Essay: DON'T JUST SIT THERE; WALK, JOG, RUN

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CONSIDER the human machine in middle age: atrociously maintained, rusty from disuse. None of its parts—the bellows, the tubes, the pump—function as efficiently as they once did. The muscles have degenerated into blancmange. If, in an emergency, the demand for air rises abruptly from the idling requirement of six to eight quarts a minute to 100 quarts or more, the maw gulps like that of a beached carp. The heart throbs about two to three times its customary rate, pumping blood through pipes thickened by sedimentary deposits and grown inelastic with age.

This gruesome image has been framed in the consciousness of a great many flabby, middle-aged Americans. And how have they reacted? They are skipping rope in a gym class, jogging around the reservoir, pedaling a pinioned and wheelless bicycle, flailing arms before the bedroom mirror, doing push-ups on the office floor—in a tenth-hour campaign to redeem years of reprehensible physical neglect.

From yesterday's fad, the cult of physical fitness has developed into a national middle-aged obsession. Its manifestations are everywhere. Through numberless public parks, in every sort of weather, straggle the beflanneled registrants of Run for Your Life programs, jogging up to five miles a day, sometimes at the very respectable rate of seven minutes per mile. In thousands of gyms, yoga and dance studios, reducing emporiums and downtown athletic clubs, an uncomputed and possibly unprecedented tonnage of soft and mature flesh jiggles, bends, hops, kicks, creaks and groans. Washington's Governor Dan Evans organized the Six-Thirty Track Team, a club of state government executives who meet at that dawning hour to exercise, and as a result he was recently given the Tired Tennis Shoe Award as the individual who has done the most in his state to advance the cause of regular jogging. U.S. Senator and Mrs. Mark Hatfield are often seen trotting around their home in Maryland in his and hers black nylon warm-up suits. Dolly Carol Channing has adopted a schedule of exercise—doing the boogaloo (good for muscles in the back, abdomen, knees and some other parts) three nights a week at The Factory, Hollywood's current In nightspot. Behind these scenes, the evidence indicates, hundreds of thousands of Americans are quietly—even furtively—exercising.

Bicycle riding has more than doubled in popularity since 1960. The annual bill for Exercycles, slant boards, Relax-A-cizors and other muscle-toning devices exceeds $35 million. Sales of the Royal Canadian Air Force exercise book have passed eleven million. This bible of the physically insecure now shares its popularity with dozens of other reference works, among them Be Young with Yoga, Jogging and Sexercises (which promises to refine the sexual performance of both genders). A U.S. Government pamphlet on Adult Physical Fitness has sold 750,000 copies, without benefit of advertising, since 1963. By the tens of millions, U.S. televiewers genuflect to the exercise programs of Jack LaLanne, Ed Allen and Richard and Diane Hittleman.

From Legs to Brain