Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 27

When I became Governor, the champion middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany, and I got him to come round three or four afternoons a week…. While President I used to box with some of the aides.

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT,

the only U.S. president who swam naked in the Potomac in winter, went blind in one eye from boxing in the White House, gave a speech immediately after taking a bullet in the chest, and nearly died mapping an uncharted river in the Amazon

NEARLY ONE HUNDRED YEARS after the Natural Method disappeared, I witnessed its rebirth in the form of a half-naked man vaulting through my second-floor window.

“Ready to play in the jungle?” he says. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”

“I’m not wild about them.”

“That’s because you never learned how to climb. Let’s get started.” He vanishes back through the window, which is about three feet from an unlocked and perfectly functioning door. For a man pushing forty, his energy and suppleness are off the scale; it’s not even 6 A.M. and Erwan Le Corre is already straining to go. His last name sounds like the French word for “the body”—le corps—and he certainly lives up to the billing: Erwan is tall, sun-bronzed, muscular as a puma, usually barefoot, and rarely in anything more than surf shorts.

I’d arrived the day before at Erwan’s base in Itacaré, a tiny village squeezed between the Brazilian rain forest and the Atlantic Ocean. Itacaré is ordinarily a sleepy outpost of fishermen and roving surfers, but it has lately become a rambling outdoor training camp for a bizarre collection of adventurers who are trying to pick up the Natural Method that the Great War cut short.

Wild as he looks, Erwan is dead serious about one thing: he’s convinced the entire multi-billion-dollar health club industry is based on a lie. And judging by raw numbers and results, he’s probably right: fitness clubs are the only business that depends on customers not showing up. It’s an amazing financial success story, especially since it’s based on such a defective product. Health clubs, by their own metric, just don’t work: the more gyms we join, the fatter we get. In fact, the rise in obesity tracks right alongside the rise in health club revenues, with both climbing steadily at about 2 percent a year.

“For most people, the gym is broken,” agreed Raj Kapoor, the well-known tech entrepreneur who cofounded Snapfish and was quoted in an interview about his new focus on American health. “Globally, it’s a $75 billion business, and more than 60 percent of people don’t go, even though they’re paying.” Here’s how it works: Every January, gym enrollments skyrocket. Gold’s typically doubles its membership, while other clubs report increases of up to 300 percent. At the maximum rate, that means four times the number of bodies are squeezing into the same amount of space. No facility can handle a stampede like that without the walls bulging.

“It’s like a damn cattle call” when the doors to exercise classes open, one regular complained to the Wall Street Journal. But no worries. Gym owners know they can pocket the cash without bothering to expand, because within a few weeks a fresh cycle takes over: by spring, fewer than half of any gym’s members turn up anymore. Ordinarily, that would mean death for an operation that counts on repeat business, but shame and magical thinking are powerful marketing tools: by the following January, the majority of the dropouts—roughly 60 percent—will feel guilty and decide once more to open their wallets and get in shape. No wonder the fitness mill keeps booming while other businesses are folding: during the recession’s darkest days, health club memberships increased by 10 percent.

So what went wrong? How did the modern health club, with all its whiz-bang machinery and calorie-crunching digital technology, prove so ineffective at actually improving health? With total revenue exceeding fifty billion dollars a year, you should expect at least some visible effect on overall health. It’s a staggering investment in a demonstrably failed approach, and it’s not as if people aren’t trying. We go to gyms; we just don’t stay. You can blame the public for not forcing themselves, but that’s like a restaurant blaming customers who don’t like the food; ultimately, you’re responsible for what’s on the menu.

And by 1980, the health club menu had undergone a radical overhaul. Until then, the standards for American gyms were set by the country’s best-conditioned athletes: boxers. Fighting is the art of perpetual motion—“Move or die,” as mixed martial artists like to say—so old-time trainers kept you on the hop with true functional movement. If you went to, say, Wood’s Gymnasium on East Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan, the way young Teddy Roosevelt did, you were trained by prizefighters. When Teddy first came through Wood’s door, he was a wheezing, short-sighted teenager who was constantly getting roughed up by other kids. His father sat him down and explained that without arete, there is no paideia. “Theodore, you have the mind but not the body,” his father said. “And without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You have to make your body.”

