Do you remember the Presidential Fitness Test?

If you went to public school in the United States before 2012, you were likely subjected to a series of physical challenges that you’ve never completed again.

Remember the shuttle run, the one with the chalkboard erasers? The V-sit? The sit-and-reach? The mile run?

Indulge me in some history: the Presidential Fitness Test was the legacy of President Eisenhower. He established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness in 1956, which assessed and defined standards for children’s fitness nationally.

It wasn’t until President Kennedy’s administration, though, that physical fitness was more explicitly yoked to national security. The inheritor of Eisenhower’s Council, Kennedy drew a solid line from the fitness of America’s youth to the nation’s ability to stand up against the communist threat of the Soviet Union. He lamented the rise of “soft Americans” who would fold in the face of a hammer and sickle. The Presidential Fitness Test became even more important: the shuttle run would surely save us from Sputnik and Soviet missiles.

By the 1990s, when I was in elementary school, the Cold War was over, but we still ran that shuttle run so often that I was sure Stalin himself was planning to chase us. I didn’t hate most of the events that comprised the test—the sit-and-reach was an unexpected skill of mine, as were the sit-ups—but there were two events that I dreaded.

The pull-ups and the mile run.

Put simply, I sucked at both.

I enjoyed playing sports and being active outside as a kid, but running for distance was a skill that escaped me. I was always one of the smaller kids in my grade (both due to genetics and the fact that I was a year younger than my classmates) and, as a result, was consistently one of the slowest. When the agenda for gym class consisted of the mile run, I would find any way possible to surreptitiously shave off some distance from the course: cutting literal corners, pretending I’d done one more lap than I actually had. Even with those strategies I struggled to break past the 50th percentile times for my age group.

After a series of running failures (another time, I’ll relate the time that I threw up right before a 400m run and then got last place), I left elementary, middle, and high school assuming that I just would never be a runner. It wasn’t in my blood or my bones. My physiology was standing in the way, and who was I to fight with biology?

More recently, I was reflecting on the assumptions I had about myself, particularly with respect to fitness and athleticism. I’d developed a self-story in which I was inherently bad at running, slower than other athletes, and was unable to exceed the constraints of my stature. Kindra Hall notes that self-stories like this can have longstanding impacts on our willingness to pursue challenges.

In considering that self-story, I wondered: could I have been wrong? Was it possible that my discomfort as a runner was childhood insecurity run amok—that I could actually be better and faster than I expected if I put the work in?

I decided to put it to the test. I’d been training intensively for months at my boxing gym, consistently taking classes in conditioning, technique, and strength. My stamina had never been better. I signed up for a 5K without ever having run a race, and without having any sense of what my pace would or should be.

I think there was something to be said about trying a race without any concrete preparation. I entered with no expectations about my time, nor with any expectation that I’d finish high in my age group. I’d pass some runners, and watched as other runners pass me. “Run your own race” was my mantra—or, arguably, my new self-story.

I crossed the finish line as a light rain fell, volunteers abutting the finish line and cheering us on. My final time was faster than I expected: 34:20.06, roughly the 50th percentile for my age group. I’m considering that decades-long self-story—that I was slow, that I wasn’t a runner, that I couldn’t be a runner—put to rest.