I’ve never been athletically inclined — in grade school, I was the girl who got picked last for team sports, who would try to be struck out first during dodgeball, and who played football exactly once (in which I ended up throwing the ball to the opposite team). So, it was with dread that I heard about the high school physical education requirement.

Granted, it’s only a year long, but I could not imagine another year full of grade-school tortures. When I had lived in Pakistan for my middle school years, P.E. had consisted of some half-hearted salutes and then whatever games we might like to play — sometimes this was an impromptu cricket or basketball match, other times it was a game of freeze tag. Compared with the suicide laps and drills our coach in elementary had us do, P.E. in Pakistan was actually entertaining.

I wondered if there was any way I could get P.E. credit for high school without having to endure the associated tortures, but the rule was clear — you want to graduate, you’re going to get a physical education.

I’m not sure how it ended up that way, but by some curious merging of chance and fortune, I ended up completing my first year at an American high school in a charter school. After signing up for the necessary P.E. class, I showed up for class the first day with trepidation. I was surprised, when, instead of a gym, the indicated classroom was a small room in an outside trailer which seemed likely to collapse if even a few students tried to perform a set of jumping jacks.

Inside, a man at the front in a loose Hawaiian t-shirt was sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat. Once everyone came in, he methodically stepped to an antique record player and inserted a giant CD that began blaring some old country music. He then had us pull out yoga mats and settle somewhere on the floor. Apparently, at this school, physical education wasn’t laps and dodgeball — it was yoga.

I didn’t learn to really appreciate yoga until a few years later, but it was that experience that helped me realize what physical activity could truly mean. Maybe I’m horrified of gyms and can’t look at a treadmill without sweating, but there is more than one way to be active.

And, in the end, I have to choose what works best for me. So these days, I’m rarely on a treadmill — my exercise is limited to short walks around the neighborhood now and then, and some morning yoga exercises when the mood strikes. And the positive vibes I feel after these sessions reminds me that physical education can be more than just torture when it’s presented the right way.