Observation: Polar Bear At Stuyvesant High School

At Stuyvesant High School, upperclassmen were able to choose an “elective” for Physical Education (never call it Gym!), and the elective I chose second term junior year was a class called Polar Bear. Polar Bear was infamous among Stuy students, because the objective of the class was to emulate a polar bear: running around outside, rain or shine, at all temperatures, from January to June. I thought the class would be sort of fun, the romantic idea of running that permeated the forefront of my mind. Maybe I wasn’t in my right mind. Polar Bear was actually kind of crazy, because it’s straight-up running. It was a sort of informal race among the athletic students at Stuyvesant, who took the class as an easy 97 (Stuyvesant is apparently too good for letter grades). For the non-athletes, it was usually a class that the automated scheduling system randomly selected for you to

Mr. Bologna, whose name was pronounced differently from the lunch meat, was a true athlete and gym teacher to his core, and ran Polar Bear with no bullshit. No music, no fancy stuff, just the sneakers on your feet and your weather-appropriate running clothes. It should be noted I was probably one of the most non-athletic people in the entire class, and that really matters when you have to run a mile along the Hudson River in the rain during the winter. Since Stuyvesant sat in Tribeca, practically on the banks of the Hudson, the parks and paths we ran on were quite nice, if you didn’t mind the occasional patch of ice, dog crap, bird crap, and the bits of construction work being done that increased your running workload by at least a couple of seconds. It made you comfortably numb though, because running has that sensation that makes you feel alive before you start the walk of shame out of pure exhaustion. High school has that same