Humor

School-Aged Children Finally Lead Fitness Trends

The window of recovery is limited to nights and weekends

Photo by Omar Roque on Unsplash

Summer ended a month ago, which means my kid just completed four weeks of carrying around a fully loaded backpack.

While preparing for the start of fourth grade, we thought nothing of the pens, pencils, notebooks, sunscreen, sweatshirt, calculator, school supply donations for the classroom, four separate binders, chapter fiction book, water bottle, glue sticks, white board, Clorox wipes, index cards, lined paper, hand sanitizer, and homework planner.

Come morning, I told my kid it was time to fill up the backpack before school. We were skeptical that all of the essential items would fit inside.

But then we realized the backpack had been made to meet the demands of school supplies. That could only mean my kid would have to meet the demands of the backpack.

Backpack companies have made bigger backpacks to accommodate school items, not accounting for the fact that my kid weighs 72 pounds and is the height of an upright ironing board.

A lot of people don’t know that the backpack has struggled with its identity for hundreds of years. Several attempts were made during the Civil War to employ backpacks as a method to carry ammunition for numerous battles, but the efforts ended when soldiers were blown up, resulting in the rebranding of the packs from The Union Bloody Face to The North Face.

In response to California’s Great Flood of 1862, leather bag companies created backpacks designed to help cart out excess water. But users complained of the musty wet smell, gave up assisting with the recovery, the floods continued, and the backpack once again faced an existential crisis.

It wasn’t until the unique vision of Han Sport, who recognized that children had become soft slouches enabled by modern living, while simultaneously schools grew eager to share their revelation that students needed more stuff. Not having stuff was historically associated with low self-esteem, distraction, and a lack of belonging.

Han Sport quickly sought to bridge the gap, and thus created backpacks hearty enough to toughen children, and practical enough to cart all their stuff.

Unfortunately, Han was killed in a riverboat accident before he could launch his backpack. Luckily, his younger brother Jan picked up where Han left off, founding the backpack line and effectively saving the Sport family from a lineage of poverty and shame.

Lately, backpacks have been pushy about getting their foot into the fitness industry. At the same time, it’s clear that children have not been doing their part in leading trends.

Additionally, kids have had a lot of situations where they may need something urgently at school, such as quart-sized Ziploc bags or a backup pair of closed-toed shoes.

It’s well known that the best way to get kids to do something is to trick them. I could never have predicted that the backpack my kid chose for this school year — with its clever, multiple sections that expand outward like the bloating belly of my once-pregnant body — would become a vehicle for a physical improvement program.

During this journey, we learned a ton:

1. Classrooms are not a place for holding my kid’s things.
2. Laptop computers are meant to reduce paper, but they weigh more. And some teachers still like paper. And books. And also computers.
3. Parents in our neighborhood are doing things like rucksacking, and it feels like they are copying my kid.
4. Backpacks do not only impact backs: the act of hoisting heavily involves other upper body parts.
5. Kids with flat, lifeless backpacks are mysterious and enigmatic, and we avoid interacting with them or their families.

When my kid started elementary school a few years ago, they didn’t intend to embark on a health quest. With these 30 days behind us, I speculate about what’s next for my kid. I don’t necessarily feel like the sky’s the limit, per se, especially with my kid’s herniated disc, but I do feel like my kid is destined to continue on this path. They will be surrounded by other fitness junkies with similar habits. Like Ryan H, who carries around his asthma medicines and EpiPen. Or Sophia L, whose backpack includes her flute and 3”-thick sheet music books. Or the Bento lunch box kids. Or Carson, with the alternative seating chair cushion he’s not allowed to keep in class.

My kid doesn’t have much more time to contemplate and reflect. The window of recovery is limited to nights and weekends. They’ll be back at it again soon, pushing their body through athletic feats they were unaccustomed to as a preschooler. My kid will watch as other fitness trends fade, while knowing they have another decade of this one to look forward to.