Does anyone remember this? I used to see the PSAs on tv on saturday morning. It left a feeling in me of Who gets these things? No one in my real life ever mentioned it. I always thought I would qualify and do well. But no one in school ever said a thing. It made me feel like you had to be really great athlete or something. Which I think is the wrong message to take out of it. But what could I do?
Did anyone ever win one?
That sounds like something I got in 5th grade PE class to encourage kids to get more fit. You had to take some sort of test that included climbing up a rope, IIRC. I remember getting a patch and a certificate signed by President Carter. I’m pretty sure that just about everyone in the class who took the test got it.
It was a nice patch. And it made a big impression on me at the time to get a signed certificate from the President. 
I was in elementary school in the mid-70s and remember these. If I recall correctly you had to do a certain number of push ups, sit ups, chin ups, etc…
I never got one 
I wasn’t out of shape I just think the gym teacher picked the jocks so he didn’t have to monitor/test the whole class.
The podcast Omnibus Project (with Ken Jennings and John Roderick) just did an episode on this.
In our school, we also had some fitness exam sponsored by the Marines. Nothing like being a scrawny pubescent and having some buff dude in uniform watch you painstakingly do one pullup, and then hang there, motionless.
Those tests were a major torture for me in elementary school and jr. high school.
Another great podcast about this “absurd Cold War trauma factory” was on “You’re Wrong About.”
I remember this from 6th grade in the late 1980s. Pretty sure everyone at the school got it. It was a participation trophy for going through the week-long program or whatever it was.
I won a couple of years back in the 80’s. I was fairly athletic back in the day but I wouldn’t say I was an amazing athlete.
As I recall there were a number of events, including, number of sit ups in a minute, number of chin-ups (girls didn’t do this and instead would be rated on how long they could hold their head above the chin up bar), time on 600m run, time on shuttle run (which involved running back and forth picking up chalk board erasers that were set around 10 yards apart). There must be one other test that I forget since I recall there being a total of five.
In any case in order to win the award you had to rank in the top 15% on all of the events. All the kids in PE would be required to do the tests, I qualified for all but the run, which later my gym teacher made me do again to try make the cut.
I didn’t actually get a medal, I just got recognized at the end of the year awards ceremony for my school, and a certificate “signed” by president Reagan. I think I was one of 2-3 students who got this out of a middle school class of a few hundred. But I suspect if people actually worked for it more could have gotten it. I hadn’t realized that there was an award associated with the tests until they called my name at the awards ceremony.
The school I went to for 4th & 5th grade had advertising posters for this in the gym. The standards seemed impossible for me and half of my classmates to meet.
That’s about how I remember it, and would have been the same time period, but I thought there was just a threshold that had to be passed on each. 45 sit ups in a minute, or whatever.
I remember it being pretty rare for anybody to make the achievement. Most kids couldn’t do pull-ups. For me and my childhood asthma it was the long distance runs that were impossible.
The Presidential Fitness was always my most hated unit of PE. Always glad it was over and we could get back to soccer, flag football, or something else that was actually fun.
There was a specific threshold, but (in theory at least) that threshold was calculated as being the top 15% . All of the scores from all students were recorded, so there was probably some sort of national mandate that required them to be sent in, and they could just calculate the threshold for next years test.
I think I remember a video from Arnold Schwarzenegger back then. He was Bush’s Chairman of the President’s Council on Phyisical Fitness & Sports for a while in the early 90s.
I also remember dreading this part of gym class. We all hated it.
I seem to recall that this was a JFK initiative. Considering the man’s own frail health, it seems a hypocritical thing to impose on the country.
How is sustaining injuries and having Addison’s Disease hypocritical?
He’s not running laps or doing pull ups.
I’m disabled and unable to run. Does that make me hypocritical to coach high school cross-country/track?
This is what I most remember from that…
I wasn’t trying to offend. My attempt to lightly mock the fact that JFK was not a pillar of fitness was poorly done.
“Medal of Presidential Fitness” might have been the way to go, but that’s quite a rabbit hole…
If it’s this program (and I think it is), it goes back quite a ways.
Look at the list of its Chairs. I may have to rethink my animus toward Herschel Walker
I got the patch in grade school. Most kids didn’t. The standard was pretty tough (1970). I recall just one other person in my grade getting it.
It kind of faded away by the time I got to high school. I don’t remember it even being brought up.