Ready, Set ...Sweat!
BULLETIN: Noted Physical Fitness Enthusiast Farrah Fawcett-Majors will appear in the tenth, 20th and 30th paragraphs of this article, jogging nude around the Central Park Reservoir, pausing every 50 yards to give a demonstration of rope-skipping. Aerobics points will be awarded to readers.
Strange currents flow for years in the deeps of the American society, then for reasons unclear suddenly roil to the surface, disturbing the waters and making reasoned discourse impossible. Talking to plants was a minor instance a couple of years ago. People who had always talked to their plants abruptly decided to come out of the closet, as if at a signal. Before the week was out, it seemed, the air waves and the public prints were awash with the commentary of glibsters who said that, by George, something, ; maybe whisky vapors, made talked-to plants grow better. By the end of a fortnight, sturdy, feet-on-the-ground Undecideds who knew the whole thing was bosh were talking to their plants just in case the lunatics were right.
Now physical fitness is upon us like a wet spaniel, bigger than talking to plants, more numbing in the fervor of its adherents than encounter-group therapy. This is a startling development for the nation that invented the electric golf cart, the pushbutton car window and the drive-in mortuary, but it is happening.
Night Jogging. Muggers tremble behind locked doors now, to avoid being trampled by housewives in striped training suits. Sports stores are unable to keep $36.95 imported running shoes in stock. (Adidas sells a white and orange model that glows in the dark, for night jogging.) Day hikers need permits to enter certain overused areas of New Hampshire's White Mountains. A slender, bemused fellow named George Butler, who produced the body-building film Pumping Iron, goes about saying, "The next generation of American men will be unrecognizable," and at the rate at which weight-lifting rigs are selling, it may not take that long.
If we lie down, will the fitness pass? And if not, why not? In a society that instantaneously hatches complicated recreational subcultures, complete with heroes, legends, artifacts and literatures (the skateboarding and CB-radio crazes are examples), to ask why all these people are running in the same direction may be to miss the point. A fad is its own explanation.
Still, it's hard not to see a clue in the fact that demographers, who in the '60s seemed to be saying that the median age of the population was something like seven, now pronounce that the U.S. is middleaged, and counting. Middle age is a sitcom joke no one wants to be the butt of, and the generation now turning 40 is the one that never trusted anyone over 30. Its members, who are among the most fanatical cyclists, joggers, iron-pumpers, lap-swimmers, rope-jumpers and cross-country skiers, were especially hard hit by the society's youth imperative. A few years ago, they turned that imperative against the society--youth was righteousness--and now it seems to be turned against whatever is not youthful in their own bodies.
Pain Barriers. Much else is involved, some of it probably undefinable, but it is clear that over the past decade or so, the general population has been receiving messages from its outposts. The women's movement has made it acceptable for women to think of their bodies as strong, sweat-producing machines. World-class swimmers and distance runners, who lowered records by training to exhaustion, talked of pain barriers that could be broken through to achieve new levels of performance.
Medical reporting in the general press improved, and doctors and laymen learned that cardiologists like the late Paul Dudley White were prescribing what seemed at the time high levels of exercise for some heart patients. Meditators preached that it was good to turn inward and attune oneself to subrational body rhythms (runners report that their rhythms of breathing and striding can have the calming effect of a mantra). And if you were what you ate, as the organic-food munchers scolded, who wanted to be a Hostess Twinkie?
The new fitness has produced its measure of snobbery, much of it directed at such harmless but torpid pursuits as golf and bowling. Neither, says the religion of wheeze and gasp, will do much for your cardiovascular system. (A golf course is about four miles long, and is negotiated, usually sitting down, at an average of 1 m.p.h. or less; at the professional level, tournaments are won by jiggling fat men. Bowling consists of brief bursts of slow motion separated by rest periods.) And fitness of the heart, lungs and circulatory system, far more than muscular strength and flexibility, is what the new believers are seeking.
