3 reasons why the Beep Test is rage-inducing

By Kat


Most of us would know the feeling. If you've ever attended a school that runs the Beep Test as one of its fitness testing components, you would know how excruciating and angry the system makes you. It seems as if the entirety of the test is just designed to make a student rage. For those who don't know, the Beep Test consists of a 20m stretch where a runner progressively increases speed while going back and forth- this determines aerobic capacity. Without further ado, here is 3 reasons why the Beep Test is rage-inducing:
1. Increasing speed.
With other forms of exercise, such as cross country running, it almost seems as if all the worries simply drift away. Because then, you aren't under the pressure of constantly increasing speed, worrying about falling behind even the slightest bit because that small bit could be all the difference. Increasing speed tires you out so much faster, and because it starts slow, you are just getting into a comfortable pace when the narrator tells you to speed up.
2. Turning around.
It's enough to make people run over a kilometre while speeding up the pace. You have to have the agility to actually turn around to go again, and again, and again...the infuriating thing is that with most races, you have a clear goal. A finish line, which you can look at and say to yourself, "run faster, you're almost there". With the Beep Test, this is not the case. You just run and keep running, continuing to turn around, and just as you've settled into a smooth sprinting glide to one end, you have to be jolted roughly out of your gracefulness into a much less graceful spin and skid.
3. The noises.
It's different to going on a Sunday jog through the park, with your favourite music blasting in your ears. When you do that, it's casual and it's fun. You actually enjoy the sounds of nature all around you and the tunes you hum along to. Beep Test? Not so. Instead, you find the chirping of birds replaced by the exhausted huffs of tired kids, the echoes of a stadium taking over what would have been a sway of wind in the trees. And above all, that lovely track of yours has been taken over by a narrator who states numbers you can't even distinguish from one another. It was different in primary school, when the stadiums were smaller and the sound was better quality. But in high school, the blurred and muffled tones of our dear friend made conversation difficult.
He begins with his first famed sentence:
"The test will begin in twenty seconds."
The tone sounds, and the students are off.
When I was watching a run that got far longer than I would ever get to, the numbers became hazy. It sounded a bit like this.
"Level eleven, ten. Level eleven, eleven. Level eleven, twelve. *insert musical tone* Start level schwetvewun one. Level wutschweshelve two."
It almost sounded like the hard-working athletes had been demoted to level seven- it was that incomprehensible.
I hope I have made my points clear that the Beep Test is utterly rage-inducing. But that doesn't mean I can't end on one of those notes, in which I say that despite all it's intricacies that makes a person want to walk up to the speaker and unleash all fury on smashing it to pieces...it's still a part of school, and it's still a part of the good ways in which we can improve ourselves, and seek to improve ourselves in the wider scheme of things. Despite everything, it's still worth it to try your best and do the best you can achieve, no matter how much tension and annoyances begin to settle.