When I was at primary school, we didn't do PE, or what my sons called "Gym"... we did Music and Movement. It wasn't a particularly swanky place, just an ordinary state school, but perhaps they had delusions of being more exclusive than they actually were, I don't know. I don't remember much about the actual classes, so I can't say they inspired me or otherwise.
When I got to high school I was immediately plunged into PE Proper.
Hockey - I played Left Back (should probably have been Left Behind but we'll not go there).
Javelin - about the only athletic-y thing I was any good at.
Swimming - they taught me to swim when I was twelve which seems very late nowadays when most kids seem to be hurled into the water before their first birthday.
Cross Country - we only did this when there was ice on the puddles and it was foggy. Very odd.
Although I felt chest-heavingly unfit on these runs I can't actually have been so awful, my school was over a mile from home, up a long slow hill, and I cycled, winter and summer (with my hands so cold that when the blood came back to my fingers I felt nauseous) until I went into fifth year, and after that I walked, unraveling the day in both directions with a girl who lived up the road from me. In six years I doubt if I got a lift more than a dozen times. There was no bus. Rain, wind, snow and sun, I was self propelled.
Several times a week I walked to the library, a mile there and back, or to the shop on a Saturday to get forgotten items of shopping, another two mile round trip.
I went on YHA walking holidays in the Cotswolds and the Peak District and in sixth year I started to do conservation work at weekends, building fences, footpaths, steps, footbridges and drystone walls. And on the weekends when I wasn't doing that, I was hill-walking and camping. I spent the summer after I left school helping to put a surveying grid down in Ariundle, the last natural oak woodland in Scotland. I helped to build a drystone retaining wall at Knockan, near Ullapool, and was part of a group putting a footpath up Beinn Eighe (we did the highest section so that meant a significant climb before we started in the morning, it's 3,314 feet high - 1010m). I worked on Skye and in the Cairngorms as well. It was quite a summer.
After that I worked on a big organic farm, driving a tractor - it took me another 12 years to get a motorbike licence and six more after that to be deemed competent enough to be let loose in a car. I built fences, planted stuff, harvested it, and loaded vans of produce for the market. It was three miles to the pub!
And then I took up rock-climbing and ice-climbing and dabbled at caving (very scary stuff, never ever again), did cross-country skiing, and cycled from Edinburgh to London and back (on my own), and around Brittany.
And then somehow, with children and not being able to drive when they were small (a three year old and a one year old tied onto the back of a Kawasaki 500 is likely to cause attention), I stopped doing these things. Working shifts scuppered the weekends away when my friends were off doing new routes on the crags, and I just never went back to it. And being a single mum for a while didn't help either.
Now I am struggling with exercise, and if I look back at the stuff I did then, it wasn't to keep fit, it was because it was fun. I am swimming the channel (virtually) at the moment, and trying to get enthused about going to the gym, which I am doing because I need to rather than because I want to. And it struck me this morning that "fun" is what's missing.
And then I saw this.
Fun. With knobs on.
In the absence of a staircase like this, I think I might go and find a hill to walk up this weekend. Not a big hill you understand. A small one will do just fine. Any suggestions?
n
PS What do you do now for keep fit, which is fun too?
PPS I can't dance for toffee, totally uncoordinated, so that's no use :(