Who is in better shape, the 240-lb. man who can pick up the front end of a Honda Civic or the 89-lb. woman who can run the Boston Marathon in 2:48:33, as 41-year-old Miki Gorman did this year? The zealots of the new fitness say, with rueful shakes of their heads, that if the weight lifter can't run a mile and three-quarters in twelve minutes (assuming he is under 30), he can't claim to be in excellent shape, and that if he can't trundle at least one mile in that time, his condition is poor.
BULLETIN: Farrah Fawcett-Majors has been held up in traffic.
The skinnies of the world have, in effect, righteously established fitness standards that reward their own strengths and forgive their weaknesses. Then, like other converts, they have proclaimed in terms not open to contradiction that their god is the one true god, and that those human tubers who do not forthwith begin regular exercise programs will end up frying in their own fat.
Nothing, not even exercise, is more tiresome than listening to some cholesterol-free windbag hyperventilate about how his energy has doubled, his triglyceride level has dropped, his sexual performance is off the charts, and his life expectancy has approached that of a Galapagos tortoise, all because he has begun daily sessions on an exercise bicycle. Nothing stimulates the gag reflex so quickly as news photos of entire families--mom, dad and six children--jogging in identical warmup suits. And nothing is more appalling than, as a 10-to 15-mile-a-week runner (which is to say a moderate lunatic; some glittery-eyed types run 100 miles a week), to hear the deadening quack of zealotry come from one's own mouth. Long-distance runners are lonely because they are insufferable.
It would be easier to dismiss the quack, however, if so many of the smug skinnies were not former fatties and former cardiac patients. There is no unarguable proof that heavy aerobic exercise programs prevent coronary blockage and heart disease (aerobic means living in air, and in fitness terminology it refers to sports like running, which cause prolonged huffing and puffing). The medical arguments are not over whether running is bad or good for people, however. They are between medical enthusiasts--such as Dr. Thomas Bassler, a California pathologist who advises heart patients that if they stop smoking, run at least one marathon, then settle down to a regime of three six-mile runs a week, their heart conditions will never worsen--and moderates who object that not enough evidence is in.
Some of the moderates say it may not be the running itself that is so beneficial but the temperate life that running requires--no smoking, little drinking, a sensible diet. Others speculate that self-selection may be involved: that only the strongest of heart patients opt for running, and that these probably would make good recoveries anyway.
Runners Know. To the runners --there may be 7 million to 10 million of us, though many are anti-org types and hard to count--and the running doctors, there is no such uncertainty. Runners think they know something the civilians haven't discovered yet. So, quite clearly, do the gristly followers of the other aerobic citizens' sports--basketball, swimming, cycling, cross-country skiing, singles tennis, racquetball, squash, rowing and hiking. But running (my speed or faster) and jogging (your speed or slower, unless you are faster, in which case points are awarded for narrative style) are the most visible and accessible of the fitness sports, and to civilians who don't participate, the most painful and absurd. Running can stand for the rest.
Not long ago, a 29-year-old runner sagged into a phone booth and called his podiatrist, Dr. Murray Weisenfeld, at his office in Manhattan. He had just run 35 miles of a 52-mile ultramarathon, he said, and now he was having leg spasms. What should he do to continue the race?
Dr. Weisenfeld, who trained, like other foot shrinkers, in the humble expectation of ministering mostly to shoe-pinched fat ladies, has grown accustomed to runners. He told his patient, not entirely seriously, and perhaps not entirely in jest, to consult a psychiatrist.
Vic Braden, the Southern California tennis pro, says that running is crazy. "I think when you put yourself under stress like that, there have got to be some real negative juices flowing. I see people who pretend to be happy as joggers and they're absolutely miserable. It's become like a second job for them."
Braden's notion of the miserable, duty-whipped jogger is hard to support by talking to the runners themselves. In farm country near Aurora, Ill., a couple of weeks ago, 17 souls who could have been sitting in front of the tube with six-packs smeared Vaseline on their feet, to ward off blisters, and loped off for a 50-mile foot race. The temperature was close to 90DEG. By the 20-mile mark, 35-year-old Romance Language Teacher Alberto Meza gave up and rolled under a faucet in the Johnson's Mound Forest Preserve. Water streamed over his head and down over his red fishnet shirt with its Boston Marathon patch.
