A Recipe for Cancer (Part 1) - by Jude Meche
Apr 09, 2025Before delving into my recovery from cancer, I think it’s important to spend a little while thinking about how I got cancer in the first place. What I wasn’t doing before my diagnosis is directly related to what I had to start doing afterward.
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As a Gen Xer, my childhood and upbringing were pretty run-of-the-mill for the time. Fast food was everywhere. Hamburgers and pizza were standard fare on busy days. And school was what school had always been. As we moved from one grade to the next, recess dwindled into non-existence, and students mastered the great skill of sitting still for hours on end.
When the school day finally ended, we raced back to our latchkey homes to snack on sodas and the kind of highly-processed snacks that our working parents could buy for us to stop our hunger pangs without having to worry about us burning the house down by leaving a metal fork in the microwave or—God forbid—actually trying to cook something on the stove.
We each collected our armfuls of junk food from the kitchen and then settled in front of afternoon cartoons where we continued honing our mastery of sitting still and doing nothing. Thankfully, TVs now came equipped with remote controls, so we could truly stretch our sedentary time to Olympian limits! No getting up to change channels! In short, I was a typical American kid for the most part. And I was learning what
American society required of me, extended periods of motionless drudgery. It was the most important lesson. All of the futuristic sci-fi movies showed us the idyllic world where—all grown up—we would still be sitting in rows, tapping on keyboards and moving sheets of paper from the in-box to the out-box.
The leading wave of this cubicle-culture dystopia was already so entrenched by 1991 that Saturday Night Live managed to get laughs out of Rob Schneider’s “Copy Room Guy.” We moved toward a future where “Making Copies” would be the highlight of our day! “Making Copies” would be the only real action we’d ever see. But we were ready for it. All our lives, we were training for that future.
The only outlier in our training regimen came in the form of P.E. classes. I hated Phys ed! P.E. was taught by the coaches, and they made it clear that teaching those classes was NOT their priority. They were football coaches. They were volleyball, basketball, and baseball coaches. They were judged by how successful their teams were.
To be sympathetic to them, they had to worry about being roasted in the local newspapers if their teams struggled. Teaching a bunch of uncoordinated, clumsy, and decidedly unathletic kids may have been the justification for their salaries, but it was a distraction from what we all knew they were being paid to do. As one of those uncoordinated, unathletic kids, the best I could hope for was benign neglect from the coaches. There was certainly no effort made to make us athletic—or to provide an actual physical education. Exercise and health took a back seat to playing sports. In the minds of our coaches, they were synonymous. Even though being healthy comprises a lot more than those specific skills that make athletes into celebrities, we were judged by those rarefied abilities. Those who had them were the royalty of P.E. The rest of us were the peasants. And the indelible lesson we peasant-class klutzes learned was that physical activity was not for us! If you weren’t coordinated, athletic, and graceful, you had no business trying to be active. That wasn’t your thing. Besides, you had that great future of sitting to look forward to!
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Sympathies aside, the cadre of P.E. coaches of the 1980s and 1990s did more harm than good. As elementary school students, we pined for the opportunity to go outside and run and jump and play. The cold institution of P.E. made us dread it. If we hadn’t resigned ourselves to a future of sitting, P.E. taught us that the alternative was far worse. We left P.E. behind and never wanted to do anything like it again.
Jude has a PhD in English and decades as a college professor.
His personal training credentials are:
- Certified Personal Trainer, American Council on Exercise, Certification Number: N1286288. 1 September 2022.
- Adult and Pediatric CPR and AED Certification, ResusciTech, Certificate Number RT062424A972A. Expires 24 June 2026.
- Kettlebell Advanced Specialist, Living.Fit, Certification Number: 2289274630. 17 October 2022.
- MMA Conditioning Specialist, National Academy of Sports Medicine, Certification Number: 1231119038. 21 October 2023.
Jude's training business is called Two Fitness Nerds, and his email is: [email protected].
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