When I used to hate physical education

When I was a kid in junior-high, physical education was very basic, not to say crude. I remember three things we had to do: Run, high-jump and rope-climb. 

These were the tests that determined a young person fitness or lack thereof. I couldn’t run because I got side-stitch, I couldn’t high-jump or rope-climb because my efforts were grossly uncoordinated and no one, among my teachers, had the imagination to try to coach and correct me. 

For these failures, I was labeled as incompetent and was so humiliated that I came to hate physical ed and considered myself a failure in sports. 

Talk about bad self-image that my PE instructors kept on drilling on me, without even trying to address my personal understanding of what I was supposed to do. 

It’s only when I was in high school that, one day, we went to climb a nearby hill called Mont Chevran, around the small city of Cluses, France, where almost miraculously, as I finally was back in my natural element, I was first of my class to make it to the top. 

I finally broke the spell of being a klutz and it finally opened the door to a rather physically active rest of my life.