Aww, man, do we have to have her? You take her!

When I was a kid, I was that kid.  The kid who got picked last for everything, except for that one time when there was a new girl and neither captain wanted to take a chance on her.  That only happened once since they discovered that she was actually pretty good, and every new kid after that got picked before me because it was apparently worth the risk.

I was the kid who didn’t get to finish the distance run in the fifth grade Canada Fitness test because the class ended before I finished, and the teacher told me to come on back, probably thinking I would be relieved, when in reality, I was crushed.

I was the kid who was so bad, I stopped trying.

As soon as I had that one mandatory high school credit, I stopped taking gym.

The irony here is that in grade 9, gym class wasn’t so bad.  It was an all-girls class with a teacher who rewarded consistent effort and improvement as much as talent and skill.  I actually made progress that semester, to the point where I passed the final 12-minute run by a very comfortable margin (okay so our teacher psyched us out, telling us that in order to pass we needed to run 20 laps of the gym, when in reality we only needed 16 – but clearly it worked, because had she said 16, I am sure more than a few of us would have done just that).  But by then I had been counting down to the end of mandatory gym class for so long that there was no way I would ever voluntarily sign up for another.

Just when there was finally some hope for me, I took that bit of fitness I had gained and ran as far away from gym as I could possibly get.  So that’s my dirty little secret.  Kind of sad, I know – but it goes to show you that there’s hope!

All that time I thought I hated physical activity, but it turns out I just hated gym class!