Claire's Run

When my daughter Claire came home from first grade with a gym report card this winter, I learned that her class was involved in the President's Challenge. The President's Challenge has national benchmarks for each age group for each event. If you score at the 50th percentile or better you meet the national standard. If you score in the top 15%, you meet the Presidential benchmark for that event. The events include a quarter mile run, a shuttle run, a stretch, sit-ups, and pull-ups.

Claire didn't meet any Presidential standards this winter, but met a lot of national benchmarks. So we replaced our Pittsburgh Plan blast-off exercises with variations of these exercises to see how she'd do at the end of the year. She got the Presidential standard in the quarter-mile run with a time of 1:58!

You can check out the different age group scores at https://www.presidentschallenge.org/challenge/physical/benchmarks.shtml or http://www.adultfitnesstest.org for adult scores. If you take the adult test, be careful how you interpret your results. I am not certain that the percentiles they give you are really for all adults and not just the adults that enter the data into the system. I envision that the kind of person that enters data into the system is more physically fit than the typical person since they are on a fitness site.