summer 2020 and everyone had been scared half to death and didn’t know if it was safe, but I had to do it. I was crushed again when they closed up in November/December time when the virus spiked again, but I made do with running around the field near my house. Then when it rained or frosted over, and I couldn’t run round it safely, I just ran around the neighbourhood. Apparently gyms were really dangerous but wine and cheese parties were fine. I should’ve ditched the exercise and picked up a bottle instead.
Anyway, to make our parasocial relationship complete, here’s a link to my gym playlist on Spotify. Why not go to your own gym on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays between 7 and 8pm GMT and listen to it. We’ll probably be doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.
I CAN SEE YOU.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3xkDryB0XOC4k9xDX0MVeV?si=1f89186b6a64412e
