The "good old days".

[RandySF]

[Haggard Celine]

1. My school didn't require P.E.,

so of course I didn't take it. But that was high school. I took P.E. in elementary school. I guess it was my dad's generation that did the rope-climbing. Never thought about the mats they had for 'protection.' You know somebody probably fell and broke their neck doing that shit.

[Emile]

2. So true, and I was really good at it too. I got rope burn on my hands

once from coming back down fast.

[BOSSHOG]

3. Wow Randy

That looks just like my old gym class back in the day. It was great to have those mats for safety. Just in case. And an ambulance was just miles away. Our good old days. Wouldn’t have traded them for any newfangled whizbangery.

[NNadir]

4. I hated that as an acrophobe.

[LymphocyteLover]

5. Yes, they had that at my Jr High School and I could never do it

I routinely failed PE... but that was expected as I was a "nerd"

[OldBaldy1701E]

6. Here was our gym class.

I am not kidding.

Every gym class in my school had to go through this in elementary and middle school. The coach would play that record and we had to follow it.

[debm55]

10. Thank you, OldBaldy1701E, That was what most of my gym class consisted of in 8th grade. Now I have an earworm.

[twodogsbarking]

7. You had ropes? We had a gymnasium, cafeteria, auditorium, bingo hall. Two basketball hoops and a tiled concrete floor.

Four feet off cigarrette smoke at the ceiling the day after bingo.

[Wuddles440]

8. Ah, the memories...

we actually had challenges regarding who could get to the top the fastest without using their legs for support.

[Martin Eden]

9. I remember doing that in the 1960's

Seemed perfectly normal, and AFIIK no one got hurt.

[Floyd R. Turbo]

11. Ha! In JH ours were bolted to rafters. During one class a kid climbed the rope, straddled the rafter and pulled the rope

up. He wouldn’t come down until his mother showed up.

Guy became a legend!

[hunter]

12. We had a knotted rope for the weaklings and the girls.

Mind you, the person who could climb the regular ropes fastest in our school was a girl.

If you couldn't climb at least halfway up the knotted rope you were officially a loser, same as if you couldn't do a single pull-up on the bars.

Everyone had to take P.E. unless they had a note from the school nurse for the day, or their doctor for a week or longer.

Some perfectly healthy kids never took P.E. because their parents didn't believe in it and knew doctors who would exempt them.

I was a skinny autistic spectrum klutz, by weight among the smallest kids in class, and my parents insisted P.E. would be good for me. I've got some P.E. horror stories, always being picked last for team competitions was not the worst of it, but yes, physical activity has always been good for me. By the end of seventh grade I could climb the rope.

[KitFox]

13. Oh geez! The dreaded rope! It was a requirement from 4th to 8th grades, and

thankfully it didn’t make an appearance in high school P.E. I wish we would have had the option with the knots as a way to begin. I never did make it to the top, usually giving up about 2/3 up. I could climb the trees in our yard but that thick oily smelling scratchy rope with every one watching was dreaded. I was not a fan of dodge ball either. I had forgotten about “Chicken Fat”! 😁 Our teacher who used that also taught us dances in gym class: polka, square dance, scottische, are ones I remember and there was lots of giggling and shyness in 4th grade.

[LogDog75]

14. Two gym activities we had to do

Wrestling and doing a flip on the trampoline. I didn't care for wrestling but for some reason I was good at it. On the trampoline, I fell off it and broke my right wrist. I haven't be on a trampoline since.

[LNM]

15. my husband told me he was required to do that in gym class

He failed until the girls gym class showed up.