Somebody Save Me

On school PE and my relationship with exercise.

I had a Twitter post that went viral this week. I’d shared a picture of a wooden gym vaulting box, brown wood with sections rising to a dirty leather brown top, and asked the question, did anyone else feel triggered by this picture? I tweeted: ‘I truly believe that the mental barriers I face towards exercise stem from this instrument of humiliation and the dragon that shamed me for not being able to vault over it, climb the ropes or roll over the balance bars’.

This is not me in this photo!

Responses came flooding in. Hannah Bourne-Taylor, she of the campaign to save the swifts and get nesting boxes put into all new homes, tweeted back that she was sorry for my experience but at first, glancing at the picture had thought, ‘ooh, those holes would be great for swifts to nest in’. I wish the vaulting box had been used for nest building rather than being used to shame and humiliate. Some who did manage to vault over it tweeted of broken arms.

It wasn’t just the box, though, was it? Just standing at the threshold of the school gymnasium with its smell of polished wood floor, unwashed PE kits and feet made my stomach lurch and legs turn to jelly. The ropes with their leather ends reaching up into the ceiling had a horror all of their own, of rope burns and hanging there while the rope swung round, nauseous with motion sickness and embarrassment while the class sat and watched, sniggering behind hands held in front of mouths.

At the balance bar, the beam that appeared on that pull-out frame of doom, my humiliation came to a peak. With the whole class of thirty girls watching, cross-legged in their regulation waist-high green knickers and Airtex shirts with initials embroidered on in green chain stitch. Miss Jackson of domestic science who had also taught my mother saw that this was done neatly and precisely. My initials were STH, so was nicknamed sanitary towel Hayes. Humiliation enough, imagine the shame at being yanked over the bar by Miss Naylor to perform the forward roll over the beam that had evaded me. Instant wedgie, red face and tears as she barked that I of all gals should be moving more. I stood, tears rolling down my face as she prodded my belly and asked to see me in her office later where an instrument was produced, a kind of calliper that measured the fat on our upper arms.

The lesson over and the terror continued. The showers. They had an odour that I can remember to this day, a mixture of feet, sweat and mildew. Green walls in a dark, windowless cell with showerheads spurting tepid water. If you run fast enough, dead centre, you avoided getting properly wet. If you were Wendy Williams and had 38DD boobs, then you ran into Miss Naylor who had opened your towel and wrapped it around you, patting your back to dry it.

If you had your period, you were marched to the toilet block, where Miss Naylor would demand that you stripped to the waist and washed your armpits with a flannel. While she watched, of course.

Out on the hockey field, it was no better. She put me at right wing as I needed to run, and run I did, up the pitch, down the pitch, ad nauseum until I was sick on the grass and was put in goal.

Athletics were simply terrifying. I could not do anything that involved leaving the ground. I ran around the hurdles and stalled at the mat for the high jump, but could throw a good shot put, especially if I thought of the games teacher when I threw it. Sports Day was a ritualistic horror show. The boys from West Tarring would line up at the fence, and with the whole school and parents watching, I wobbled around the relay track to taunts of ‘come on thunder thighs’ as Karen Freeman who ran for the county streaked past me. For some reason, the skorts we usually wore, a cross between a skirt and shorts (and chafed your thighs something rotten) were taken off for Sports Day. Even at sixteen, we were made to wear just green knickers with our Airtex shirts tucked in. It was social suicide if my period coincided with Sports Day. I begged my mother to let me use tampons, as the shame of a wad of sanitary towel was too much, but apparently, tampons were only for married women. I had no idea why.

I learnt to stick my fingers down my throat to avoid swimming. The excuse of having a period didn’t wash every week, as the teacher kept a chart. To this day I’m petrified of swimming pools and swim as my son says like ‘somebody save me’. I wish somebody had, as I clung to the edge crying, the swimming teacher in cream-coloured cut-off wellies shoving me out into the water with a foot on my head. You could see her pubes up her shorts.

I’m over sixty now. I haven’t really talked about this in detail before or thought about the effect it might have had on me. I wonder if this is the reason when I think of exercising, there is a demon on my shoulder who convinces me it’s a bad idea. Is this why I hate competitive sports and am not interested in watching them (apart from international rugby but that’s more to do with my social life at teacher training college, but that’s another story). Is this why swimming pools terrify me but I can swim in the sea or in our local river. Is this why I hate activewear? Is this what’s meant by triggering?

I cannot imagine running anywhere and have a get out clause for that – a neurosurgeon looking at my damaged back that saw me exit my teaching career and has a synovial cyst sitting on my sciatic nerve and wear and tear in my lower back, told me I shouldn’t do sport with impact. No aerobics, no running, no Zumba. That’s fine by me.

Walking in the High Atlas, Morocco 1987

I do, however, like walking. Our honeymoon was spent walking in the High Atlas Mountains and we climbed Mount Toubkal the highest mountain in North Africa. I’ve twice completed the Moonwalk, a marathon from the Walk the Walk charity that begins at midnight and sees thousands of women in pink-decorated bras walk the streets of Edinburgh or London. The top of the mountains are beyond my reach now, but a good walk along the coast or here in our Northumbrian countryside is a delight and is as good for my mental health as it is for my fitness. I have an ebike too and love the freedom this brings to join the lads on their bike rides, being able to get up hills like the rest. All is not lost. I’m not sedentary, but I do wonder if my relationship with exercise might have been different had my PE teachers been kinder.

I feel a disclaimer is needed. I’m sure there were lots of PE teachers then and now who are gentle, kind, and encouraging and don’t think competition is the be-all and end-all. I just wish you’d been at my High School.

This is my experience. I’d love to know if yours was different or do you identify with mine? Feel free to leave a comment below.

All names have been changed to protect identity.