Meza was cheerful. Five years ago, he said, he was overweight and out of shape. "I picked running because I'm not athletic at all. I couldn't do anything else. In Chile I got kicked out of soccer class." Now, down from 180 Ibs. to 145 Ibs., he covers at least 15 miles a day. "It's great," he said.
Richard Guse, a 42-year-old Mayville, Wis., businessman, finished the Aurora race in a little over seven hours, coming in third. He wore a red, white and blue bathing suit, down the front of which he poured ice cubes periodically. He said he runs a marathon each month. He started running a number of years ago when he was plagued by insomnia and drowsy spells. The exercise pulled him out of his physical slump. "I owe my whole life to it," he says now. Like Meza (and enough other middle-aged runners to suggest a personality pattern), Guse says that he was not much of an athlete as a boy. Now he takes faintly malicious pleasure in seeing his old classmates who played on the first string. "Most of them are all fat and flabby now."
BULLETIN: Actress and Fitness Enthusiast Farrah Fawcett-Majors has disappeared, under circumstances not yet explained, while warming up for her nude jog around the Central Park Reservoir. Details will follow when available.
Women came to running more slowly and shyly than men. They were even less accustomed than men to the pain of exercise. Breasts jounced and drew hoots from male motorists. The all-important running one-handed noseblow, a maneuver performed without Kleenex, was unladylike. When Judy Sanford, 33, a Houston housewife, began jogging a few years ago, she did it inside her house. She reckoned 73 laps to the mile, and says that she changed direction every ten laps to keep from getting dizzy. Now she runs three miles a day through the streets, wearing a headset radio to keep from getting bored.
Six months ago, Lucy King, 35, a New Orleans housewife, began getting up at 5 a.m. to jog with her husband. "The first two weeks, my body thought I was going to die and my mind was convinced. I didn't want to do it. I hated it." Now, she says, she feels buoyant after her mile-and-a-half run, and the feeling lasts for most of the day. 'Tm pleased with myself."
Joggers become runners, and women, who until five years ago were not allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon, have now lowered the sex gap at the marathon distance of 26 miles 385 yards to less than half an hour (Derek Clayton holds the male record at 2:08:33, and Chantal Langlace is the female record holder at 2:35:15).
Probably the sex gap is unclosable in the marathon, but in the ultramarathon distances of 50 to 100 miles, women's lightness and endurance may be a commanding advantage, and a woman has been an overall winner in a West Coast 100-mile ultramarathon.
Age deters runners no more than sex. Marathoners in their 60s are almost commonplace now, and two weeks ago, 78-year-old Dr. Paul Spangler completed the 7.6-mile Bay-to-Breakers race in San Francisco in the respectable time of 60:14. (Twenty-five-year-old John Holewinski collapsed during the race and died shortly afterward; and 30-year-old Pro Tennis Player Karen Krantzcke died this year after jogging. Such deaths are rare, but exercise experts strongly recommend physical exams for beginning joggers.)
At Chicago's Swedish Covenant Hospital, Cardiologist Dr. Noel Nequin started an exercise program for heart patients six years ago. The first step is a stress test, in which the subject runs on a treadmill while wired to an electrocardiograph. Then an exercise regime is set. The beginning pace may be a walk or a slow jog, with frequent pulse checks. Conditioning is slower than with healthy joggers, but the results can be startling. Ten of Nequin's patients, one of them a 47-year-old merchant who survived a triple bypass operation, were planning to run in a ten-mile race along the lakefront.
Participants in such programs tend to talk about running with a special fervor, and so do their doctors. "Man was made a two-legged animal because he was meant to use his legs," says Dr. J.V. Shivde, one of Dr. Nequin's assistants. "We don't know what one thing causes heart attacks, but two of the risk factors are inactivity and psychological tension. Jogging is an answer for both. We can't say that exercise arrests heart disease, though there is some evidence that it may. But at least with exercise, if you have a heart attack, you have a greater chance of coming out of it alive."
