Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for August 18, 2014

I liked gym, I could get all sweaty and dirty and no one would complain until much later….yeah too much personal info, sorry.

In Gym we had, on a time, to run an obstacle course; you know the sort of thing climbing up ropes and across bars and the like, and at one stage we were required to jump from a beam to a rope and then shimmy down the rope and off to points unremembered (for reasons which will probably emerge shortly).

Our story being set in those halcyon days of child safety, when nothing was expected to hurt us but the cane (not even those fascinating blobs of mercury we were always playing with on the physics lab benches), the beam was of course set well above head height; something that would never be allowed in the more cynical and lawyerly times of today.

… So …

So we boys proceeded along the beam indian file (not that we had much choice in that really) prompted towards simulacrum of alacrity by our mad sports master.Now I have always had a bit of a tendency to be rather more enthusiastic than good at sports; and so maybe I was following a bit too closely on the guy in front of me, or perhaps I had annoyed him so that he pulled the rope a bit more than necessary as he left it, or it was just that a two inch wide climbing rope was just beyond my visual acuity, but as I launched myself from that beam I was aiming for a point that was at the end of the up-swing of the rope and as I approached it, it was moving away from me and we never did meet.

Have you ever watched those, I think they are traditionally Saturday morning, cartoons? The ones where, say, a coyote runs off a cliff? How, amusingly, he runs straight out legs aspinning, gravity defying; then suddenly noticing some slight difference in his situation he looks down and immediately realising the untenability of his position he makes an instantaneous right-angled turn downwards, ignoring inertia just as completely as he had earlier ignored gravity? Have you seen that? Well whoever it was first started that convention must have had the most brilliant psychological insight—-well either that or had actually done exactly what I did.

So, to get back to our story having left me hanging in the air and just about to miss my rope for the last few seconds, that was exactly how it felt. My perceptions of the event were exactly the coyote’s: that I went straight out hung for a moment with my hands flapping about vainly for a rope that had left me and moved on with its life; and then, because I foolishly glanced below, I dropped straight down to the hard hardwood floor, where I broke both wrists and sprained an elbow.

My brain being somewhat faster than my body, somewhere on the way down I had assessed the situation and had what I like to think of as the ‘coyote syndrome’ firmly fixed in my mind so that I was laughing heartily by the time I hit and continued to do so—-though perhaps it would be more accurate to say the laughter was hysterical rather than hearty by then. Because of that it took absolute ages for me to convince the rest of the class that I was actually somewhat in need of a visit to the emergency department.

Yes, marvelous story, Richard! I went to a girls boarding school, so our gymnastics were less, um, arduous, but I loathed phys ed with a passion. However, being the genteel creatures we were (cough, cough) we had ballet classes two days a week, which I enjoyed tremendously. At least I learned to walk across a room without tripping over my feet, which is a lot more useful than swinging from a rope.

gym class was for muscle heads that couldn’t read a book!

I could never climb a rope and still can’t. Thankfully I’ve had no real world applications for needing it (yet).

At the age of 54, I finally found out that I have a genetic disorder that explained why I never could climb that rope in gym class. Lipid storage myopathy – google it if you’re interested in learning more.I was in my late 40’s when I found out the medical reasons why I never did well at running. No wonder I could never get a decent grade in gym class. If I’d known then what I know now, you think a doctor’s note would help my grade?

At least he isn’t being forced to line dance to ‘Achy Breaky Heart’. To this day, I can’t stand country music.

We called it P.E. back then and I liked it for two reasons: NO WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS and NO HOMEWORK! Even though I was an out of shape husky kid who had to be given a head start on running laps and couldn’t do a pullup or manage the monkey bars… or earn that President’s Physical Fitness Award patch, by the time of 4th and 5th grade I was invincible in Indian leg wrestling, Puberty skinnied me up and in the 8th grade I ran my first mile in 8:13. Threw myself into P.E. classes in High School with gusto and would earn two JROTC physical fitness ribbons.

That said, I despised my elementary school coach denying me water breaks; in the hot Florida sun, that’s virtually child abuse.

I never cared much for gym class, P.E. (phy ed), P.T. (physical torture), or whatever they call it, and it was required all the way through 10th grade. Of course, by 10th grade (and a bit before), my mind was on other subjects. So it raises a question….… why weren’t the required showers at the end of class co-ed?

So there’s still a chance.

I was one of your “honors” students, so, I never excelled in sports…………however, I did enjoy volleyball season…….that was fun and I did very well in that.

I was never very athletic, so it came as a surprise to learn I was very good at rope-climbing. Too bad I wasn’t able to turn that into a career.

Hated gym class. Grade school was fine. But high school? Little dictators with whistles and clipboards. Sucked all the fun out of any form of sport or exercise.I can’t climb a rope. But rappelling down would be a good skill. Why else to carry extra floss at work? :))