school | Twin brothers swimming, cycling and running in Scotland

I grew up before sexual equality was invented. Sexual discrimination was rife against girls although very occasionally it was against boys.

At my primary school boys and girls received two physical education lessons a week. They were taken by a female teacher. The boys and girls would get changed. The class would start. The teacher would tell the boys to stand at the side of the gym. She’d then let the girls play games for 40 minutes before letting the boys have 20 minutes at the end.

She once made the boys stand for the whole hour. The boys didn’t get a single minute of exercise!

Years later I got my revenge on her. I had a job as a paper boy. The gym teacher was on my round. She liked the Scotsman. She hated the Daily Record. Whenever there was no Scotsman’s in stock I’d put a Daily Record through her door instead.

BUT what I’ve realised is that I didn’t get my revenge. What I’d done was assume a male privilege that I as a man deserved to be treated better so I must have been discriminated against. Actually what she had done was very clever. She knew the boys got lots of exercise. We played football before school, every break and after school. If we weren’t in the classroom we we’re on the football pitch.

The girls, on the other hand, got very little exercise. There were no facilities for them to play at breaks and no encouragement from any teacher to do exercise. Therefore she used the two chance she had to get them to do exercise as they needed support more than the boys did.

I wasn’t discriminated against for losing P.E time. I was privileged to get every other bit of time!

I’m sorry I gave her the Daily Record. It’s a sh*t paper.

One of the signs I am getting old was seeing my Secondary School and thinking how much it had changed since I attended it. It was a very minor change – the Council had knocked it down and built a new one!

Previously, a road ran past the front of the school. The road has been replaced by a very large building. This is very annoying as the road was a shortcut from my home to the shops in town.

I did think about cutting through the school to save me a five minute detour but for some reason schools frown upon middle-aged men roaming the playgrounds.

That road has a special place in my sporting heart and history. It was where I became the fastest boy in school history. How I felt when I saw it was gone is how Andy Murray would feel if Wimbledon was knocked down and replaced by a Tesco Metro. He’d probably need a sit down – although that might be due to his dodgy hip.

It happened during my 5^th year of secondary school. During PE lessons the class would take part in a 100m race. The course was setup on the road outside the school.

The PE teacher picked one of the other boys to go out with a measuring wheel to mark the start and the end of the course. Once it was setup the class lined up at the start.

I don’t think I warmed up before the race. This was the 1990’s. Warming up hadn’t been invented yet.

We didn’t have blocks so it was a standing start. The gym teacher blew his whistle. I started running with all the forward momentum of a conservative MP stepping forward in support of Theresa May i.e. I dithered a bit and then when I noticed everyone else was doing it I stepped forward too.

I covered the first 50M swiftly and was soon near the front running alongside a boy wearing Joe Bloggs jeans. He’d forgotten his shorts but he didn’t care as he knew the Jeans made him the coolest guy in our year. I knew he’d slow down towards the end as he wouldn’t want to get the jeans sweaty.

In the last 10m I was Eric Carmen! No not the kid from South Park but the man who wrote and sang All By Myself. {NOTE: I thought the reference would be less obscure but as I’ve gone to the trouble of googling who sang All By Myself then I’m going to keep it in!]

And then I was over the line. I couldn’t believe it. I’d won. The teacher couldn’t believe it. My time was unbelievable!

I was so fast my name should really be UsIain Bolt Todd.

What neither I nor the teacher knew at the time was the boy who’d been sent out to mark the course didn’t know how to use a meter roller so he’d just taken a guess at how far 100m was. He’d actually created a course of 81m.

This was discovered when another PE teacher heard about the time and realised that a runner as slow as myself could not possibly have run the time claimed.

I was the fastest boy in the history of the school….for about ten minutes and then it was annulled.