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By Root 1189 0

” which Germans organized here “to promote physical education and disseminate rational ideas in order to advance health, happiness, prosperity, and the progress of mankind.”8 They were anti-Catholic, anti-Puritan, antitemperance—rationalists who wanted to have some fun. Sports are half controlled by those trying to find sober family fun, models of self-discipline, and heroes with “heart”; and half by those who want loud fun, beer, and models of defiance. These two trances of value do not occupy separate sections in the arenas. Extremists on both sides sometimes do, but generally speaking, we are all mixed up together in the stands. Indeed, almost all of us trace our personal history in both traditions. It burdens our experience of sport and exercise to give our subconscious such ambivalence to carry alone, so it makes a lot of sense to bring these complex allegiances to the surface of our minds and get a good look at them.

With the Great Depression and World War II, the United States faced huge and often heartbreaking challenges, but it also kept winning and growing, beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. In this context, metaphors of the body as a fixed, limited system of energy were cited less and less, especially when it came to young people. Still everyone assumed that adults needed to take it easy on their bodies, and this idea went nicely with all the new appliances and conveniences that came into society in the 1950s. It also went well with martinis. It was only in the 1970s that people started arguing that you could make the heart muscle more powerful by using it a lot. Inanimate things wear down when you use them—so ran the new argument—but the heart is a muscle, and, at least in the short term, muscles get stronger when you use them (though they also might cramp or tear). The change started with the jogging craze. The physician Kenneth Cooper began jogging and crusading that everyone ought to be doing it. He made up the term aerobics, adding an “s” to a word that meant “living in oxygen, or living in air.” There was nothing scientific about it. In his best-selling book, Aerobics (1968), Cooper offered a list of exercises, awarding each one a number of points, and said anyone who earned thirty points in a week was fit. He asserted that people could benefit from such a regimen at any age—in their forties, fifties, and even sixties—and that those people with heart problems should be doing more regular exercise, not less. These were shocking ideas to doctors of the time, but the message that youthful vigor was available to adults was compelling to the public. Another physician, George Sheehan, discovered jogging at age forty-five and became famous for it. He insisted on the idea of getting your heart to 120 beats a minute for half an hour, four times a week, and connected the benefits of this action not only to health but to happiness. The third great guru of running was Jim Fixx. Fixx published his Complete Book of Running in 1978 and captured the public imagination. His understanding of what exercise had done for him was largely mood oriented. Wrote Fixx, “I was calmer and less anxious. I could concentrate more easily and for longer periods, I felt more in control of my life…I had a sense of quiet power.”9 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been doing surveys on American exercising only since 1985, but the number of joggers in the early 1960s may have been around a hundred thousand, and by the late seventies it was over thirty million. Jane Fonda cranked it up another notch in 1982 with the release of her first workout tape. Fonda asserted that her efforts were not in pursuit of a fashionably thin body, but to make her “own body as vibrant as it can be.”10 Gyms sprouted everywhere, colossal industries of sports clothing and equipment sprang up, and since then almost everyone has, at one time, joined a gym and given the experience a good college try. Most of them gave up, but they didn’t dismiss the endeavor, only their ability to rise to its challenge.

Meanwhile, a lot of time has gone by and no one