On refusing to run 𐫱
Yesterday’s post has attracted quite a strong reaction, which I understand to be a little tongue-in-cheek but also, my goodness… A response to the response has already come in, with what sounds like more on the way. It’s looking to become an all out brawl.
I had scheduled back to back thinking posts but the chaos has distracted me slightly, so I think it might be good for me to take a day off from the world of ideas and to instead produce some nice memoirslop.
Here is the story of my first fight:
It may be hard to tell from my immaculate physique, but I have not always been the fittest person. I am, in fact, a sufferer of a condition known as asthma.
In grade three I was in a split 2/3 class, and every day they would race us on a loop around the school and post the times on a big sheet in the front of the classroom. My time was consistently among the slowest, often slower than the slowest girl in the grade below mine. This did not go unnoticed.
One day, fed up with this, I decided to try giving it my all. I ignored the sensations of my body telling me to stop and clawed my way to the middle of the pack. At the end of the track my teachers seemed completely oblivious to the fact that I was on the edge of a full blown asthma attack without an inhaler and congratulated me as I lay on the ground, heaving my burning lungs and staring into the sky.
For my sixth year my parents decided to move me to a new elementary school to escape the bullying. This worked out well for the most part. But where the old school got to go downhill skiing for their class trip up the mountain, our school had to do the much inferior cross country skiing, where I was so slow that I became separated from the rest of the class in a blizzard. I still struggled in gym, but there was one key difference: I made a friend. This friend showed me that you could just… decide not to try. We would walk around their path so slowly that the teachers would be forced to just stand there for an extra 10–15 minutes. The fact that my times were so slow was suddenly funny: a small victory on my own terms.
I kept up this bad attitude through junior high and all the way into high school, including with my grades: barely passing where I could easily have done well. I could not be prevailed upon to complete the daily runs at more than a meandering walking pace.
Grade eleven was the last year that gym was a required course. My friend suddenly got into running, which felt like a betrayal. I was on the home stretch and I was on my own.
My teacher that year was determined not to go down without a fight. He sent me out alone onto the field while holding everyone else back, and then when they came out they all ran past me shouting encouraging messages like “Go Drew!” and “You can do it!” and “Come on!”. As you can imagine these were not entirely sincere. They mostly petered out by the time people were making their third lap around me, except for one earnest boy who I had to gently ask to stop.
There was a troublemaker who would come to class high on coke or MDMA or something. One day he came into the locker room with a squirt gun. Everyone told him to cut it out, but I was the one who approached him with a look in my eyes.
I only meant to grab the squirt gun, but soon fists were flying. I lifted him up by his shirt and pinned him against the wall while he pummelled me in the chest. I grabbed one of the clothes bins and swung it at him, but only managed to smash an unrelated kid in the face with a loud thunk. It was over as soon as it started, and nobody was really hurt that badly. I left the school to go home and watch Kill Bill, shivering with overexcitement.
I was given a three day suspension and a choice: I could either leave the gym class and just take the credit, or kick the other kid out of gym class without a credit so that he would be forced to take the class over. My teacher told me that if I stayed, he would make sure that things were different for me.
I chose to drop the class.
I only saw that kid one other time before he got himself expelled. He apologized, insincerely, for “beating me up”. I almost decked him right there but I decided against it.
I went through the rest of my school years scraping by from class to class, never quite moving above a walking pace or seeing what I was really capable of.
It’s probably a shame… I hear running is good for you.
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