Getting physical: Living in sweat vindication

By Pennie Azarcon Dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

WHOEVER said that teachers cast a long shadow must have been talking about Mrs. DR, our math and PE teacher from the elementary grades to high school in this small Catholic school tucked in the armpit of Manila.

She was humongous and was probably the template used to cast the bastonera (jail warden) role in B movies. With her perpetual scowl, Clint Eastwood squint and the foreshortened limbs of a seasoned pugilist, Mrs. DR immediately stomped on my outer and inner child the moment she met our Grade 1 class in the school quadrangle and barked orders like we were in boot camp. Forget Private Benjamin’s nemesis and that dour-faced sergeant in the “Police Academy” series. Compared to her, they’re positively cuddly.

Not being particularly coordinated, I easily became my PE teacher’s favorite prey, the slowest and weakest of the herd who was chopped liver the moment she started that day’s calisthenics routine.

It didn’t help that Nanay, who came to Manila straight from the rice fields of Central Luzon, had very definite ideas about a woman’s behavior culled from generations of Maria Clara-inspired living. The moment we got our period, her iron-clad rules were up: No biking lest we damage our hymen (and who’d want to marry us then?). No swimming because we could get pregnant (what if a guy had swum in the very same waters just before we did?) No running, either: that could make our uterus sag and would we rather adopt than have our own children?

And so I spent the better part of my childhood reading komiks and school textbooks and playing house, the perfect nerd with thick glasses, buck teeth and skinny arms. Sure I got good grades and learned to cook, but PE had always meant calvary. No sooner had I gripped the ball and was preparing to launch it in a volleyball match than my classmates would be hooting, “Ouutttt!!” I never made it to any sports team all through school and it was with relief that I greeted my monthlies because they excused me from PE. The Mrs. DR curse hounded me through college, where I barely passed folk dancing, gymnastics, volleyball and badminton through the four-semester compulsory gym classes.

Fast-forward to so many years later: Today, I eagerly attend high school and college reunions, making sure I wear form-fitting clothes and sleeveless blouses that show my rippling muscles to full advantage. I am not above meeting old friends in my workout clothes even when our session had ended hours ago. This is the New! Revitalized! Totally Buff! Me! I want to scream out every time I meet folk from my distant nerdic past. I’d willingly soak in a dripping sports bra and savor the scent of sweaty socks just to see once more the look of surprise, envy and wonder in their eyes: “could it be, could she be, but how…” the confusion in their faces went.

The answer: workout! Taebo, weights and pilates three times a week for the past seven years. Has it been that long? I remember how, when I first joined the Inquirer’s workout class some eight years ago, my biggest fear was passing out even in the warm-up stage. Except for jumping to conclusion and running around in circles, I’ve never been very physical. But how could I not join this office-organized workout? I had the time, classes were subsidized and it was held right here in the workplace.

Though I quit after a few months when I found our first gym instructor to be too much of a whirling dervish, I finally hit my stride a year later with our current trainer, a Gold Gym’s instructor and certified physical therapist (with a Ph.D in Sports Kinesiology, mind) who makes sure my brittle bones don’t buckle under me when we do lunges. I can now confidently locate my biceps, triceps, lats and gluteus maximus, and beat my strapping 19-year-old son at arm-wrestling. Even my mom and siblings who had initially blanched when I showed off my muscles (“but that’s not very feminine; para kang bakla,” Nanay groused), have changed their minds. In fact, they had generously offered to give me some weights for my birthday, ordered directly from the neighborhood goon: two empty condensed milk cans filled with cement and held together by a smoothened dos por dos. I wouldn’t want to impose, I quickly demurred, alarmed at the thought of betraying my thuggish roots.

I still wish I could swim well, bike and drive without denting the car. But well, the night is young. And so am I.

Editor’s note: Author getting physical in Batanes. Photo by Pablo Apostol.

Read the Sunday Inquirer Magazine’s Getting Physical issue on May 11.