My fitness journey: The school days...
- Nathan Dyas
- Jun 4
- 3 min read
Back when I was around 5 or 6 years old, in primary school, I loved all of the games and sports day events that used to go on, mainly because they were fun and not really seen as sport. As I grew older, I found a love of video games; particularly Pokémon and Final Fantasy, and if you've ever played either of these, you'll know it is very easy to get sucked into them, and spend multiple hours playing to achieve the next task. As most youngsters do, I loved sweets and crisps as a little snack, which tied in perfectly with video games, as they require no effort. Pair that with a fairly inactive lifestyle outside of school; it was a recipe for disaster.
By the time I got to secondary school, my weight and body shape had started to change, and not in a good way. At secondary school, P.E. was my least favourite subject (does that surprise you?) as it was always focused on team sports like football and rugby, or athletics in the summer. Rugby was OK, but the football and athletics were not my bag at all. I didn't enjoy them and wasn't that great at them either, so as you can imagine, being picked last or close to for a team, increased my dislike for these even more. I remember, when I was in Year 7 (about 11 years old), I got entered into the inter-house sports competition for my house as they didn't have enough players for basketball, and I had no idea what I was doing, so I just felt useless.
As the years went on, I discovered being picked last and/or feeling useless would be a regular occurrence so I would 'accidentally' have forgotten my P.E. kit that day, so all I had to do was walk around the field instead. I also got diagnosed with asthma, which explained why I felt like I couldn't breathe doing simple tasks at a young age, including being able to run. What puts the cherry on the top, is that if there were any disruptions or bad behaviour in the class, the punishment would be running.
With exam time coming around in later years, I felt like P.E. really wasn't important to me, there wasn't a GCSE at the end of it, and I'm not gonna be playing sports, so what's the point?
With this in my mind, I took this opportunity to get out of doing P.E. and focus on my favourite subject, which was, you guessed it, food tech/home economics. I got on well with my teacher and to be honest, I don't think anyone really noticed I was gone from the P.E. lesson, because in my eyes, it was always the ones that were good at sport who were the ones that were worried about.
Coming to the end of secondary school, me and a couple of friends went to the 'junior sessions' at our local gym and had a play around with various pieces of kit, with no idea how to use them, and no-one really showing us how to use it properly. This was great, but sometimes followed by some sort of food or drink which wasn't really the healthiest - usually some sort of fast food.
Never did I think that leaving school, having some freedom in the summer before going to college, that I would go from hating the way I looked and felt, to making one of the biggest changes so far...
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