Not a good sport

I really dislike going to the health club at this time of year. The parking lot is crazy full, even at lunch time; the demand for the elliptical machines is too high; and, in the locker room, the crowd fighting for space at the mirror is reminiscent of the frantic four minutes of prep time after ninth grade phy. ed.

This happens every January, of course, and every January, I try to wait patiently as all of these unfamiliar faces who I haven't seen all year gradually give up on their lofty New Year's resolutions and return to their normal routine of paying for a health club membership that they never use.* I look forward to February, when things return to normal, and when I can go to the club over lunch and easily get rock star parking right outside the front door.

There is one benefit to the January influx of not-so-regular members, however, and that's that I'm no longer the least coordinated person in the cardio step classes. After attending these classes for two or three years, I can generally follow along and successfully transition myself from a right or left basic to a v-step to a turn-step to a set of alternating lunges or jumping jacks without any noticeable errors. But then the instructor will try to make things interesting by incorporating various spins and turns and making us face a different direction every three or four seconds. That's when she loses me and I realize I've gotten a little cocky with my overconfidence. In January, however, there's less of the complicated choreography. I can only assume it's a conscious effort on the instructor's part... she knows she has a lot of newbies in the group and she's trying not to discourage them. Still, despite the relatively simple footwork, there's always one woman who's entirely lost. She's either two moves behind or stumbling through a step or facing the entirely wrong direction. In January, thankfully, that woman is not me.

I've never been particularly coordinated or athletic. In grade school, I once jumped down the two steps between my parents' dining room and living room and slipped on a balloon one of my sisters had left on the floor. I tore a ligament in my ankle and was in a cast for a month. That ridiculously preventable injury about sums up my athletic prowess, I feel.

Sometimes, in the step classes at the health club, I like to look around at the other participants and guess which ones were cheerleaders, which ones were "real athletes," and which ones were like me--kids who hated phy. ed. because it brought down their GPA and who didn't even like to dance because they felt that everyone was staring at them.

I actually was a cheerleader for one brief season, but I maintain that it doesn't count because 1) it was in eighth grade and 2) with only five girls in my eighth grade class, we pretty much either all had to be cheerleaders or our team had no squad.

When I got to high school, I joined the freshman volleyball team and the track team, for no other reason than my older sister had done so and I thought it was what I was supposed to do to be involved or "normal" or find a place in that school. When I realized I was the only one on the volleyball team who couldn't get the ball over the net serving overhand, however, and when I humiliated myself in the triple jump by not even making it to the sandpit, I decided there were other ways for me to be involved. My athletic career ended there.

My older sister had a decidedly different high school experience. Not only was she entirely more successful on the volleyball and track teams, but as a freshman, she also tried out for and got a spot on the pom-pom squad, a squad otherwise dominated by exclusively juniors and seniors. She remained on the squad for four years, and put in some time as a football cheerleader one year as well.

I have a theory about this discrepancy in abilities between my sister and I. The way I see it, my parents had a finite amount of "stuff" to give to each of their children. My older sister got the majority of the coordination and athletic ability, and I got about two-thirds of the disproportionately small amount that was left after that. Of course, by the time my little sister came along, there was even less left in the bag. As a result, that poor girl has a hard time walking into a room without cutting the doorway too close and ramming her shoulder,** so really, it could be worse for me.

I've always known I wasn't athletic, and it never particularly bothered me. Even back in first grade, when kids are still supposed to think they can do anything, when no one's been labeled yet as a good or bad athlete, musician, artist, or mathematician... even then, I knew sports were not for me. Each week, Sister Dolores would compile teams for kickball, and each week, I quietly abstained, even if every other kid in my class was participating, leaving me to play by myself on the swingset every recess that week. One week, during kickball signup, I actually did raise my hand and agree to play. I figured I should give it a try just once before I wrote it off completely. I made it through the week, but felt awkward the whole time. The following week, I was back on the swingset.

This lack of ability and interest in athletics has followed me throughout my life. In grade school, there was the annual embarrassment of the Presidential Physical Fitness test, where I struggled with the flexed arm hang and fought the two next-slowest girls in my class in a battle not to take dead-last in the 50-yard dash (or later, in the more grueling eighth-grade test, the mile jog).

It didn't get any better in high school, as I can attribute the majority of my most mortifying adolescent moments to high school phy. ed. There was, for example, the time when someone made the mistake of passing me the ball in soccer, and I kicked it halfway down the field in the wrong direction, wondering how I could have such superior ball control that no one on the opposing team was stopping me. And then there was the time when I beamed a classmate in the head with a softball, which really could have been just as much his fault for not catching it as it was my fault for poor aim (regardless, I used this story as an excuse every time my friend Dale begged me to be the one girl they were missing on his intramural softball team in college). My favorite, however, was the time in 11th grade phy. ed. when Mr. Linnabary (a large, lumbering man who, in my opinion, had no business forcing us into any physical activity when he looked incapable of such activity himself) paired me up for doubles tennis with a guy named Tim, who I happened to be enamored with at the time. Knowing I was no athlete, Tim looked my way and said, "I've got this. You can just hang out back there." I was fine with this plan until Linnabary caught on and decided to announce his disapproval to the entire class. From two courts away, everyone heard him shout, "Hey [lastname]! You gonna play?" Needless to say, Tim and I never had our magical moment together that I felt I so rightly deserved.

Perhaps the only moments of minimal glory in my very sporadic attempts at athletic greatness came in sixth and seventh grades, when my dad entered me in the Knights of Columbus freethrow contest. I actually won a trophy BOTH YEARS, but only because one year I was the only girl participating in my age group and the other year I beat my neighbor, Julie, one-zero... in overtime.

Although the wounds from my high school embarrassment are mostly scarred over by now, I'm still entirely averse to team sports of virtually any kind. Even when friends assure me that the informal volleyball match or the pickup game of basketball is "just for fun," it almost always turns into a demeaning experience for me. I don't even know the actual rules for basketball--a fact so amusing to my friends that they continue to bring it up, even four years after that doomed game during a camping trip on Madeline Island. And the last time I played a simple game of "toss the football around," it ended in a Marcia Brady "Oh my nose!" moment for me, so really I don't see why everyone can't just accept that I'm not a team player and leave me alone about it already.

The step aerobics, however, I can handle. At least in January, I can.


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* I'm a cynic, I know. Truth be told, the only thing that forces me to go regularly and not fall into that same trap is the fact that my company subsidizes the membership as long as I go eight times a month. It's an excellent motivator.

** OK, I admit it; I do this too. But not nearly as often as that kid does.