Physical health is not the only benefit reported by running addicts. Runners who push themselves beyond three miles or so describe with surprising consistency a feeling of euphoria that would be worth five years in jail if it came from plant resins.
Tom Williams, 42, an ex-Stanford footballer who owns an executive search firm in San Francisco, describes a feeling that other runners will recognize (though speaking of it generally draws an "Uh, yes, that's very interesting" reaction from sedentary friends). Williams says, "I don't feel good until about a half-hour after I start jogging. Then the sense of fatigue is like a warm blanket. It's a good time to meditate. You run along feeling like you're the greatest thing. Nobody can touch you."
William Morgan, a physical education professor and psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, says that runners "can develop a sensation of omnipotence. They begin to feel invincible. They run through red lights, challenge cars at a light. Their behavior becomes absolutely bizarre to their peers. They begin running 100 to 120 miles a week." There is something resembling addiction here, and runners tend to become edgy when their exercise schedules are interrupted.
READERS' ADVISORY: Break in Fawcett-Majors disappearance to follow.
"In general, it's a positive addiction," says Bernard Gutin, a runner who is professor of applied physiology at Teachers College at Columbia. "Running seems to do away with linear thought; same with meditation. A lot of people find that they get creative solutions to problems. I suspect that the euphoria comes from emitting a lot of alpha waves, although there has been no study on it."
At least a beginning has been made in the medical use of such psychological effects of running. Dr. John Greist, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, recently treated 15 cases of depression by prescribing jogging. Results were said to have been as good as, or better than, those obtained with traditional techniques. Says University of Chicago Psychiatrist Dr. Jarl Dyrud: "One of the best ways of treating depression is by forcing activity. Of course, you have no way of telling which is cart and which is horse, but I have a hunch that a lot of this jogging exercise makes very good sense as an antidepressant."
The alpha waves and the bombproof cardiovascular systems are not achieved without cost. Tennis players wreck their elbows and break their Achilles' tendons, but runners, especially when they reach middle age, are creaky with bone spurs, shin splints, knee miseries and bruised heels. Despite layers of foam padding in their expensive Adidas, Puma, Nike and Tiger training shoes, half of the members of a suburban joggers' club will be out of action at any given time.
Running is certain to be the best-researched sport in history, because so many researchers are running, but not much thought seems to have been given to running and alcohol. Most exercise books advise against mixing the two. but in terms suggesting that what is being purveyed is merely conventional wisdom. Not long ago Runner's World, the amiable and authoritative magazine subscribed to by just about all serious foot flappers, published an article alleging that alcohol has not hurt the performances of several distance runners. Frank Shorter, the Olympic gold medalist, is said to have swallowed 1 1/22 to 2 liters of good German beer the night before he won the '72 marathon.
One of the great virtues of running is that it makes dieting unnecessary. A mile run in eight minutes, which is a good hacker's pace, will burn roughly 100 calories. Faddists' diets and food additives such as protein powders have their adherents, but experts are nearly unanimous in saying that normal, balanced meals, easy on the fats, will sustain a runner perfectly well. Marathoners have taken to loading up on carbohydrates for several days before a race, to pack their bodies with glycogen, but since it takes about 20 miles to run through a normal supply of glycogen, spaghetti has no special magic for short-winded strivers.
Business firms have latched onto the new fitness with unmistakable sincerity. It is a backward business organization, in fact, that does not subsidize some kind of aerobics program at least for its executives. Fumble-fingered. soft ball, bowling and Ping Pong used to be the extent of business athletics, but now such firms as General Foods, Xerox and Life Insurance Company of Georgia have set up elaborate exercise regimes. The reasons are not obscure: employees who take 20 laps instead of four martinis at lunch make more sense when they return to their desks, and are far less likely to require payouts from company-financed health insurance.
