Once a year, my junior high school decided that going through puberty in a giant cinderblock building surrounded by other people who were also going through puberty in a giant cinderblock building was not making any of us quite miserable enough for their liking.
To solve this problem, they loaded us all onto school buses and drove us out to the edge of town for a day of intense physical torment, third-degree sunburns and the sort of public humiliation that can only be remedied with a lifetime of therapy.
This event was referred to as “track and field day”.
I was not a fan of track and field day.
The rules of track and field day were simple. For eight hours, we were trapped on the grounds of an outdoor athletic park in a neighbourhood that none of us knew how to escape from. During that time, we had to compete in any five of the various track and field events that were being held throughout the day. If you showed up for all five of your events and made an effort that didn’t raise doubts about whether you were a backwards step in human evolution, you got full marks for the day.
If you didn’t make it to five events, you failed track and field day, which was worth 20% of our final physical education mark for the year.
Which, in hindsight, would not have impacted my future in any meaningful way.
Everyone had their own strategy for making it through track and field day as painlessly as possible. For my lanky, gazelle-like classmates, the most efficient strategy was to sign up for five of the short-track running events; theoretically, it was possible to knock out all five of your events for the day with less than three cumulative minutes of sprinting.
I had to come up with a different strategy, because I was shaped like a fire hydrant and therefore incapable of performing three cumulative minutes of sprinting without putting myself in the emergency room.
You may not like it, but this is what my peak performance looks like.
My strategy was the jumping events. For just a little bit more humiliation and a lot less physical effort, I could throw myself over a series of bars and sand pits like a pubescent bowling ball and wrap up an entire day of sports education in approximately seven minutes.
Leaving the rest of my day open to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch directly out of the box, the way that athletes do.
I started out Track and Field Day of my eighth grade year with the long jump events, where I promptly stumbled over my own feet and ended up with a face full of sand. This was fine. This was expected. This was, in fact, optimal – my earnest but thoroughly sad performances meant I was knocked out in the first round of every long jump event and was free to move on with my day.
Once I had exhausted my chances to under-perform at long jump, I made my way over to the high jump station to continue with my master plan. I intended to put in an unremarkable performance in both the junior and senior girls’ high jump events, thereby wrapping up an entire day of athletics by 10:15 in the morning.
That was where everything started to go wrong.
I checked in at the first event, waited my turn, did the strange little sideways run-up to the bar and launched myself off the ground. But then something strange happened – instead of flopping backwards onto the bar like a humpback whale, I felt my body arc through the air and land on the bag without so much as grazing the plastic pole.
I figured this was a fluke, the same way that you could hypothetically slam a typewriter into a wall and accidentally write the third act of Hamlet. The way that the event worked was that after every round of jumps, the teachers would literally raise the bar for the next jump, and everyone who’d cleared the previous height would have to line up for another round; I went to the back of the line, fully expecting a prompt elimination. But again and again I jumped, and each time I flew over the bar like an aerodynamic little bumblebee.
By the time I was finally knocked out of the junior girls’ high jump event in the quarterfinals, the whole ordeal had been going on for so long that I’d missed the start of the other high jump event, and it was too late to enter.
I found myself faced with two options to pass track and field day: do some actual running, with my legs, like some sort of frightened ungulate, or enter a throwing event that I had not trained for and was in no way prepared to do.
I chose throwing.
I am become junior high athlete, thrower of things.
There are a lot of things in this life that simply have to be learned the hard way.
I learned the hard way, for instance, that there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of curly-haired people with bangs. I learned the hard way that teaspoons and tablespoons are not interchangeable when you’re trying to bake passable chocolate chip cookies. I learned the hard way that you should not combine your finances with a semi-employed circus performer who believes tax filing is a scam for the government to steal his identity.
One thing that should never be learned the hard way, however, is “how to throw an 8lb iron ball really hard while people stand really close to you to watch you do it”.
I got in line for the shot put event with naïve, unearned confidence. After all, it was throwing. I had been throwing things my entire life, from the time I made my earliest restaurant review by chucking my baby bottle at my mother’s face. How hard could throwing possibly be?
Incidentally, this is still how I choose to review restaurants to this day.
Then the first shot putter stepped up to make their throw, and I realized it might be more difficult than I had anticipated.
My gym teacher, who tended to speak to me in the same soft, reassuring tones that you would use to coax a slow duckling to get out of a busy street, told me to pick up the ball and place it under my chin.
I did what he said and immediately lost my grip on the shot put, dropping it on the ground just a few inches from my foot.
The teacher kindly offered to let me re-do my throw. I told him no, I was perfectly happy to let the junior high record books show for all eternity that I had the throwing power and precision of an anemic penguin.
The way that the event worked was that each of us was expected to make two throws, with the better score being used to decide who would move on to the next round. I got back in line for my second throw and watched my more experienced classmates step up one by one to expertly hurl that metal ball down the pitch like they’d been sent to intimidate it for unpaid drug debts.
You know what, I thought to myself in a moment of self-delusion. I bet I can actually do that.
When I finally stepped forward to make the second and final shot put throw of my entire life, I gave it my absolute all. I spun. I grunted. I twirled. I threw that shot put like I was casting out the sins of mankind and harkening our collective salvation.
And it probably would have been a decent throw, had I not released the shotput too early and whipped it directly into my gym teacher’s ribcage.
I’d scrunched my eyes closed to make my grand throw, and I opened them to see my gym teacher doubled over and dry-heaving. A parent volunteer was running across the field toward us at a full-tilt sprint, as if she was concerned that I had tasted violence and needed to be stopped before I picked up another shot put to finish the job.
In the end, my gym teacher escaped with only some serious bruising and I escaped without any consequences, as it was decided that I lacked both the malice and the physical coordination required to intentionally weaponize a piece of gym equipment. He never even seemed to hold the incident against me, and the whole thing blew over shortly after my gym teacher regained the ability to sit upright without gasping.
Although, when I ended up in his wood shop elective the following year, he never did look entirely comfortable with me operating power tools.
To read more about my experiences as a person with below-average physical coordination, enjoy this post about the time I leaned on a sink and caused $3000 in damages to a university dorm building.
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For a brief time, I accidentally held our school's 50 yd dash record. This was caused by 1. the event being held directly after a lunch I didn't like & didn't eat but most of my classmates did (slowing them down) as well as 2. a freak growth spurt that resulted in me being temporarily taller than all my classmates (a situation long since changed). My mother didn't quite believe my non-athletic self when I came home and told her, and I didn't blame her.