So Teddy got to work. “Professor” John Wood didn’t stick him on a padded seat and tell him to push a bar back and forth fifteen times, or plunk him on a stationary bike to crank the pedals. Wood partnered Teddy up with pro fighter John Long, and together they attacked Wood’s “beautiful and effective combined exercises”: skipping rope, swinging on parallel bars, vaulting over gymnastics horses, shuttle running with a medicine ball, hitting the heavy bag, shadow sparring with Indian clubs. One of Wood’s specialties was the lost art of strength rings: two circles of steel that a pair of partners grip between them, each grabbing an end in their hands. Then they go at it, pulling and resisting, each trying to make the other lose his grip or footing. The rings were a combat art as intricate as fencing; John Wood could diagram at least thirty-eight combinations of lunges, thrusts, and body twists.

“These certainly may be classed among the movements that are most generally useful,” one of Wood’s protégés remarked, “for they bring into play every joint and muscle of the body, secure geniality and generous emulation, and afford a great deal of exercise in a brief space of time.” Proficiency and power—paideia and arete.

But at the end of the 1970s, the curtain suddenly dropped on fight training. Ordinarily, it’s rare to pinpoint the Patient Zero who starts an epidemic, but in this case, it happened right on camera. In 1977, a womanizing, pot-smoking, cigar-puffing, steroid-injecting, gay-magazine pinup model suddenly became the poster boy for American fitness. Pumping Iron was released and, thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s swaggering charisma and chemically-enhanced physique, bodybuilding was transformed from underground entertainment into a worldwide phenomenon. Arnold would become Hollywood’s most bankable star, and bodybuilding—a form of male modeling that has nothing to do with agility, endurance, range of motion, or functional skill—became the new gold standard for gym training. Just like that, the best-conditioned athletes in the world were being replaced by some of the worst.

From a fitness standpoint, it was a step backwards. But economically, it was genius. Fight training takes up lots of room, but bodybuilding is about staying in one spot. It requires remarkably little floor space; if you’re not sitting or lying down, you’re standing or squatting. The idea is to isolate one muscle group at a time and blast it to the point of tearing, repeating the same movement over and over until you approach muscle failure. Like any other damaged tissue, the stressed spot will swell. That’s an emergency reaction, blood rushing in to immobilize the area and initiate healing. Oddly, that discomfort became a selling point: because bodybuilding is about appearance, not skill, sore and swollen muscles began taking over as a sign of strength.

And just as bodybuilding was becoming the new fitness model, a new device came along that made it as tidy and efficient as an assembly line. In 1970, a bizarre character from Florida showed up at the Mr. America competition with a product to sell. Arthur Jones was a chain-smoking high school dropout turned big-game hunter whose hobby was trying to overfeed his fourteen-foot alligator to Guinness World Record size. He was also a self-taught mechanic who’d built an exercise machine he called the Blue Monster. Jones’s brainstorm was a kidney-shaped cam that evenly distributed resistance as the weight was pushed higher. Because the gear also resembled a seashell, Jones renamed his creation the Nautilus.

Finally, gym owners could offer one thing your basement bench press couldn’t: a specialty machine that made you feel like a pro. Nautilus was compact and quiet and safe, allowing gyms to herd many more customers through much less space. Even during the New Year’s rush, you didn’t have to worry about members smacking one another with medicine balls or turning the joint into a full-combat mosh pit as they careened around with strength rings and Indian clubs. There were no dumbbells to rack or techniques to teach; no spotters were even needed for the bench press. Expertise wasn’t required, so neither was an expert staff: you only had to look pretty, take money, and wipe down the equipment.

