The Fatal Flaw In School PE Programs

Running.

Don't get me wrong, I love running. When I'm feeling stressed, frustrated, agitated, or downright pissed off, I can pound those feelings out on the concrete and asphalt of Philippi. I do it just to do it - and it helps make you fitter too, which is a big plus.

However, have you ever noticed something? Most runners either run for speed, a la sprinters, or they run for endurance, a la marathon runners. It's either endurance or speed, and while they play a factor with each other, you really can't combine the two rationally.

Thus comes the fatal flaw of the school PE program. They train us to think that if we can't run a mile in just a few minutes, that we're no good as runners period.

But what if we aim for endurance, not for speed? Then what? OK, so it may take me seven minutes to do a mile, whereas it takes the star athlete only three or four, but he's in it for speed. I don't care how fast I'm going, I just want to remain at a running pace for so long. Most runners don't actually RUN either, minus the sprinters. They more or less jog.

It wasn't until I was in high school that I had a PE teacher who said, "It's OK to just jog, to just pace yourself, you don't have to be the fastest, just make sure you don't stop running."

In middle school I had a PE teacher who told us to just push through any pain, which leads me to wonder if this woman even knew what she was talking about when it came to running. If you're in pain, you're supposed to STOP! Isn't that your body, yelling at you, telling you to stop, that you're hurting it? Why would you tell a kid to just run through pain, which could result in a really messy injury - not to mention if it happened during PE class, the school could be held responsible?

That's why I never gave running a thought until I was in high school. I thought that I had to run as fast and as hard as I could, or it wasn't running at all. When I learned that true runners pace themselves, that made it so much easier for me to get out there and run. Actually, if you want the truth, I thought it was kind of funny to see all these kids showing off how fast they could run their mile, as beginner runners, only to end up running out of steam halfway through because they never paced themselves and I (along with my little group of friends who also realized that pacing was good) just kept on going. Maybe that's mean but it's true - by far not their fault though. They probably had douchebag middle school PE teachers too.