At this moment, Reno High School students are going through the arduous process of finals. Oh finals, the trepidation of opening your exam booklet, the amnesia you always seem to experience right before the exam, and the fear that a poor exam score will invariably lead to your rejection from college, leaving you with no options except a downward spiral of drugs, sex, and crime.

Without a doubt, the worst part of finals for me was gym class. It’s simply absurd that gym would even require a final let alone how I would even begin to prepare for said final – I guess …. working out … and exercise would do it, but like that’s going to happen. The only thing that I was remotely good at in gym was kickball – stand there and punt a ball … done! – and all the flexibility tests – which didn’t mean a whole lot in Middle School but now later in life is a very useful and beneficial asset to have ;)

Like most gym teachers, mine was the soccer coach who took pleasure in sadistically torturing his students – especially the fat ones. Now what is the mortal enemy of any plus-sized individual? That would be the dreaded timed mile. Our teacher forced us to run a 10 minute mile for our exam and if we happened to not complete the mile in the allotted time then we had to try again the next day. This would continue the entire week of finals until you either (A) passed (B) failed (C) the coach took pity upon you and decided to pass you. One particularly horrifying final, I was determined not to walk the whole thing. Now as a 230-pound 5’5 individual, running was quite possibly the worst torture ever; fat rolls jingling from side to side, my chest cavity threatening to explode with oxygen, and my weak un-muscled legs – already sore from the walk to the track – turned to mush 30 seconds into the final. What made this final particularly embarrassing is that as my fellow classmates were lapping me around the track, they were patting my back, and shouting encouraging words as they sped past me on the way to success. What I learned later on was that the gym teacher told all of the students to encourage me as they ran past as a way to motivate me to run longer, faster, and further. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I am not some Pavlovian Dog whereby a few positive affirmations will instantly result in more instances of the desired behavior. Don’t you think if I had the ability to run a 10-minute mile I would instead of suffering the humiliation of having to repeat the mile time and time again?

I wish that the story ended with some epic tale of me training all year so I could not only complete the mile in less than 10 minutes but go on to break the school record for the mile just to show the coach in some epic Lifetime Movie montage. Unfortunately, I was totally mortified by the experience and decided to take up two languages just so I would never have to experience a gym final again. I wonder, years later, if I would be able to accomplish such a feat having lost some weight and strengthened my muscles …. I’ll let you know when I get around to testing it.