If any single contradiction defines us as Americans, it is that we are gluttons for the spectacle of team sports, but for the most part we starve ourselves of individual exercise.
Our nation’s high schools abound in football and basketball teams as social and civic events—“Please rise for our national anthem!”—even as youth obesity rates rise, settle, then rise again. Individual physical fitness, like personal diet, has no cheerleaders, no adoring crowd of parents or alumni to cheer the solitary victories of an awkward adolescent.
I remember well when it was not always thus, but what I remember is mostly the spectacle of my middle-school gym classmates sweating it out for nothing but concessionary status as a physical specimen or, worse, the laughter and derision of their classmates after farting through a round of hard-won push-ups. It was called the presidential fitness test, and it was the bane of every American middle schooler when I was growing up, circa 1979, at Salt Lake City’s Bryant Middle School. And now that same test, or something like it, thanks to President Trump, is back from its 2012 retirement by the Obama administration to shame U.S. middle schoolers all over again.
The specific regimen of tests to be passed escapes me now, but I remember its various components as if it were yesterday: pull-ups, sit-ups, push-ups, a 50-yard dash, a shuttle run, a standing broad jump, plus a one-mile run. In seventh grade, it was the 50-yard dash and pull-ups that barred me from the test’s coveted, Eagle-emblazoned, stitch-on patch. The following year, having trained for speed in the summer, insufficient pull-ups alone were all that denied me patch status. None of us was given any time or a coaching program to train for the test in advance. Between games of shirts-and-skins football outside, and games of “Smear the Queer” indoors (yes, this was before any era of political correctness, let alone wokeness), the presidential fitness test was just something we did. The two boys—out of a gym class of at least twenty-five—who cleared every test requirement to earn patches were so chuffed at their success that they feigned nonchalance in front of everyone else, “the losers.” One even had his mother sew the patch on his jean jacket so he could gloat later on.
President Trump’s resurrection of the test makes it ripe for political critique—“Of course a President who loves humiliating others wants to re-institute a middle-school gym regimen that humiliates our kids!”—but what I remember most about it was just how few of my classmates proved themselves “patchworthy.” Even the girls’ gym class produced no more than one or two “winners.” This stark rarity of fitness success cultivated two distinct responses: Either you concluded that physical prowess worthy of a national badge was designed to be ludicrously out of reach, or you redoubled your efforts to try again. The physical fitness test was this mountain you could climb, but with a top you could never quite reach.
The presidential fitness test collected more than its share of criticism since its distant birth in the Eisenhower era as a program created in a sort of national panic that adolescents from central Europe were, on average, fitter and faster than their U.S. counterparts. Even today, the internet is ripe with memories of adults who found it more shaming and traumatic than challenging. But since when were the middle school years deemed shame- and trauma-free?
The question is worth posing not because it is central to the endless debate about the supposed costs of sheltering people from shame and trauma during the years they should supposedly learn to cope with shame and trauma. It is worth posing because if the presidential fitness test taught my generation anything, it was that some goals are worth every ounce of work and striving, even if rarely won, or even impossible to win.
The patch was never mine to give my mother to sew on my jacket because I could not pull off ten, twelve, or how many ever pull-ups the test demanded. And I grew into the sort of adult who today understands that was never the end of the world, even if it seemed like an apocalypse in the teenage mind.
Thanks to the presidential fitness test of my youth, “Winning” with a capital “W” came to be a subjective term, rather than an objective burden that would haunt me for having failed. It is not that pull-ups are not worth training for. It is that no one should waste time and tears after failing to do ten, twelve, or however many in a row might be required.
