On a warm, cloudless July morning in Central Park, hundreds of young adults, most wearing workout clothes, fanned out into a long line and faced Jordan Haber, 25, as he hit play on a portable speaker.
A monotone voice rang out: “The FitnessGram PACER test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues,” it droned. “The 20-meter PACER test will begin in 30 seconds. Line up at the start.”
The PACER — which stands for “progressive aerobic cardiovascular endurance run” — is a fitness assessment in which participants run between two lines that are 20 meters apart. The laps are paced by a standardized beep track that gets steadily faster. The first time you don’t make it across the line before the beep is a warning; the second time, you’re out. The number of finished laps is your final score. But the assembled runners needed no reminder of the rules — they had vivid memories of the test from their childhoods.
The test has been a gym-class fixture for decades. But after the Obama administration included it in the Presidential Youth Fitness Program in the early 2010s, it became a generational rite of passage. (That initiative replaced the decades-old Presidential Fitness Test. Last year President Trump reinstated the older test, but kept PACER as an option.)
Months earlier, Mr. Haber had published a flier to the party-planning app Partiful, promoting the second edition of what he called the “world’s largest” administration of the test. He had attracted enough young people to fill the width of Central Park’s 15-acre Sheep Meadow nearly from end to end. The speaker beeped, and they were off — first at a trot, then a jog, and within minutes the field had been winnowed. A few dozen participants zipped between the lines as the rest of the crowd cheered them on.
One runner, Juliane Douds, 27, remembered the test from P.E. class as “Darwinian.” Reliving it as an adult had an appealing absurdity: “It’s like a collective trauma,” she said with a laugh.
Maximum Effort
The first version of the test was developed in the early 1980s, and it eventually gained popularity with sports teams and government agencies around the world as a measure of maximum cardio capacity, much like VO2 max.
Unlike the mile run — which had been the federal government’s preferred metric for schools — the test requires little skill to pace correctly, and it can be administered without much space. In a parking lot or basketball gym, a teacher can assess an entire class in minutes. (An average 10-year-old is expected to run for around 3 minutes — an elite athlete might last for 15.)
The test’s proponents also considered the social dynamics of the knockout format an advantage. Unlike the mile run, according to the official manual for coaches, “students who have a poorer performance will finish first and not be subjected to the embarrassment of being the last person.”
But many people with firsthand experience of the PACER report that it does not seem to have entirely solved the fraught social dynamics of middle-school gym. “You felt for the kid that was the first off the totem pole,” said Ms. Douds.
And any test to measure maximum cardiovascular effort is bound to be uncomfortable. “You would wake up and have a full breakfast,” said Alex Nudya, 27, “and then you would come to school for P.E. and run the whole thing.”
“And then you’d go to math class,” interjected Lavina Kalwani, also 27.
“About to vomit,” said Ms. Nudya.
These not-entirely-fond memories of that exertion — and the droning audio track — have turned the test’s instructions into a meme online. (Mr. Haber said he first re-encountered a joking reference to it on the dating app Hinge, which sparked his idea to host the event.)
Mr. Haber, who grew up in Boca Raton, Fla., and describes himself as “chronically online,” said the PACER test appealed to his sense of what might go viral.
‘We were just doing it in jeans.’
Gabi Gresenz, 27, said she laughed when she saw the Partiful listing — and that it resonated enough for her to have peer-pressured two friends to come along late the previous evening. “We were just sitting yapping at Sauced” — a natural wine bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — “then they actually showed up,” she said.
Fiona Kelleher, 24, was somewhat better prepared. She wore a pair of spiked racing shoes, left over from her time running for New York University’s cross-country team, and lasted around 11 minutes to finish as the day’s top woman.
In spite of the effort, she wasn’t quite sure of her final score. Neither was the overall winner, Case Winter, 24. And in the end, nobody was really keeping track of the final number of attendees — Mr. Haber said involving Guinness, the record-certifying body, would have cost too much money. (The current record, set by a group in the U.K. in 2017, is 941 participants.)
Ultimately, he said, the event was about having an absurd idea and making it happen.
Cindy Keeya, 25, also wasn’t certain how many laps she had completed, but she was certain she was slower than in her school days. She said this came as a surprise, given that she was training for her second marathon — and the conditions back then were hardly ideal for running fast.
“We didn’t even get to change clothes — we were just doing it in jeans and whatever shoes we had on,” she said. “Hats off to my younger self.”
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