Total Fitness

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 1988.)

BEFORE YOU adopt the advice from any book, first judge the author’s qualifications and limitations. I named strengths and admitted weaknesses while prefacing my 1988 textbook Total Fitness: Training for Life. It reads in part:

I’ve practiced one particular fitness activity for all or parts of four decades. I’ve reported on the experiments-of-one of myself and others for almost that long. However, as I became more of a runner, my overall fitness slipped.

In my teens I took fitness for granted. It wasn’t a goal in and of itself but an automatic result of how I lived: working on a farm, eating wholesome local products, living slowly and quietly in a small town, walking or bicycling a paper route, playing a variety of sports.

I was 14 years old and already fit when running became my special sport. I never have run purely for fitness, but was attracted to it first for the excitement of competition.

I stick with it now as a relaxing recreation. I would have run 99.9 percent of the last 10,000 days even if it had done me no good physically. Whatever physical fitness it yields is a by-product of more immediate rewards from doing what I enjoy.

The running surely does promote fitness. Direct benefits include a well-tuned aerobic system and the luxury of eating my fill without gaining (much) weight.

Running also promotes good health habits indirectly. I’ve never smoked and rarely drink alcohol. Concerns over effects on today’s performance are more effective in controlling these vices than warnings about their long-term damage.

Having patted my own back, I now confess that my approach hasn’t been the best one for overall fitness. Dr. George Sheehan says, “Fitness is a stage you pass through on the way to becoming an athlete.”

The work of maximizing running results is too hard and too specialized to promote balanced fitness. So athletes often become less fit than moderate exercisers in terms of balanced development. I was less fit at my competitive peak than when I started running – and than I am now.

In my 20s, I practiced no supplementary exercises and no alternative sports. I paid little attention to diet except as it directly affected performance.

I accepted chronic physical fatigue and emotional strain as the prices of racing success. I regret none of this, but also know I couldn’t have gone on living indefinitely this overspecialized, overstressed way.

A more balanced approach replaced it in my 30s and 40s. Running-induced injuries forced the adoption of stretching exercises into the daily routine – along with the replacement of some runs with walking or bicycling. Unbalanced muscle development – strong legs under an atrophied upper body – led to adding small but regular amounts of strength training.

Nutrition-related health crises in my family, plus some late-blooming food intolerances of my own – inspired dietary changes. Running evolved from being a cause to a cure for chronic tiredness and tension.

My history reflects the story of the fitness movement in the 1980s. It has trended away from overemphasis on a single activity – be it aerobic, muscular, nutritional or stress-reduction – and toward total fitness.

The Total Fitness book takes a total, well-rounded, long-range approach. I hope to teach you its ingredients and their combinations faster than I learned them, and I hope you enjoy your results as much as I have mine.

THE SAME month as the Total Fitness book’s release in 1988, I shared a stage with Dr. Kenneth Cooper. His 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.

His approach to exercising for health and fitness won many converts, but I didn’t think in 1970 that it applied to me. I ran far more than he prescribed for health maintenance, and I had never run purely for fitness.

Dr. Cooper 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 stated, “If you run more than 15 miles a week, you are running for reasons other than fitness.”

At the time I and most of the runners 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.

Then, many more years after he’d written his specific fitness prescription and I’d first denied its application to me, we met at the 1988 Fitness Fest in Shreveport, Louisiana. “I’ve finally caught up with you,” I told him. “You were right for me after all.”

He looked puzzled at this opening, so I explained: “I now run a half-hour, covering no more than three miles, five days a week.”

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 followed his own prescription. I still cheated on it the sixth running day of each week by going longer (often much longer) than three miles or faster-than-normal pace, or both.

But for most of our runs we’d arrived at the same conclusion for different reasons. Dr. Cooper ran to stay fit; I to refresh, relax and rebuild between big efforts.

Photo: I finally came to practice in 1988 what Dr. Kenneth Cooper had prescribed for two decades.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, 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.]