It's time for a sob story

You probably have one like this too. Have you ever met anyone who actually enjoyed PE?

If wearing iconic shirts was a sport, in 1993 there was only one winner. Now available in Dalston for £479.

This edition of Keep It Up Fatty! comes to you from my parents’ sofa in the Cambridgeshire fens, the very place where I formed what would surely be a lifelong hatred of exercise.

And yet on this brief trip, I’ve been for three runs and even given the local gym a whirl. In fact, the woman on the front desk let me in for free with a wink because she used to work in the care home where my nan spent her final years, and remembered her fondly. Officially the only perk to date that’s come out of growing up in the middle of nowhere.

As a teenager, I did a bit of swimming and a bit of dancing, but anything that could be considered actual sport would have me feigning crippling period pains faster than you can say “But she was only on last week?”. Instead I spent most of my spare time writing stories and letters, reading, making really shit bracelets and watching music videos while stuffing biscuits into my mouth. Some of these things have served me well in life. The bracelets and the biscuits, probably not so much. 

God I miss these books

At school there were people who were sporty and people who were academic, with very little crossover. I was firmly in the academic camp, and I hated the sporty ones, who called me things like “milk bottle legs” and whacked me on the shins with hockey sticks despite the ball being across the other side of the field. 

Sport at a crap rural comp in the mid-90s seemed to be about pain, humiliation, competition, and being either boiling hot or freezing cold. Mental health hadn’t been invented yet and it didn’t really feel like fitness or strength were relevant either - it was all about winners and losers and, when it came to PE and games, I was definitely a massive loser.

My PE teacher made this clear when, at the start of year 7, she loudly ordered me to “go and stand at the back with the other chubby ones”, something I continued to do well into adulthood whenever group photos were required, as well as turning down invitations to be a talking head on the likes of 99 Most Totes Adorbz Reality TV Moments Of 2006, because I didn’t want to pollute your telly with my chubby ways.

If it’s a PE teacher’s mission to encourage kids to be more active, their methods in the 90s had the exact opposite effect on me. I remember bursting into tears because I couldn’t heave my prematurely womanly curves over the horse in gymnastics and feeling distinctly too bootylicious at 13 to be wearing tiny polyester gym knickers in public. My defining memory of Sports Day doesn’t involve any medals, but being sent home after puking from sunstroke (sun protection also hadn’t been invented yet).

The absolute most dreaded part of it all was running. Thanks to an exciting new bypass cutting through the school’s old cross country course, the longest distance we ever had to do was the 1500 metres aka “not even a third of a parkrun”. Yep, the Fenland highways bigwigs of the late 20th century really did me a solid there.

I swear, though, that in 1994 the 1500 metres was a seven hour ordeal in the howling wind and lashing rain, with evil teachers screaming “KEEP RUNNING YOU LAZY FUCKERS!” as bats flapped around my sodden hair, lightning struck the ground in front of me with every agonising step and thousands of cackling medieval onlookers hurled human excrement in my face. In hindsight it couldn’t have taken more than 15 minutes or so and they probably didn’t say fucker. 

But it definitely felt traumatic, and goes against everything I now know about running - basically that walk/run intervals are the scientifically-proven best way to get into it, and should definitely not provoke a torrent of abuse from people who are supposed to be encouraging. Actually helping people to get better at, let alone enjoy, exercise did not seem to be the priority here, though. And, according to some fairly credible research from a few years ago, not much has changed. 

I’ve done my own little survey of people who’ve been to school more recently than me and, while PE teachers probably don’t routinely bitch about people’s bodies to their faces anymore, many of them still favour the naturally athletically gifted and focus on performance over wellbeing. This means that only those who were considered to have elite potential report positive experiences of school sports. If the 99% of us who were never going to run for the county or play for the country ever want to lead more consistently active lives, we’re going to need to find motivation from elsewhere.

With all this in mind, is it any wonder that it took me another 25 years or so to realise that:

1. Exercise can actually make you feel good. In fact, it should be the whole point. 

2. Not all sporty people are complete arseholes who will shout that you look like a T-Rex when you run because your arms are slightly too short for your body*. 

3. If you are a chubby one, or just still feel like a chubby one, or a puny one, or a lanky one, or a clumsy one, you don’t have to stand at the back. You can’t stand right at the front though, because I’m doing that now, sorry. However, I will never be evolved enough to do this in polyester gym knickers.

4. This is a big one: You are allowed to run even if you’ll never “win”.

5. If PE makes a good chunk of people feel so inadequate, self-conscious and humiliated that they might never exercise again, then this is a failure of the system rather than a personal one, and probably has a fair bit to do with poor activity levels in this country.

I also know I’m not the only one who goes to their hometown for a few days and starts reliving their low-level school horror. But boy does it feel GOOD to smugly run past the scene of the crime and stick a metaphorical finger up at the PE teachers who made me feel like crap. As one of the academic ones, I’m obviously way too much of a total goody-two-shoes boff to stick up an actual finger.

Huntingdon parkrun this weekend. I came 213th out of 303 and that’s just fine. The dog belongs to my parents and he’s too naughty to take part.

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share it with anyone else who might too. The first edition went weirdly viral on LinkedIn and has led to some “exciting opportunities” *mysterious face* but it’s still early days for Fatty.

Oh, and if you happen to know any PE teachers who are doing things differently, I would love to hear about it.

* I recently attended a boozy impromptu barbecue with some local friends ranging from 5’4” and a half (me) to 6’7” (not me) and it somehow came up that your wingspan - do humans have wingspans? - is meant to be the same as your height. Because my pals are wild like this, a tape measure was promptly produced and sure enough this turned out to be true for everyone… except me and the host, a nice and otherwise conventionally-proportioned man called Tom. Our arms came in a couple of inches short and so we are destined to be branded T-Rexes forever. ROAR.