Gather round the campfire, children, and let me tell you a scary story about the annual ritual humiliation known as the Presidential Fitness Test.
Long before SoulCycle, the social internet, and the everyone-gets-a-trophy ethos that allegedly remade millennials into a generation of coddled, spherical slobs, the youth of the nation were summoned each spring to the school gymnasium and put through the rigors of seven exercises designed to measure our strength, our stamina, and our flexibility. Sit-ups. Pull-ups. Push-ups—knees down for the girls, full planks for the boys. Until, finally, we were herded out the rear of the gym, down a back hallway, and out the door like cattle to the abattoir, walking not to our doom, but to the track that circled the football field for a timed mile run—which was, if not as unpleasant as being clubbed to death, certainly as undignified.
The Presidential Fitness Test was discontinued after the 2012–2013 school year, long after I graduated. But I was inspired to take a gym sock–scented trip down memory lane after Donald Trump signed an executive order late last month announcing its reinstatement:
“As the United States prepares to celebrate its semiquincentennial anniversary in 2026, we must address the threat to the vitality and longevity of our country that is posed by America’s declining health and physical fitness,” the order reads.
I have a handful of recollections from those yearly examinations, all surprisingly vivid. There was the time my friend Jules, an aspiring Olympic gymnast, blasted out a dozen effortless pull-ups before stopping out of modesty rather than exhaustion—all while the rest of us dangled like sausages from the bar, kicking and turning red with the impossible effort of hoisting our own body weight above it. There was the trio of girls in black eyeliner and unlaced Vans who walked one half of one lap around the track and then darted into the woods to smoke cigarettes, ultimately sauntering across the finish line fully 15 minutes after class had been dismissed. There were the boys, all making an exaggerated show of being unable to touch their toes, owing to the misbegotten but unshakable conviction that being flexible meant you were gay.
Personally, I spent 20 years haunted by the ghost of my 12-year-old self, dangling impotently from the pull-up bar.
Mostly, though, I remember the test as a humbling lesson in my own self-imposed limitations. I was a straight-A student but a C+ athlete, which is to say, my natural ability was enough to bring me within shouting distance of the Presidential Fitness Award—a paper certificate given to any kid who scored above a certain percentile on all tested categories—but my laziness ensured I never actually got there. To do that, I would have had to train. To run, lift, push through the humiliation and discomfort of being weak and slow until I became incrementally less so.
