I am not athletic. I thought that an understatement of gargantuan proportions would be a good opener — and a declaration of my lack of athletic skills certainly fits the bill.
Athleticism is not necessarily the same as physical fitness, but in the case of the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, I would say it is.
Are you old enough to remember the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, bestowed on schoolchildren who met certain standards on a variety of tests of physical fitness in gym class?
Were you one of those exceptionally athletic schoolchildren who earned an award?
I most assuredly was not.
The test that I remember the best was the one testing the number of pull-ups we could do on a bar. I have no recall if the test was timed or not. It didn’t matter — I could barely lift myself up one time, much less multiple times. I doubt that I performed in a superior fashion on the other tests, but the pull-up test was thoroughly embarrassing.
I hadn’t thought about this humiliation for years, but memories came flooding back at the Nebraska State Fair recently. My husband and I happened upon a “game” that consisted of paying $10 for the opportunity to see how long you could hang from a bar. If you could hang there for two minutes, you would win $150. No pull-ups were necessary, although they were allowed as long as your chin didn’t touch the bar.
We watched several people throw away their Alexander Hamiltons. No one whom we saw even came close to beating the clock, although the guy running the game mentioned the youngest and oldest people to do so — so obviously at least two people earned big bucks.
I left thinking about how I could never win $150 at that game — but that my son almost surely could. Wouldn’t that be fun?
And wouldn’t it be fun to see if he could? So when my son and his family came over for supper a few nights later, I decided that our after-supper entertainment would be a hanging-from-the-bar challenge.
My son wasn’t exactly gung-ho about the idea — he doesn’t believe in flaunting his strengths, and also hanging from a bar for two minutes is not exactly pleasurable — but he was a good sport and played along. We all traipsed out to the shop, where my husband had a pulley system set up to lift heavy pieces of iron for a project he was working on. We set up a bar across the hooks on the ends of two pulleys — and, yes, my son did hang for two minutes.
My 4-year-old granddaughter was keen to try, so my son and husband lowered the pulleys so that the bar was closer to the floor, and she began. You should have seen the determination and concentration on her face. And she lasted for a full minute.
Then it was my daughter-in-law’s turn. She also did an amazing job, lasting 55 seconds.
Yes, I then took a turn. I’d like to say that I lasted at least half a minute, but that wasn’t the case. I lasted a mere 27 seconds. However, I wasn’t terribly disappointed. I’m pretty sure that I beat my former gym class time. Granted, my former time involved actual pull-ups instead of just hanging there, but still …
And I did beat my husband’s predicted time for me of 22 seconds. He was somewhat impressed.
Nonetheless, I certainly haven’t suddenly become Presidential Physical Fitness Award material. Perhaps the next time my family gets together, we’ll play word games after supper.
