Dr. Kenneth Cooper

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from November 1988.)

FOLLOWING COOPER. I’ve followed Kenneth Cooper for 20 years now. I still haven’t caught up with him, but am slowly gaining.

Dr. Cooper’s original Aerobics book, published in 1968, was the first I read that talked of running purely as a prescription item. He was the first person I interviewed face to face two years later in my new job with Runner’s World.

Then as now, Cooper combined the bearing of a military officer (he was an Air Force physician) with the delivery of an evangelist. His message on exercising for health and fitness was spellbinding, but I didn’t think it applied to me.

I already ran far more than he prescribed for health maintenance. I’d never run purely for fitness.

As results came in from the first generation of aerobic exercisers, Cooper modified his prescription. He had implied early on that if some training was good, more would be better.

After seeing an “overwhelming” number of injuries and burnouts in higher-mileage runners, he recommended running no more than three miles a day and five days a week. He made the now-famous statement, “If you run more than 15 miles per week, you are running for something other than fitness.”

At the time, I and most others I knew ran for reasons other than fitness – or at least in addition to it. We trained to race or to settle our nerves. Our running was just getting started at the point where Dr. Cooper asked us to stop.

Years after he’d made his fitness statement and I’d first denied its personal merit, we met at the Fitness Fest in Shreveport, Louisiana. “I’ve finally caught up with you,” I told him. “You were right after all.”

Cooper looked puzzled at my words. So I clarified:

“I now run a half-hour, covering little more than three miles, five days a week. I hold down the pace, do some stretching and wear sensible shoes.”

Cooper smiled, then said, “I’m in my 28^th year of running. I’ve run more than 23,000 miles and have no muscular-skeletal problems.”

He always follows his own prescription. I cheat on it once a week by going farther or faster than he thinks wise. That big day keeps me happy, if not healthy.

With this one big exception, we’re finally running almost in step. Now we both run cautiously five days a week, though for different reasons: Cooper to stay in shape, I to rebuild and relax between big efforts.

I still don’t run for fitness – and make no claim to being totally fit. The Shreveport event offered a dozen physical tests, and two of them scored me as “poor” – in muscular strength (of the arms) and flexibility (of the hamstrings).

These results drew laughs when announced at a talk that night. The muscular deficiencies cause no obvious health problems. But I wasn’t laughing at another score, this one a cholesterol reading.

Kenneth Cooper had implied in his early work that anyone who collected enough Aerobic points could eat just about anything. This wasn’t a license to pig out, of course, but was a signal that exercise might forgive certain dietary sins.

Then came Jim Fixx’s death, attributed in part to a high cholesterol count. That tragedy prompted Dr. Cooper to write two more books: Running Without Fear and Controlling Cholesterol.

When Fixx died, I wrote that the best way runners could remember him was by having their cholesterol checked. A high reading is a silent threat that can only be found with a blood test and then can’t be reduced by running alone.

My reading went unchecked then. When Cooper and I talked two years ago, he had become a cholesterol crusader. He asked what my reading was, and I promised to have it tested.

I’d made the same promise to Dr. George Sheehan and others, but hadn’t kept it. Now we know. It’s 206, or slightly above the supposedly “safe” borderline of 200.

This reading doesn’t spell imminent danger. But it does tell me to read Kenneth Cooper’s latest book and play some catch-up with him, this time on diet.

UPDATE. Long after this writing, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, now 84, still runs regularly at the Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas, which he founded.

I still run his way most days – an easy half-hour – with the one big exception of a longer day each week. Thanks to a few dietary changes, my cholesterol count remains well controlled without medication.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]