Some days I hated it, occasionally it was actually fun, but usually it was just a chore.
The class wasn’t segregated, but we did have two teachers: a man and an incredibly old woman, with the woman doing most of the actual teaching and the man assisting and staying more or less out of the way.
Apart from dancing lessons, every class started with a walk/jog of something like 1600 meters (it was a mile with enough shaved off of it to make it metric). I did not care for this, and mostly blew it off and walked as slowly as I wanted to. We did this outside as long as it wasn’t raining or snowing, and when it was, we did it in the gym, where the task was made all the more boring for lack of anything to look at while going around (the outside trail was through the woods and always afforded some interesting views).
After that, there was an activity. It could be a game or a made-up game or not-really-a-game or aerobics.
Let me state up front that I am not sporty. I have a basic understanding of what sports like soccer or football or lacrosse are, but don’t have any clue in hell about the actual rules. Thus, when the activity was an actual game, that usually was a day I hated. Baseball days were the ones I loathed above all others. I don’t recall ever being told the rules, even vaguely, so I mostly just stood around and tried to stay far from the ball, and moved to and from the field when the others on my side did. When we all did the line-up-and-swing-at-the-ball part, I would hang as far back as possible and hope I wouldn’t have to try to hit the ball. I do not know how one hits a tiny, flying ball with a narrow stick, and have never successfully accomplished it myself.
I hated game days in general, except for those when we played golf, archery, or badminton. I liked those games, and had fun playing them. Golf, in particular, was my absolute favourite. It wasn’t proper golf–we just had one club and the balls were larger than usual, not to mention the “course”, as it were, was comprised of just the fields and surrounding country with a few holes dug here and there–but it was leisurely and unstructured and offered a nice setting for conversation. I’m not actually sure what the exercise aspect of it was supposed to be.
The made-up games were very hit-or-miss. Usually miss. They had a tendency to have insanely complex rules that noöne seemed to be able to follow without cheating. Adaptations of real games generally faired better: circular badminton and life-size ping-pong stand out in my mind as being the best. I’ve blotted out most of my memories of the more spectacular failures, but I remember one being some kind of relay race on those buckets-on-your-feet stilts where the course was a secret that you had to discover by some convoluted process.
Non-games were days like weightlifting (Nope. I couldn’t even do whatever the lowest setting on that machine-thing was. This was one event the man conducted, though, and he was far more kind-hearted than the woman. He marked me down as having completed it so I wouldn’t have to try anymore), or sit-ups (not my idea of fun, but I can do them), or push-ups (I can do the knees-on-the-ground kind), or pull-ups (just no), or dancing (the Charleston is fun, waltz is a bit boring but decent enough, swing requires too much effort, square dancing is an abomination whose only redeeming aspect was the announcer’s most humourous accent on that scratchy old 33 they played).
Aerobics would be fun if they didn’t last so damned long. You start out with your box and have a good choreographed time, but after a few minutes you get tired and bored. Plus you had to take your before and after pulse for your record book, and I have a terrible fear of blood and simply can’t bring myself to do that. It’s hard enough letting someone else do it. I always made it up. The numbers must have been believable enough, they were never questioned.