Tag Archives: Physical fitness

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FITNESS FOR REAL

If Trumpers weren’t so homophobic. they would adopt Peter Allen’s “Everything Old Is New Again” as their theme song.

Because it seems their goal is to bring back a lot of crap from the past, under the pretense of making America great “again.”

There are some pretty serious bad things Trump’s trying to make a comeback. Criminalizing abortion. Wiping out Black representation. Tariffing the hell out of everything. Good old insider trading. 

What might not seem as egregious, but which caught my attention this week, is the decision to reinstitute the Presidential Fitness Test.

Few things rake the muck in my soul as much as “physical fitness.” That’s because I suffered lacked it as a child – I was a really big kid who was taller and heavier than everyone else. By a lot.

There were things I just couldn’t do. Because of that, the class I dreaded more than any other – even more than science – was phys ed, aka gym.

It was in gym that I couldn’t tumble. I couldn’t climb the ropes. I couldn’t lift myself on the parallel bars. I couldn’t outrun the kid in my class who was on the track team.

When we did the wrestling unit, they couldn’t match me with anyone else because I was so much bigger. So they matched me with a state champion who weighed more than 100 pounds less. He flipped me over because he was a goddamn wrestler and I had no interest.

The most dreaded part of gym was, you guessed it, the Presidential Fitness Test. When I was taking it, it consisted of four parts – running a mile, straddling lines to demonstrate agility, pushups and sit-ups.

I was moderately capable at sit-ups. And because I didn’t want to be the class loser who got a zero on the Presidential Fitness Test because I couldn’t do any of the other parts, I went all-in on the sit-ups.

So much so that 24 hours afterward, my father took me to the hospital emergency room because I was in such pain from overexerting myself on sit-ups. I still only got 4 out of the 10 possible points.

The Presidential Fitness Test and mandatory gym classes are why we fail kids when it comes to their physical well-being. They’re afterthoughts and meant to pat the heads of kids who can do well in them.

But children who need help with improving their health and fitness are reduced to humiliation and failure. They’re bullied into accepting that there’s a pecking order in the gym and your actual fitness is not something you should be helped with – it’s something you either have or you don’t.

That’s why the test was abandoned by experts who look at countries that don’t have such tests and wonder why their people are healthier. It could be that they discourage athletic competition until children grow into their bodies and have a chance to find the best way they can attain fitness.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I got the urge to be more physically active. I wasn’t ordered to or told to. I wasn’t compared to other men my age.

I just thought it might be fun to run a little. And then I did it almost everyday for years. I ran – OK, that’s being charitable, but I sure as hell finished two New York City Marathons and dozens of races from 3 miles to half-marathons.

Not through some badgering by a teacher who couldn’t wait to coach his football players. But because I loved it. I felt better and experienced the joy of sweating for fun.

I’m 72 now. I don’t run regularly any more because of arthritis in my knees, but I did try to jog a mile or so when my wife and I visited Kauai in March. I do, however, ride a stationary bike every single day – 481 days in a row, to be exact – and it has revived my feeling of wellbeing.

When I did it yesterday, the instructor on the class video that’s part of the bike experience said something that resonated with me.

Exercise isn’t punishment. Exercise isn’t something you do because you’ve failed at something. 

It’s something you do because you want to.

That’s why reviving the Presidential Fitness Test is yet another stupid Trump idea. If you do well on it, you’re supposed to. If you don’t, you’re officially unfit – and left to wallow in that unfitness, because no gym teacher is going to help you figure out how to do what’s best for you.

It’s about winners and losers. And this is one of those things for which there should be no losers. Not if the goal is a happy, healthy country – which, come to think of it, is something that is anathema to the Donald J. Trump administration..

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HOW MANY SIT-UPS CAN YOU DO IN TWO MINUTES?

The people with whom I went to high school would be floored to learn that, in my 71 years, I’ve run two New York City Marathons and more 10K and 5K races than I can remember.

They would be floored because I was not – shall we say – physically fit when I was a teenager. 

I was heavy. That’s the kind word. There are lots of reasons why. But as much as my heart saw myself as athletic, my body never cooperated.

When I went off to college and then after I graduated, I saw the advantages of working out. One day, on a beach vacation to Rhode Island, I started running. I did that on and off into my late 60s. When I tore my meniscus hiking and developed arthritis, I switched to a stationary bike – although I am thinking about making my first run as a 70-year-old in the next few weeks.

The reason I mention all this is that there is nothing about what one of the women instructors on my Peleton calls my “fitness journey” that has anything to do with having taken physical education classes in school.

And so when Trump, in one of his efforts to bring back the tried-and-truly-useless of the past, declared last week that he wants the Presidential Fitness Test returned to the nation’s schools, it sounds about right.

He hasn’t the slightest clue what it would take to help our nation’s kids live healthier lives.

The Presidential Fitness Test, for those who forgot, was this four-part event that your whole gym class did. It consisted of sit-ups, squat thrusts, straddling some lines and running a lap around the school track.

The point supposedly was to show how fit you were compared not only to your classmates, but to other kids around the country.

The test was one of the stupid things about physical education in elementary and secondary schools.

Gym classes are mandatory because, supposedly, they instill the notion that kids should be fit.

But what they do is completely ridiculous.

For kids who are would-be athletes, wanting to compete in interscholastic sports, they’re 45-50 minutes of beating their chest and showing how strong, fast or whatever they are.

But for kids who need help in getting healthy, they’re a waste of time at best and, often, a chance to be humiliated or bullied.

There is no effort – none – to help kids in need find a program that will help them improve their physical well-being. 

The test that Trump wants to reinstitute is about competition and superiority. He panders to bullies because he is one – and this gives them another chance to show off.

Most kids don’t need any more of that. They need to be encouraged to do healthy things. They need someone to ask them what kinds of things they’re comfortable with doing. They need to start slowly and build a love of physical activity as a way to get in touch with themselves and the world around them.

I’ve run races in my home of New York, in Florida and California and even London. Not once did I think about something that happened in a gym class that was about conforming to the rules and competing against the school jocks.

Not once was I made to feel useless, even though I came nowhere close to winning a race. As opposed to when I couldn’t do a forward roll, swing off the rings or wrestle a state champion almost 100 pounds lighter than me,

And yet, I’m willing to wager that I’m in a better place physically than 90% of the people in my gym class because I enjoy exercising.

President Barack Obama got rid of the Presidential Fitness Test because it was a complete waste of time and unhelpful. 

Just like Trump.

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