Phys ed Fail

Hey Friends!

Quick programming note: I’m taking a break here until after Labor Day. Going to let my August swamp brain dry out, take a breather, and do some editorial noodling. Take it easy and don’t bother fighting the return of pumpkin spiced everything. Be the peppermint mocha you want to see in the world. X! -She

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We can’t agree on much these days, but I think we can all agree that resurrecting the Presidential Physical Fitness Test is a bad idea. That says a lot considering that this regime is the Mozart of bad ideas. They pile up by the hour, appreciating in the current of absurdity and bad taste. Here I am referring to paving the Jacquelyn Kennedy Garden and putting up a parking lot (sorry Joni). Actually, a parking lot, also terrible, might have at least been useful. Instead what exists in its place is a concrete courtyard with white tables and gold and white striped umbrellas. It looks like the outdoor food court of the Bunker Hill Community College student center circa 1979. But this physical fitness exam nonsense is a bridge too far even for this regime that is also the Mozart of burning bridges.

There have been a few things going on in the news these days that probably knocked this item pretty far down the leaderboard. Looping you in: Little Orange Nero, Haver of Bone Spurs, Bringer of Chronic Venus Insufficiency, Enjoyer of the McDonald Quarter Pounder Hamburder, Shunner of Vegetables, Detester of Exercise, Cheater in chief of Golf signed an Executive Order to bring back the Presidential Physical Fitness Test to schools.¹ If you are of a certain age and recall an adolescence spent paging through magazines of young people with shiny skin who did not look or dress like you; an adolescence preoccupied with arts, crafts, concert band practice, field trips to the library, and summers at musical theatre camp, you might be triggered by this announcement. I am.

“What the hell do you want me to do with this thing? How dare you, Gym Teacher!? I SAID GOOD DAY!” (Image by Anil Sharma, via UnSplash)

When I read about this latest, and most tediously stupid, executive order, I felt like I was right back in middle school. There I was feeling like Grimace in my weird, unhinged body, wearing baggy shorts and an oversized T-shirt, which simultaneously masked my blorpy shape and called attention to it. Not what Anna Wintour would have gone with. As if having to interrupt my day to 1. Change clothes 2. Sweat when it wasn’t even hot out 3. Pretend to care about regular athletics I couldn’t do like basketball and gymnastics wasn’t bad enough, now you want to JUDGE ME DOING EVEN WORSE ATHLETIC STUFF LIKE PULL-UPS IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE DAMN CLASS! Even as a 12-year old I saw the Titanic sized holes in this phys ed scam.

So, yeah, that trauma lives in my bones. But here’s the funny thing: I don’t remember any gym teacher ever explaining why we had to do any of this. I only recall the dread that pooled and settled in my stomach whenever the teacher announced, “Next week we’ll be doing the Presidential Physical Fitness test!” Before she could finish the sentence I was praying for a meteor strike.

The fitness test dates back to the 1950s. The government was on a tear about being a superpower on the world stage, i.e. WE MUST BEAT THE RUSSIANS AT ALL OF THE THINGS! We were already crushing them in the blue jeans race with Beatles records not far behind. But clearly that wasn’t enough. The American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation (AAHPER), a civic organization, formed a committee on physical education to make recommendations on the appropriate type of activities for school age children. They determined that public schools should phase out things such as obstacle courses and boxing, which were popular during World War II, to more diverse offerings such as games, sports, and outdoor events.

I have to take a minute here over BOXING and OBSTACLE COURSES! Boxing would not have been for me. I would have faked a head injury immediately while the other person was lacing up their gloves. But obstacle courses! Now that’s something I could have gotten behind in sixth grade gym class. Of course they would have been like the ones featured on the Nickelodeon kid game show Double Dare. Those obstacle courses usually involved crawling on your belly through a pipe filled with whip cream and rooting around inside a giant foam nose oozing green booger slime.

Back to dreams of American athletic superiority in the Mickey Mouse Club era.

The Presidential Physical Fitness Test was eventually inflicted upon us thanks to two doctors: Dr. Hans Kraus and Dr. Sonya Weber. Around this same time in the early 1950s Kraus and Weber did a fitness study of about 4,000 children from the East Coast ages 6 to 16. The result: over 50% failed the test. I’m not going to blame Dunkin Donuts and Coke, but those have been staples of East Coast diets since the 1700s. You do the math.

Kraus and Webber widened their research to include kids in Europe, which became officially known as the Kraus-Weber study. Their findings did not prove out some idea of American exceptionalism. Very much the opposite. American kids were spuds. They were driven around in school buses and cars. When they weren’t sitting at desks in school they were sitting in front of the television for tens of minutes at a stretch (or for however long The Howdy Doody Show ran). In contrast, European kids were already running shoe factories by age 8. Their playtime involved arguing existentialism in smokey cafes. The media ran with this, as media always does, and in 1955 the Kraus-Weber study eventually found its way onto the desk of President Eisenhower.

Eisenhower called a bunch of meetings with “people in the government paid to care about this stuff” and other fitness, athletic, sporto types. He tasked his VP, Richard “What tapes?” Nixon to form a presidential committee on physical fitness. And you can bet Nixon was psyched to be told he should go in a corner and talk to men twice his size and half his age about tennis and 100-meter dashes instead of focusing on how to get his filthy paws on the oval office.

The first iteration of the test consisted of the following feats of strength:

Pull-ups for boys

Modified pull-ups for girls (because sexism)

Sit-ups

Shuttle run (like the Kessel run, I guess?)

Standing broad jump (oh god)

50-yard dash

Softball throw for distance (sure, Jan)

As the years raced by (cut to calendar pages flying off a wall), each administration tinkered with the test to align it with current politics. For instance, President Kennedy used the test to stoke the coals of the Cold War. He wrote an article for Sports Illustrated titled “The Soft American” where he argued that a lack of physical discipline meant soft, subservient minds, which were low hanging fruit for Communist manipulation and conversion. Kennedy wrote: “The harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies – whose physical fitness is not what it should be – who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of the individual citizen can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.” More trotting, less Trotsky.

By 1966 President Johnson noodled with things again. He established the Presidential Physical Fitness Award program that recognized anyone who met or exceeded the 85th percentile on all exam areas. What an awesome way to saddle teens with even more humiliation: attach their already fragile self-worth to a rewards system for physical superiority. And did anyone actually take this award seriously? Have you ever heard a gold medal Olympian say in an interview, “Honestly, the day I got my Presidential Physical Fitness Award when I was fourteen, I knew I was destined for greatness.”

And so the iterations of the test continued with each new administration, reflecting changes in approaches to youth fitness until President Obama, our Liberal Lord and Democratic Savior, retired the exam model around 2010. Arguably more important than whatever he did to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

I hope that this executive order gets forgotten in a closet at Mar-a-Lago where other documents go to die. But if not, then at least drill these kids on realistic activities: PlayStation controller finger dexterity; eye-roll strength and longevity; sarcasm fluency; and, okay, fine pull-ups–but only because they need that upper-body strength to be able to get at the box of the cheat day doughnuts hidden on top of the refrigerator.

1. In a 2017 interview with The New Yorker, Donnie “No Deal” said that he believed exercise was “misguided” because a person is born with a “finite amount of energy.” Honestly every time this walking bag of dicks opens its mouth I immediately dissociate and mentally find myself in the middle of a pile of golden retriever puppies.