In praise of a gym teacher

There were two gym teachers in my high school, a man and a woman. The woman was a nice enough lady who had lost her first love to the Vietnam War, and might not have been teaching otherwise. The man was also the wrestling coach, and probably exactly what you imagine when you think the words "wrestling coach". He could have been dropped in by central casting.

I was no fan of gym class. I did well enough to avoid sinking my GPA, but I was constantly on edge about it. I was a strong swimmer, an adequate runner, a profoundly mediocre gymnast, and completely hopeless in ball sports of any kind. Until I went abroad my junior year, to a country where I was average height and basketball was off the curriculum, I was convinced I was about two steps above disability.

Looking back on it, though, the interesting thing to me is that the second gym teacher, the gruff wrestling coach, programmed his class not for the confirmed jocks but for people like me. He taught us about flexibility. He had us try aerobics (this was like 1986, practically Peak Fonda). While I'm not sure his message actually got across, I do sincerely believe he was trying to introduce us to options for lifelong fitness.

And he did one other highly unconventional thing after class: he let girls into his weight room. It may sound pretty ridiculous now, but back then it wasn't uncommon for the weight training equipment to be inside the men's locker room, so even basic physical access was hardly a given.

I had read somewhere, probably in something Olympics-related in the 1984 cycle, that swimmers were now lifting weights, so I wanted to try it. That gruff wrestling coach let me in, and taught me some moves: curls, shrugs, upright rows,  bent-over rows, dumbbell presses and flyes. These same movements were the bulk of my non-cardio gym activities through most of the 90s, eventually supplemented with leg presses, lunges, and unweighted squats thanks in part to (yes!) the Stripper FAQ.

I would like to be able to say that I took to it like a duck to water, and the crusty old wrestling coach became my mentor. Alas, that is not the case. Without a program or a goal, I lost interest in the weight room and didn't return until college, and fairly haphazardly then. Still, here I am, 25 years on, still moving weights, so in the end I guess that lesson of lifelong fitness did stick.