My colleague MK has written about the aerobics craze with some affection in these pages, and I share her warm fuzziness for the oh-so-eighties, Jacki Sorenson/Spandex/Reebok-obsessed madness.

My own brief fling with aerobics, though, I remember rather less fondly. I was a first-term freshman in college in the early nineties, and — thinking I was oh-so-smart — I decided to get one of the four required P.E. credits out of the way first thing. Seriously: I signed up for an 8 a.m. section of aerobics, so my first college class was a gym class.

And I hated it. I have never been a person excessively fond of exercise, and I quickly learned that while I was hauling my ass out of bed three times a week for aerobics, the rest of the campus, save the other twenty or so ladies (they were all ladies) in my class, was slumbering happily. Lesson #1 in College Time for TGOTS. The class itself was just your usual, peppy aerobics class, taught by a succession of peppy young women from town who would bop in wearing their cute little outfits, boom box in hand. The class wasn’t even excessively challenging — I just did not like having to be there one bit.

In the years since, I seem to have both blocked the memory of aerobics class and fixed it permanently in a dark corner of my brain. On the one hand, I can’t remember much more about the class than the little I’ve written above. This is unusual for a gal who could tell you which of the people who became her friends, or whose lives intersected with hers in some way, were in pretty much every single class she took in college, all the way back to fall term freshman year. I’m the gal who memorized the facebook (back when they were facebooks, not Facebook) before even setting foot on campus and who studied it religiously once there. So, to not remember another soul from aerobics class is odd for me.

However, hearing Iggy Pop singing “Real Wild Child (Wild One)” I immediately get a shiver of distress, remembering my early mornings in that little dance studio, half awake and bouncing and lunging, reminding myself that I was going to be glad, both later in the day and later in my college career, to have this P.E. credit checked off on my list of distribution requirements.

Man, though. I did not enjoy those classes.

(I have to add here, having discovered, just this morning, that it was Iggy Pop who sang the song that most reminds me of aerobics, that I am haunted by his “Lust for Life” as well. I once worked for a company that did brand management for this one major cruise line, and I helped write endless copy for their marketing materials. They then fired my firm, yet must have had rights to all we wrote because a year or so later, that cruise line’s ads with “Lust for Life” in the background were all over the television — while a narrator read copy that my colleagues and I had written for other purposes. It was bizarre. Not as bizarre as a punk rocker selling out to a cruise line commercial, but bizarre. And at least old Iggy got a fat paycheck out of the experience.)