Childhood fitness!

When I was a kid, I had a checkered relationship with personal fitness. Given that I was the little kid equivalent of how short and skinny I am now, I wasn’t very athletic. So, when some folks in my fourth grade class approached Mr. Larkins, our 425 pound PE teacher, about doing extra push-ups and sit-ups to become the most in-shape class in school, I whined like I had been asked to roll around in honey and jump in a barrel full of earwigs (that was the rumored high school hazing ritual that had us all terrified, by the way).

At the same time, though, I knew that it would be cool to get one of those little Presidential Fitness patches that the fifth graders had, so I wasn’t entirely against the idea. I worked hard, and aside from the really slow kid with a lisp who kept farting every time he did a crunch, everything went according to plan and I got my National Presidential Fitness patch. It was red, and at the time I thought it was the most important award ever. Entertainingly enough, I even remember making plans to put it on my college applications. Maybe that was the missing line on my resume that kept me out of some law schools.