Blast From the Past!

I was on one of my drives to Parry Sound recently and to pass the time was listening to a Podcast of a comedian named Adam Corolla and one of the items he was ranting about made me think back to public school.  He was talking about how when he used to play football in high school and college the coaches used say that the water was ‘bad’ for them.  That they use to tell him and his teammates just to ‘wet their lips’ and ‘spit out the water, don’t swallow’.  It made me think of my gym teacher in public school because he use to say the same thing. We’d be running laps of the school going by the outdoor fountain and he would be there telling us: ‘Don’t swallow the water, just get your mouth wet and spit it out, or you’ll get cramps!’  Funny how times change, I am pretty sure that any teacher telling students that or even worse denying them water would have more than a few parents on their case!

Thinking of my old gym teacher and how we used to run laps also got me thinking about the Canada Fitness Test and how every year we had to complete these 5 or 6 fitness tasks to see how in or out of shape we were.  Oh what fun those days were!!  Who can forget doing crunches until you felt like you were going to puke?  Or sprinting the length of the gym to grab a 30yr old bean bag that was full of dust, then turning around and sprinting back again! Awesome!  I believe there was also a straight sprint of 50 meters or so and a long jump of sorts.  And who can forget everybody’s favourite, the Flexed Arm Hang!  What a great feeling to be hanging from a horizontal bar with your arms flexed at 90 degrees for as long as you could.  That had to be the most difficult of all the tests and probably the one that killed a lot of people’s dreams of getting the ‘Award of Excellence’.  🙂 The endurance run was also a dream killer.  We had to run around our school, mostly on the sidewalk (watch out for the old ladies walking)  but at one point it cut through the school yard (watch out for other kids) around a couple of corners and up a set of stairs (nice touch, as if it wasn’t hard enough.)

Ahh the memories….I went on line and searched for the better part of an hour trying to find the ‘standards’ that we had to meet to get the different awards and I could not find it anywhere.  What I did find out is that the program is not in effect anymore and I found a number of articles talking about how out of shape this generation of kids are and questioning whether or not something like the Canada Fitness Test should be reintroduced to our schools. If I remember correctly the Canada Fitness Test was not for everyone. As a matter of fact I am sure there are some people that hated every minute of it and couldn’t care less if they got Bronze, Gold or the Award of Excellence. And maybe we don’t need a structured fitness test to ‘rank’ the level of our kids. What we do need is to lead by example and show them how much fun you can have being active and fit and staying off the couch and away from the video games and other sedentary activities. And for god’s sake let them drink as much water as they need!!