Classy, Classy Guy
Ah, today we have a ripe one:
Your worst experience in a gym class.
Let’s just get the actual worst experience out of the way first. That’s the prompt, right, what you came here for?
When I was in junior high, we’d try out various sports in gym class. I guess the coaches thought that in order to be well-rounded, we definitely needed to shoot a bow and arrow at least once in our lives, climb a cargo net, basically do the sorts of things Jason Statham does in most of his movies.
Or, I mean, Deliverance came out in 1972, so I’m sure almost all my gym coaches had seen it, and maybe they felt they were doing us a favor in the event that we had to kill some hillbillies who were raping our fat friend.
One of the sports we tried was lacrosse, a sport that wasn’t deadly to hillbillies in the strict sense, but which seems to be popular at ivy league schools, so it does kind of give their enemies, rich, educated east coasters, further avenues to networking with people who inevitably convince hillbillies that coal mining is a great idea.
Lacrosse is the sport where you have that stick with the net on the end and…well, I don’t actually remember what else you do in that one other than throw the ball around and try and catch it in your stick net, which seems fucking impossible.
Lacrosse kind of seems like a bullshit sport someone made up, like some guy cut the nets off his pool table and then taped them to sticks and decided to throw around a cue ball because he was THAT drunk.
As a non-sports person, it’s a mystery to me why, say lacrosse is a sport people play in college, or field hockey, whatever the fuck that is, but colleges don’t have pro wrestling leagues. Why not? At leas someone might actually want to watch that! You could team up with drama departments for costumes. It’d be a spectacle, and isn’t that what we’re all looking for?
Anyway, we were playing lacrosse, or the closest approximation of lacrosse available to kids who have never touched a lacrosse stick before and have zero desire to do so, and I’m in the field, standing in the way of another player, and he just decided to go with an unorthodox play and launch the ball straight at me as hard as he could. Which, in fairness, wasn’t a terrible strategy. I mean, after a quick Google, it’d seem that this isn’t allowed in lacrosse, it’s sort of like hitting a baseball player in the head with a baseball while he’s trying to steal a base (which I argue would add some serious stakes to the game). But, again, it’s not like we had a large toolset in terms of lacrosse maneuvers.
The ball, which is a solid rubber ball, hit me right in the chest, and it left me with a hybrid wound between a bruise and a burn somehow that lasted for weeks.
Definitely my worst experience in a gym class, which isn’t so bad considering the urban legend I heard about kids getting into a towel fight in the showers after a gym class, and one kid whipped another kid in the nuts so ferociously that the kid’s nutsack split open and his testicle fell out onto the shower floor.
This seems almost impossible, maybe a folktale designed to make us all think it’s not so bad to get hit in the chest by a hard rubber ball.
Presidential Fitness Test
There were some other things about gym class that sucked.
I was a victim/participant in the Presidential Fitness Test where you had to do various tasks to a certain level in order to…I don’t know, have the President think you’re hot shit? Is the President actually concerned with whether or not I can do a pullup? If he is, maybe he should find something else to do. There are many, many middle eastern countries that I’ve never even heard of to bomb! Akrotiri and Dhekelia? Wha!?
One of the events was the sit and reach, which has a very descriptive name, so me telling you that it involved sitting flat, legs straight, and reaching forward as far as possible seems like a waste of everyone’s time. And yet, I did it. Guess that shows how much I care about our relationship.
I sucked butts at the sit and reach, which seemed unfair. Like, push-ups, you can kind of push (up) through the pain. Or running the mile, you could gut it out. But sit and reach? It’s just how far your body goes, bro.
Plus, I don’t remember American heroes, like Rambo or John Matrix, showing us how flexible they were. That shit is for Belgians, who were probably commie scum, right? With their flexibility and untearable nutsacks.
In my later school years, they altered the test so that instead of meeting a standard set up in some spreadsheet, all you had to do was try the events the first time, then, later in the semester, you were supposed to beat your previous records.
This worked when I was in 8th grade because you’d try and do a good job, then find out you had to beat it next time. In 9th grade, however, hip to the scheme, you’d just half-ass it completely on the first time, then 3/4 ass it the second time, and so you’d still have a full quarter of ass left in the tank for eating Doritos as a lunch, which is a thing I did as often as possible.
Step 2 The Test
We used to do a couple diabolical cardio activities in gym class, too.
