PE could be much more – and I hope it is

A few years ago, I used the NHS Couch to 5k programme to start running.It worked really well for me, and soon I was heading along to my local parkrun. I was happy with how I’d progressed – even with my long legs it felt like an achievement to have gone from being able to manage the odd short run to being able to run for that long, especially given at school I wasn’t considered one of the “sporty” ones^[1]It didn’t help that I was quite small for quite a while, and only later on ended up as a bean-pole..

But thinking back to my PE lessons at school, it left me not so much angry, as disappointed. This newfound sense of progression, of achievement, of actually doing something useful is what PE should have had – rather than the despair of struggling round fields on a “cross country run” that we hadn’t prepared for, nor would ever work on improving.

The Couch to 5k plan hadn’t been easy, but it had been simple. A few times a week, listen to the track. Run when it says to. Walk when it says to. Get distracted by the music, and spurred on by the encouragement.  I was surprised at how following that two or three times a week was enough for me to quickly see real differences in how long I could run for. Why had we never done anything like this at school?

As PE had never really been my thing^[2]Although at sixth form, in an attempt to not so much resemble some soggy spaghetti lashed together, I did start using the gym by the school twice a week. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect … Continue reading I wondered whether the lack of progression that I felt in it was basically the same as some of my friends felt in English or Maths lessons. It didn’t seem like it to me though – although we did drills for some sports I never really felt like I was improving. Sometimes I don’t think we got told what situations in a game these drills were related to, so they all felt a little meaningless. In fact, I’m not sure that I was ever told the rules to any of the sports we played. This led to incredible disappointment during a rugby union^[3]I would much rather have been playing rugby league – I enjoyed going to watch games with my Uncle despite our team often struggling. match where, amazingly, I intercepted a pass and I thought I was clear with the try line in sight, only for the teacher to blow his whistle and pull me back for being offside, leaving me with no idea of what I’d done wrong.

I’ve been lucky enough that there have been a few sports where I’ve gotten into them enough to want to play them in my free time, and to be willing to train for them too. They’ve generally been “minority” sports, where there were fewer people involved, so although there were people there who’d spent their entire childhoods doing it they were a lot fewer of them than for something like football, or rugby, or tennis or anything we played at school. I think that helped, as I could just enjoy myself without being ground into the dust immediately. As I was doing these things for fun, it wasn’t entirely about getting better, but I did improve.

However, it really was the Couch To 5K that really showed me what I’d been missing, as it was a proper dedicated training schedule – and I could see the resulting increase in fitness so clearly, even in my everyday life. The odd busy day that would have had me out of breath just didn’t do that anymore. It even helped me with the sport I was playing regularly at the time, Ultimate Frisbee.

I hope PE lessons are better now. I know lots has changed since I went to school in terms of teaching, so maybe there’s more of a focus on health and fitness than I recall. Maybe rather than learning that they “aren’t sporty”, kids these days are getting the chance to find a way to exercise that works for them and that they enjoy, in the same way that the Couch to 5K programme worked for me.

I hope they are, because that feels to me like the point of physical education.