“The idea of a health club really changed. It became big business. It was Arthur Jones that started that,” one of Jones’s designers would later tell the New York Times. “Mr. Jones’ invention led to the ‘machine environment’ that is prevalent today in health clubs,” the Times article continued. “The machines helped to transform dank gyms filled with free weights and hulking men into fashionable fitness clubs popular with recreational athletes.”

But the Rise of the Machines came at a cost. The goal became to create bodies that looked as much alike as possible, and you accomplish that by insisting on exact repetitions of the same motion, over and over. Even the vocabulary changed to fit the factory-floor mentality: our parents exercised, but we “work out.” And like any other factory, progress isn’t measured by whether you mastered a new skill; it’s measured by whether you hit your numbers—in this case, pounds and inches. The Greek ideal of a supple, balanced, useful physique was out. Massive McBodies were in.

And why? Because along with the Rise of the Machines came the Dawn of the Super-Males.

“With the advent of anabolic steroids in the last 30 to 40 years, it has become possible for men to become much more muscular than is possible by natural means,” notes Dr. Harrison Pope, M.D., a psychiatry professor at Harvard, who coined the term “bigorexia nervosa” to describe our dangerously misguided idea that bigger = sexier. Pope knows plenty about fitness; at age sixty-six, he could still shuck his suit jacket and tear off a half-dozen one-armed pull-ups on his office door. He can glance at a magazine cover or a movie trailer and instantly spot who’s juiced; sadly, more of those famous bodies are syringe-pumped than you’d think. But then again, was anyone really surprised when Sylvester Stallone was caught in Australia with nearly fifty vials of human growth hormone in his baggage?

Even kids’ toys and comic books were infected; action figures soon became as artificially overmuscled as the Italian Stallion. Take Star Wars: do you remember spotting any tank-tread abs or veiny biceps among the Rebel Alliance? Luke Skywalker and Han Solo barely take off their shirts in the films, and when they do, they’re amazingly … average. Just a couple of skinny guys who get by on dexterity, not Dianabol. But over the past thirty years, their plastic doppelgängers have gotten crazy huge. Same with G.I. Joe and Batman: their toy biceps have nearly tripled in size.

“Our grandfathers were rarely, if ever, exposed to the ‘super-male’ images,” Pope notes. “They didn’t do bench presses or abdominal exercises three days a week.” Their grandkids, however, are caught in an endless self-image onslaught. “A young man is subjected to thousands and thousands of these super-male images,” Pope complains. “Each image links appearance to success—social, financial, and sexual. But these images have steadily grown leaner and more muscular, and thus more and more remote from what any ordinary man can actually attain.” The payoff from all those gym reps is supposed to be a Hollywood bod, but once you discover that the road from Rambo I to Rambo II is paved with injectables, you face the same deflating choice pro cyclists had when they sniffed out Lance Armstrong’s secret: go dirty or go home.

“There’s a fairly sharp limit to the degree of muscularity that a man can attain without drugs,” Pope explains. “Most boys and men who exceed this limit, and who claim they did so without drugs, are lying.” Before the Rise of the Machines and the Dawn of the Super-Males, you went to the gym to become an athlete. Teddy Roosevelt focused on performance, not appearance, and it made him an athlete for life. Like all self-made men, he was afraid of backsliding, so even after he became president, Roosevelt stuck with what he learned at Wood’s: he boxed with soldiers, swam naked late at night in the Potomac, and squared off with his buddy, an army general, for bruising battles with wooden cudgels.

Some evenings, Roosevelt would slip out of the White House, pick a spot miles in the distance, and head straight for it. The challenge was to reach the goal no matter what obstacles were in the way. “On several occasions we thus swam Rock Creek in the early spring when the ice was floating thick upon it. If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes,” Roosevelt would recall. “We liked Rock Creek for these walks because we could do so much scrambling and climbing along the cliffs … Of course under such circumstances we had to arrange that our return to Washington should be when it was dark, so that our appearance might scandalize no one.”

