On exercise and fitness

Now there's a title to scare away my few loyal followers.

Hannah is home for the holidays, and has been encouraging me to get out and walk every morning while she runs.  Likewise I was encouraging her to continue in these good habits, saying that the only good thing I remember from my college phys. ed. days was that we needed to make a lifetime habit of being physically fit.  (Obviously I failed, but I am currently back on the wagon now.)

This is another of my "Before marriage" stories that I'll never forget.

Back when I was at Baylor (1978-1982), I was required to take four semesters of Physical Education.  Those were some of my least favorite credits I earned.  

First semester, I thought I would sign up for the very easiest class ever.  Roller-skating.  How hard could that be, right?  I grew up in a big Baptist church in Dallas that actually had its own skating rink, and between that and the old-fashioned metal skates (complete with key around my neck on a piece of yarn), I was an excellent skater.  In fact, if you could call skating a sport, you could say that was the only sport I excelled at.

Then came my first day of class when I heard those ominous words from the instructor:  "As you all know," (no, I had no idea!), "this is a class in ballroom dance on skates!"  Oh, gross.  It may sound fun to you, but it was not my best class.  I was assigned a dance partner, and let me assure you it was anything but a blow-off course.  We had to work hard for whatever grade we eventually earned.  It involved skating backwards mostly, as I remember it, and doing the jitterbug, complete with swinging (skating actually) between my partner's legs and flying up in the air and spinning to land facing the right way.  That was no easy "A" for sure.

Next semester I signed up for bowling, thinking at least that was an activity I might actually use at some point in my life.  I won't belabor the point, but suffice it to say that my team used to try to bribe me to not show up for class.  If I cut class, they added in my very first score as a scratch, and as it turned out, I never managed to do as well as that first day before "learning" all the correct form techniques we were required to practice.  Yes, it's also true that the only strike I ever achieved was a flook, and it just happened to have knocked all ten pins down on the lane next to the one I was attempting to use.

The summer after my freshman year, I had a job that didn't provide a lot of physical activity, so in a grandiose attempt to lose the "Freshman ten" I had gained (in spite of two semesters of phys. ed.), I went bicycling to and around White Rock Lake every morning with a friend before showering for work.  That was about 12 miles a day.  Not too bad for a P.E. flunkie like myself.  Therefore I got the brilliant inspiration to sign up for bicycling as my next phys. ed. requirement.

By then I had learned enough about college to realize that things were never quite what they seemed, but still I had no idea how ridiculously hard that class could be.  The very first day, we got a lecture on the importance of keeping our bikes in perfectly safe condition.  The teacher eyed the bikes and selected the most dilapidated one with which to demonstrate basic repairs.  Of course she had to choose my bike.  Only she didn't exactly demonstrate the repairs, only how to determine if they needed repairs.  She told us "how" to do it without showing us anything but how to take the bike apart.  When the class period was over, my bike was on the pavement in pieces.  She gave me a list of things I needed to do before the first bike hike, which was two days away.

My roommate came and picked me up in her car, and we carefully put the handlebars, frame, seat, tires, brakes, cables, and everything in a box and took it all to a mechanic where I paid a small fortune to get it put back together with new parts, freshly greased.  Thus began my third semester of learning to be physically fit.

The fourth and thankfully last semester to complete my fitness requirements, I carefully chose a class I determined would not involve mechanics,  dance maneuvers, or ugly shoes, and one my parents would gladly foot the bill for:  tennis.  My folks belonged to the Royal Oaks Country Club where they played tennis at least once a week.  I, however, had never learned to play.  The first day of class, I showed up properly attired with my tennis racket, only to learn that there had been some horrible mistake.  Instead of being a beginner class, as I had supposed, I was in an advanced tennis course, clearly out of my league, so to speak, as evidenced by my first embarrassing attempt at a serve.

Going to the registrar and pleading my case, I was told that the beginner tennis class was full, along with any other possible class that might appeal to me.  The only one, and I mean the only P.E. class with an open slot at the time I was available was called something like "Figure Control."  The mystery was solved as I showed up for the second class (since I had missed the first one while wildly hitting tennis balls over the fence and across the campus).  "Figure Control" was just a nice way to fool people from knowing they had signed up for a weight-lifting class for girls. That was without a doubt the worst class I ever took.

It was that final semester of P.E. that I proved I was no "Baylor Girl."  I had always heard that "Baylor girls don't sweat; they glow!"  Um, not true in my weight lifting class.  That was the semester I learned to detest glowing, or whatever you want to call it.  Working those machines caused me to perspire in places I never knew had sweat glands.  My hair would be drenched, and even my toes would be stinky and damp by the end of my "Figure Control" class.  I hated that.  And besides all the sweating, I still had not one sculpted muscle on my entire sore body for all my agony.  I don't think I got an "A" in that class either.

Stay tuned.  Later I'll tell you about my first major misunderstanding with Jim, who somehow got the mistaken notion that I was really "into" fitness and working out.  I thought you needed to hear these P.E. stories first in order to fully appreciate the irony.

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