“Man! You smell like phys-ed!”
Chunk to Sloth, in the movie “The Goonies”

Yeah. P.E. Phys-ed. Gym. It was a rite of passage for sophomores. I knew it was coming. I knew I’d have to grin and bear it when I reached 10th grade. In junior high I specifically took band so that I wouldn’t have to change in gym class. By the time you reached the 10th grade you had to take gym. Something about the president’s council of physical fitness meant that we had to take gym sometime in our life. And not just recess. It had to be some kind of organized physical activity. And you had to dress out. Dress out to pass. You weren’t required to do anything else except to put on your gym clothes.
I had it 2nd period. Which reminds me of a Wonder Year’s quote:

“In one of those quirks of scheduling my first class was gym. This meant that I had to wake up in the morning, shower, get dressed, go to school, get undressed, run around, shower and get dressed.”

It wasn’t all that bad. We didn’t sweat much in gym, so nobody showered. And we really didn’t have time. As I remember the showers were pretty nasty, so we didn’t go near them.
What was the usual in gym was that we changed, lined up, and let the coach mark us present. Our gym clothes were pretty bad. The shorts were tight enough to be biker shorts, but without the elasticity. At one point we were writing our names all over our gym clothes because there had been some theft of gym shorts around there. And who would steal gym shorts?