America Shapes Up: One, two, ugh, groan, splash: get lean, get taut, think gorgeous

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COVER STORY

One, two, ugh, groan, splash: get lean, get taut, think gorgeous

That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing off of the old skin, towards a new youth.

—D.H. Lawrence

At 7:15 a.m. Audley White, 52, watches the Today show, an American morning ritual. But with a difference: the youthful-looking information systems manager views the program on a convenient monitor while he pounds out the miles on a motorized treadmill at the Xerox Corporate Fitness Center in Stamford, Conn. On his daily jog, White is surrounded by a $61,000 mechanical sculpture garden of chrome, leather and cable: stationary bicycles, cross-country skiing simulators, rowing machines, Nautilus weight stations and racks of dumbbells positioned around the spacious, brown-carpeted gym. Down a hallway hung with modern paintings are whirlpool baths and a sunning room studded with ultraviolet and infra-red lamps. Near by: offices for a physician and a full-time exercise physiologist.

Not long into his daily workout, White has soaked through his T shirt, emblazoned XHMP—Xerox Health Management Program. His face is mottled with exertion, his eyes narrowed to the 1,000-yard stare of a man at the limit of endurance. Beta endorphins, chemicals released by the body during sustained strenuous exercise, calm his nerves, suppress his appetite and relieve his pain. Increased blood circulation as a result of the exercise may improve White's heart muscle. Such are the small miracles of activity: insurance factors in a stressful and sedentary life.

Though the $700,000 Xerox program is not compulsory for executives, participation is a route to faster promotion through the ranks. At the invisible end of the treadmill a vice presidency may be waiting. In the last mile of his workout, as his $40 running shoes echo on the treadmill, White resembles a movie hero: the young man who wrestles with the hand of a huge clock. If it strikes 12, the heroine will be decapitated or the dynamite will explode. Audley White has extracted a similar victory over the inevitable: time.

As recently as 20 years ago for most people, the body was hardly more than an interesting mass somewhere down there below the head. It could be barricaded in gray flannel and wantonly pleased in steak houses and French restaurants. If the body belonged to Clint Eastwood or Sophia Loren, it was interesting. Otherwise, except in bed, it was ignored by the public in favor of more important pursuits like winning the space race or building the New Society. Of course, Muscle Man Charles Atlas beckoned to boys from ads in comic books (Don't let bullies kick sand in your face, weakling) and a few grownups even lifted weights at Vic Tanny's. By the early '70s, however, a sweeping change was literally afoot. At a cocktail party, the old-fashioned kind with fat-laced canapés and spirituous liquors, some gaunt, counterculture Ph.D. brandished his glass of club soda and announced: "The body is the temple of the soul!"

It did not matter that the notion was as old as ancient Greece, as recent as the 1910 Boy Scouts Official Handbook; Americans make a specialty of reinventing the wheel every decade or so. The philosophy seized folks overnight, and the sport of mass running had begun. Suburbanites jogged