The 1.5 miler isn’t like an insane feat, but what was ridiculous about it is that it’s not like gym class trained us up to run 1.5 miles using any sort of plotted out method. You just showed up for gym class one day, waited to see if the coach was going to put a basketball or a lacrosse stick or a goddamn arrow in your hands, and instead he was like, “Well, we’re going to run 1.5 miles today as fast as you can.”
This is not something I would suggest even to a moderately fit person untrained in distance running. I mean, okay, it’s kids, and for some reason, kids can kind of handle anything, even stuff that’d make adults sore for like 9 days. You know how you can tell you’re aging? You run 1.5 miles as hard as you can, and you’re not even sore the next day, but the day after that, you’re like, “I wish I was dead. I wish I’d always been dead.”
There was some kind of time standard, I can’t remember how it worked exactly, but I do remember that the slacker strategy was to walk until the last minute, then sprint through the last lap or so in order to make it in time.
This is a super stupid plan because in order to be fit enough to pull that off, you’d have to be fit enough to just easily jog 1.5 miles in a reasonable timeframe. It’s like having to deadlift a total of 1,000 pounds, and because you’re totally out of shape, being like, “Instead of lifting 100 lbs 10 times, I’ll just load up the bar with 1,000 and do it once. What kind of sucker is doing this ten times?”
But the worst event in the same vein was the Step Test.
The Step Test was an “event” where you would line up along the gym bleachers, step up onto them, then step back down, and you’d do this as many times as you possibly could for some arbitrary amount of time, like 4 minutes.
Some dipshit classmate was supposed to count your steps, and they never, ever did it right. Because who can pay attention to something that boring for 4 minutes? Watching a kid go up and down the same step? Jesus christ.
The indoor bleachers weren’t just regular steps, they were extra tall, I guess because doing this on the sorts of steps we might actually encounter in real life would be silly.
It was exhausting, painful, and my only hope is that it was an activity gym coaches did when they were hungover and didn’t want to have to work very hard, and then they’d realize the cacophonous stomping of 30 kids up and down wooden steps was just about the worst punishment imaginable for their sin of having a life outside of school.
Cage Ball
I hear that kids today maybe don’t play dodgeball in gym class. And that seems fine to me. Whatever, I don’t really care if kids are tougher than I was or not. I’ve never really understood why old people get all upset about generations of people being softer and softer.
A) I don’t think getting slapped in the face with a red rubber ball really seems to have done a whole lot to improve the character of my generation, seems like plenty of them are still assholes, and
B) I WANT younger generations to be softer. That way, even though I’ll be old and kind of frail, they may still fear me on some level and not make fun of my shoes, hair, and whether or not my socks show.
Cage Ball was a dodgeball variation. Coaches came up with a fuckton of dodgeball variations. As a kid, I kind of always assumed that’s what coaches did at night, lay in bed awake, dreaming up new structures that facilitated kids whipping red gym balls at each other. I figured this was probably the main thing they did in college, learn how to come up with games that were pretty much like the ones we always played, but slightly varied so that it seemed necessary to have some guy employed by the school who was also allowed to wear shorts all the time.
Cage Ball was really only like dodgeball in that the goal was to not get hit by a ball. Other than that, it was pretty unusual as dodgeball games go. You could run anywhere in the gym, and only two designated people could actually use the balls to hit other people.
The catch was, the balls to dodge were big-ass yoga balls.
The two designated ball handlers (this is edging towards grossness) were one boy and one girl.
The boy had to throw the yoga ball, and the girl could kick the yoga ball. This was, in theory, a way to make it so that there was some fairness, girls being weak stupid babies, boys being strong as fuck.
However, this entire setup collapsed thanks to Chris Hiller, a girl who was strong as fuck and kicked like a coked-up mule in a kicking contest with a grand prize of a big pile of carrots. Or whatever the fuck would motivate a mule to kick really super hard and debilitate a human 9th grader.
I have a distinct memory of Chris kicking this yoga ball around the gym, sending kids fucking flying. I saw this kid, Brandon, a super skinny kid, get completely cleaned off his feet by a Chris kick.
I’m running around, sweating my ass off. It was like one of those war movies, like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan where it’s just chaos and running around, and you’re fighting for your life, and I turn and see the coach.
He’s off to the side, and as Chris fucking cannonballed some kid, the coach is stifling a laugh, barely, not really, behind his fist. His face red. Just having a goddamn ball. A Cage Ball.
Today, we worry about kids going to a school that has a library in it, and in that library, there may be a book where two boys make out.
In my day, our gym teachers were definitional sadists.