Decades later, Roosevelt’s midnight rambles inspired one of the strangest fads of the Kennedy administration. After becoming president, John F. Kennedy was appalled to discover that half the young men called up for the draft were rejected as unfit. Americans were becoming dangerously soft and therefore, in Kennedy’s eyes, stupid. “Intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong,” Kennedy declared. “In this sense, physical fitness is the basis of all the activities of our society.” JFK was interested in true fitness, not bench presses or beach muscle, so he zeroed in on the two factors that matter most: endurance and elastic strength.

Thus began America’s weird, brief love affair with ultradistance. JFK found an old order from Teddy Roosevelt that required U.S. Marines to hike fifty miles or ride one hundred in less than seventy-two hours. (Teddy, naturally, led the way by doing the ride himself during a winter rainstorm.) Some of Teddy’s troops finished the hike in a single day, so JFK made that his challenge: Could modern Marines cover fifty miles of wild terrain in twenty-four hours? But before the military could give the command, civilians—including Kennedy’s own kid brother—beat them to it. At 5 A.M. one freezing Sunday in February, Bobby Kennedy set off with four Justice Department aides to hike the C&O towpath from D.C. to Harpers Ferry. All four aides dropped out, but by midnight Bobby had hiked fifty miles in less than eighteen hours.

The race was on. College frats, Boy Scout troops, high school classes, postmen and policemen, “pretty secretaries” and “beautiful girls” (as U.S. News & World Report put it) all tackled the “Kennedy Challenge.” Congressional staffers marched off in mobs, and a pub in Massachusetts offered free beer at the finish of its own fifty-miler. “The 50-mile hike verges on insanity,” warned the National Recreation Association, and the doom prediction was seconded by the American Medical Association: “We get distressed when people go out and strain themselves.” News photographers fanned out to capture the carnage—and instead found the same expression on faces across the country: grins of pride. People who’d never moved their legs for more than an hour at a stretch were thrilled to discover that just by heading out the door, they could keep on going. Speed records tumbled: Bobby Kennedy was beaten by a high school girl in California, who was edged out by a fifty-eight-year-old postman in New Jersey, who was bested by a Marine who smoked it home in under ten hours.

Kennedy’s murder brought the armies of Challengers to a halt—except in one small town in Maryland, where the same shock of personal discovery has been playing out every year since 1963. Only four people finished the first race. Seven the next. Eighteen after that. But while all the other Kennedy Challenges died away, Boonsboro kept getting stronger. It’s a tough race; the JFK 50 sends you up the steep and rocky Appalachian Trail and then down long switchbacks to the C&O towpath to follow in Bobby Kennedy’s footsteps. A half-century later, Boonsboro is still holding fast to Kennedy’s vision. Now, nearly a thousand entrants set off on the Saturday before Thanksgiving to discover for themselves what Kennedy suspected from the beginning: if we have the confidence to start, we’ll find what we need to finish.

The JFK 50 is no longer the country’s longest race, and it’s never been the sexiest. Big-city marathons have rock bands and movie stars; Tough Mudders have Arctic Enema ice-water plunges and mud scrambles and electric-shock hazards; while the JFK has … silence. For long, lonely stretches, it’s just you and your doubts. No cheering, no glimpses of Pamela Anderson and Will Ferrell, no victory lap through Central Park. But like one of those old family diners dwarfed by new sky-rises, JFK survives for a reason: it’s where soldiers and Marines are honored as elites, and a thirteen-year-old girl who’s told she’s too young for the New York City Marathon can run a double through the mountains instead. It’s where Zach Miller, an unknown cruise-ship worker who trains on a treadmill at sea, could shock even himself in 2012 by uncorking one of the greatest performances in the race’s history. The JFK could have been designed by Teddy Roosevelt and Georges Hébert; it’s the kind of enduring testament to the spirit of natural movement—to proficiency and purpose—that you rarely find anymore.

Unless, of course, you’re in Brazil. Down here, another route to excellence has been dusted off from the past. It’s been lost for so long, it now sounds exotic and oddly stirring. And one of the few who still know how it’s done—how to be fit to be useful—has just jumped out my window and is waiting impatiently below to lead me into the jungle.