There is a class distinction here, however. Not many factories sponsor aerobics programs (though Jogger Jesse Bell, president of the Bonne Bell cosmetics firm, built a running track near his Cleveland factory, and paid employees $1 a mile for paddling around it, until some began lapping at the rate of $250 or more a month).
In fact, not many blue-collar workers or their families take part in aerobic sports. Not all motorcyclists are blue collar, but almost all bicyclists and runners are white collar. In snow country, the line between white-collar crosscountry skiers and blue-collar snowmobilers sparks with animosity, and is seldom crossed. Factory workers are nearly as sedentary as bank presidents now, but clearly the conviction persists from the arduous old days that sweating is what privileged toffs pay you to do.
Lavish Gym. Class crackles in the clean, conditioned air at Dr. Kenneth Cooper's $2 million Aerobics Center, a lavishly renovated antebellum mansion in north Dallas. The center is a gym. and people sweat there, but the locker rooms are cozy with rust-colored carpet, and their smell is more Brut than Ben Gay. Cooper is the author of Aerobics, the exerciser's Old Testament, The New Aerobics, and two other books about the exercise system he developed while he worked as a health researcher for the Air Force.
The basis of Cooper's system is his use, as a measure of conditioning, of the amount of oxygen a circulatory system can take in and use in a given time. This he measured by positioning runners on treadmills and capturing their exhalations in plastic bags. The more oxygen used, the more work done before exhaustion, the better the subject's condition. Cooper found that he could approximate such tests by measuring the distance a runner could cover in twelve minutes over a track--1% miles for a man under 30 in excellent condition: 1.1 to 1.24 miles for a 45-year-old woman in fair shape, and so on.
Cooper devised aerobic exercise schemes for postulants at each stage of conditioning, aimed at keeping the heart working at 70% of its maximum rate. He advises that runners may subtract their age from 220, then take 70% of the result as an optimum heartbeat rate. Cooper then had the flash of genius that has earned him fame and wealth. Exercisers receive intangible but much prized rewards--aerobic "points"--for doing their routines. An evening of ' bowling? No points. Twenty pushups? No points. A round of golf (walking)? Three points. A 7:59-minute mile? Five points. Get running.
They do; before 5 a.m., Mercedes and Triumphs purr up to the Aerobics Center, and their drivers begin to circulate around the one-mile track. Each has undergone a stress test and has been weighed submerged in water to determine what proportion of his body weight is fat. Runners punch their times into a computer and receive their points. At the end of each month they get a printout of their progress. Thirty points a week, says Cooper, will maintain condition. Some overachievers earn 400.
To some, the Aerobics routine may seem too much like what Vic Braden said jogging is, a second job. Another profitable brawnstorm, this one invented in Europe and developed in the U.S. by Peter Stocker, is called Parcourse. Dotted around its 1 1/2-mile track are signs, directing the faithful to stop and perform an exercise, then jog on. Pa-course suggests a hybrid of miniature golf and the stations of the cross, and citizens should be warned, because its franchises, creeping eastward from California, can now be found in 65 cities.
No doubt the society needs ants more than grasshoppers, who jump dazzlingly but probably don't keep up their aerobics points. Perhaps each sort of bug should listen to Dr. George Sheehan, 58, marathoner, author (Dr. Sheehan on Running) and cardiologist: "Play is the priceless ingredient in any successful fitness program. But ... play is not just fun and pleasure. It has to do with human need. Fitness is something that has purpose but no meaning. Play is something that has meaning but no purpose; fitness is a bonus in play, and people are finally learning how to play."
BULLETIN: Actress Farrah Fawcett-Majors was kidnaped today by a large white bull as she prepared to jog nude around the Central Park Reservoir to popularize physical fitness. Amid a crackle of thunderbolts, the bull leaped an 8-ft. chain-link fence with Fawcett-Majors on its back, and swam off with her in the direction of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Witnesses said that the animal bellowed several times in what seemed to be Greek. Park authorities were investigating the disappearance.
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