What are your worst PE memories?

[OneUmberJoker]

Breaking my arm playing football

I don’t recall naked showers maybe once in secondary school and we all tried to get out of them. The convent I went to didn’t have showers.

Junior school, the school bus to the Victorian swimming baths. I was always worried they’d forget me and go without me.

Periods, we had our Tampax film in the sports hall. I tried to get off sick with heavy periods and stayed home when I could, not that often.

Haven’t PE lessons changed since then? It’s all This Girl Can adverts promoting sport. I was never that good at sport but it’s hardly surprising.

we had dance lessons in an indoor hall if that counts as sport which everyone loved.

Age 12 or 13 we had a big open air swimming pool at secondary school and one summers day after school it was opened. It was an absolute riot and didn’t happen again.

Being shouted at by the games mistress after going through the horrible showers without a shower cap on, I forgot to take it into school, this was about 1967.

She shouted at me while I stood there naked and really cold in front of all the other girls I had just done PE with.

She was a cow though.

We had the naked showers and also knicker inspections. The knickers were a specific colour and teachers checked that we were wearing the right colour (not just in PE). I can hardly believe that this happened.

Wow. What was the justification for wearing a specific colour of knickers that no one would even see (apart from the creepy underwear inspectors)?

i actually gave myself life long toe problems to get out of PE.

I always hated it.

My dad suffered with an ingrown toenail. By the time I was 11, I thought that it would be excellent if I did, so I wouldn’t have to do PE. So I fucked around so much with my toenail, that I gave myself horrendous issues, resulting in it having to be removed twice, once when I was 12, and once when I was 14. Two horrible procedures that caused issues with infections. Now, at 46, I still have to visit a podiatrist yearly as parts of the nail grown back.

I don’t think children should be made to do PE.

Being told to find a partner and no one wanting to work with me. Ditto being the last one when choosing for team games.

I was introverted and very unpopular. Now I realise I'm most likely autistic too.

We also had the PE knicker inspections and having to queue naked for the showers.

I refused to do PE anyway (and then gave myself an injury). They could threaten me all thee liked. I would stand there and refuse to get changed.

Early 90s and wearing vests and pants for PE, if you forgot your vest we just had to wear pants.

Yes to naked showers- horrific.
Being made to run around, being laughed at and in pain from large breasts bouncing around (32E at age 12)

-Being hooked around my ankles by hockey sticks (on purpose) and landing heavily on my knees
-Gymnastics where 1 of the girls was very bushy and hirsute- I really felt for her 😳
-Injuring my ankle then continuing to play football because I thought the 'clicking' was putting it back in and the teacher didn't believe I was in pain. I'd broken it!

They stopped this at my all girls school because of the flasher in the woods.

Being picked last for teams every time - in fairness I was absolutely useless at sport but still was awful.

I was really cold so I put my PE sweatshirt on under my school cardigan to walk up the hill to the changing room. It was on for five minutes at the most, but the PE teacher refused to let me wear it for hockey (9am, thick frost on the ground) and I had to play hockey in a t-shirt. I felt progressively iller all morning and keeled over during afternoon registration. Spent two weeks in bed with a really nasty dose of bronchitis - only time I was off school in all of secondary. I was a 'good' girl and always tried hard in PE despite being useless so it really rankled that she wouldn't let me wear the sweatshirt. Big secondary school so I don't imagine the teacher ever heard what happened.

Being shouted at and made to stay behind because i couldnt master a backwards roll, i was in so much pain! I fpund out later i have fused bones in my spine which makes it physically impossible to bend properly.

Being forced to walk naked to the shower and not allowed to close the door so they could check we showered. The period register as well, it was all so embarrsing and humiliating. I used to miss school on period days so i didnt have to tell the pe teacher. It obviously affected my education as that meant i missed other classes as well.

One of my first experiences of how fucking awful men were was due to my secondary school PE teacher.

I was skiving it, as usual, and was made to sit and watch.

The other girls were running around the 200m track and another male teacher came over to the male PE teacher.

”Lucky bastard, watching those tits bounce up and down all day.”

”Yeah, I save it all up here for later, I’ll make them do another couple of laps if you are staying.”

I felt sick. I must have been 13 and it was the first (but sadly, far from the last) time I’d heard men speaking like that. The intense feelings of danger and disgust it sparked in me never left me and that shaped my view of men forever.

I loved PE but didn’t learn to swim until I was an adult so always found school swimming scary and embarrassing as everyone else in the class could and the teachers didn’t really know what to do with me. Plus they’d inexplicably give us a half hour lesson in which to get changed, swim and change again so we were frequently wet and late, rushing wasn’t fun.

The games mistress getting out a tape measure and measuring our vital statistics, praising those who were closest to 36-24-36.

Forgetting my gym knickers on trampolining day.

The horror. The horror.

The unrelenting fucking cold for most of the year.

As at least one PP has said, being last to be "chosen" for a team by the sporty girls.

People shouting at me if I missed the ball.

I agree, PE teachers are sadists, or at least were in those days (80s/90s).

In sixth form I worked out I could skip games with nobody noticing.

Thank you. I have always hated country dancing and ceilidhs since, not much to do with not been picked by the boys but it didn’t help! Nothing nice about being picked last for anything

more bad memories of being forced into the showers, having to strip off in front of each other, just horrendous.

The worst I heard of was my uncle being forced to run cross country when he had pneumonia (he was at boarding school), he collapsed and died half way round 😢 I don’t think my dad (or indeed my grandparents) ever got over it.

Being made to run a certain number of metres, in the rain, as a punishment for being last to arrive at the field (I mean, somebody has to get there last?!) while the rest of the class watched, and crying because I was in pain.

The showers.

Being last to be chosen every single time. I was relentlessly bullied by one girl all through school, who was inevitably one of the team captains. My hand/eye coordination wasn’t great and for most years we just played netball in the winter and rounders in the summer. I can’t catch. No hockey, no athletics, no gymnastics. It was utterly awful and had left me with a life long fear of rejection.
One of my proudest days was when we had to swim every day for 2 weeks in Junior 4 to make sure we could all swim, as part of a Sport For All initiative. My bully could barely swim. My mum had such a phobia of us drowning that she sent me and my sibling to lessons at the pool with the high talent swim club attached. It’s 45 years ago but I can still recall the look on her face after I swam 200m freestyle without stopping.

Girls turning off the lights in the changing room (it was pitch black due to no windows) thinking it was entertaining. Being not picked for teams or very last one to be picked because I essentially was rubbish at sports. Yeah, I hated PE.