Purposeless Required Test (PRT)

I was actually in decent shape when I joined the Navy. Throughout high school I was pretty active in sports (football, soccer, and wrestling), not because I was some jock douche nozzle but because it was what most of my friends were doing. The physical side of boot camp was a joke.

I never exercised during my first few years in the Navy, and yet did fairly well on the PRT when it came up. Not so much on the push-ups or sit-ups (I could do 70 or so of each), but I almost always came in first on the run. One time I stopped and smoked a cigarette a few feet from the finish line while I waited for the #2 guy to catch up (which I thought was funny, but which my section adviser had a real hard spot with).

Doing time on my first boat, coupled with age and a general lack of healthy living, began to take its toll. By the time I was twenty five, I was just barely passing (I still didn't work out), and soon after I started cheating like most of the other guys.

Yes, we cheat. Much like the underway sock, anyone who says we don't is either a liar or the XO. You can't really do anything about the run (unless you're buds with the PRT coordinator, which I never am since it always seems to be some suck-up cone), but there is usually some creative counting going on when you pair up for the sit-ups and push-ups. As an organization, I think the Navy is fairly ambivalent, since we all know the real PRT is when you have to haul a red devil blower from one end of the boat to the other.

The key is to make sure you do the PRT when everyone else does it, so that you can pair up with someone you know and hide out in the crowd. Usually this is not a problem, but one time I happened to miss the regularly scheduled PRT and had to take the make-up. There were ten guys (including me), all of them were khakis (except me), and I ended up paired with the CO himself.

At the time, the CO we had was pretty cool (we called him "red dawg", a nickname he himself provided), but I was fairly nervous all the same. Did he expect me to keep an accurate count when he was working? If I didn't, he may nail me for a lack of integrity. However, if he was expecting some creativity, and I was dead-on honest, I could be in even more trouble. Either way, I was screwed when my turn came, since I hadn't done 40 pushups in a row in long, long time. Suffice to say, I was sweating it long before any physical exertion took place.

As it turned out, I got to go first on the sit-ups, something I knew I could at least scrape by on. I did like 45, but red dawg appeared distracted the whole time. When the PRT monkey came by, red dawg asked ME how many I did before repeating it to him. So, with a little trepidation, I did the same when it was his turn. Ditto for the push-ups. I claimed I did forty five, but a few of them were not exactly regulation.

So far, so good. But I still had the run to do, and that was the part I ended up failing. Not because I coundn't run fast enough, but because I was stupid enough to run along at the same pace as everyone else. That's what I normally did, and never had a problem before. This time, however, I was running with a bunch of old dinosaurs, and they had like an extra ten minutes to finish the run. Some of them weren't even running; "ambling" might be a better word for it.

So, I ended up failing, and had to go to mando-PT for a month and re-take the test. Nothing makes a Navy day as long as starting it off with a two mile run, followed by various exercises (on gravel, for the most part), followed by ten to twelve hours of "normal" manual labor. The guys who ran that little program can smoke a turd in hell. But I've never failed another PRT, so I suppose it was effective in its own way.