Overlap

Chapter 4: The Guard Dog

<08/17/2009 - 10:25 | Saffrin Middle School (Gym), Austell, GA, USA>

The second week on Monday of my 6th grade school, and I still struggled to get accustomed to this specific kind of class. My second period class was also known as gym class, or to others, physical fitness. Don't get me wrong. I was never athletically motivated from the start, but I didn't mind the hassle for a while.

In my fifth grade year actually, I came in first place in a little sprinting competition, defeating Antonio, the previous running champion. We ran on that track several times in 5th grade recess, but that guy smoked everybody in just about every race. I thought that getting faster and better at that kind of stuff would make me more popular...

But I was wrong. Nothing good ever came of it or my rotten luck. Shortly after winning that race, I suffered from a powerful asthma attack, and I wasn't able to recover my lost stamina and breathe quickly enough to get enough oxygen to my body. The diagnosis was only made after that day, as I had never had the disease prior to that moment. Ever since I contracted it, my physical stamina and endurance was half of what it used to be overnight. It wasn't the kind of asthma that required a constant inhaler. It was the other variant, the type that either made it impossible to recover after pushing myself to the brink, or at least made that recovery time extraordinary longer than it would have been for a normal person. If I were to run on that same track for that same length trying to match my old time, I could still come close. But in doing so, I would need about 30 minutes before I could stop gasping for air, and another thirty minutes to return to my normal strength once more. The inhaler can speed up that process, but only slightly.

Ever since that day, I haven't liked gym very much. It's all physical exercise, which I don't typically care for. What worse, I'll never be able to compete in anything extreme due to my now permanent condition of asthma, so it feels like there isn't even a point to it anymore. I'm not chubby or overweight, so weight loss is not something I have to worry about. Thanks to my quick metabolism, I can eat a buffet and still have these noodle arms of mine.

There was another aspect to not look forward to when going to gym class. Elementary school never had this, at least not where I attended. But ever since middle school, they introduced large changing rooms, gender divided of course, where you would be expected to change from your school outfit to your gym clothes. The school was lax on a few things including the lack of any school uniforms, so people brought in whatever they wanted within reason, but it also meant that I had to change clothes in front of a bunch of sweaty, gross, stupid men. Okay, that might sound like an exaggeration now, but trust me when I say that at least some of them are total idiots. Being self-conscious about changing wasn't the issue. The issue was being packed inside a room full of people which happened to include some of the worst natured and worst mannered boys, like something right out of a cliché. Were they bullies? No, not bullies. More like troublemakers. Let's go with that for now.

I couldn't complain too much though. There were a couple of upsides to gym, at least as they would last for the time being. Like I said before, this school is a bit lax with some details, and the gym teachers were pretty interesting themselves. Mr. Richard and Ms. Jennifer were the gym teachers, and have been for some years now according to others. Every Friday was dodge ball day, something I oddly enjoyed since it involved more coordination than anything else. Other than that, many days became what was known to us as free days.

Free days are essentially gym days in which every single student gets to do whatever they want to do, except for sitting down, laying down, or standing around doing nothing. Whatever that something was, it had to be athletic. Even walking around the gym in rectangles was okay, though they encouraged the walkers to jog from time to time. Many groups of people formed their own little circles, while two larger teams formed opposing sides for their basketball games. If anyone wanted to play, it was as easy as walking up to one of the teams and asking to join mid-game.