On April 16 the famous Boston marathon will be run once again. 30 thousand or so people will be heroically pounding the hell out of their joints over 26.2 paved miles, almost all for the sheer fun—and celebration of health and vigor—of it. They will be widely admired by millions of other runners and couch potatoes alike.
In 1897, the first year the race was run, there were 18 entrants. Until the mid 1960s this biggest marathon in the world, one of the few at that time, attracted at best a couple of hundred participants. For those relatively few even aware of it, it was less a model or heroic event than a curiosity: a handful of skinny, marginal types for no good reason exhausting themselves running through the streets in their underwear.
It’s hard to believe that there ever was a time BF, before the fitness phenomenon, in which running has played a large role, a time when we didn’t spend hours a week running in circles, bouncing in place, sitting on stationary bike putting in the digital miles over digital hill and dale, or other unproductive expenditure of energy. But until the late ’60s, most men (running was not considered ladylike for women) felt they had performed enough heroic exertion earning a living (by the sweat of their brow, as it was put in those days) when not saving the world in a war.
Starting with the “running boom” of the 1970s, the number of runners rose exponentially, as did the number of marathons staged over the world. Running became a “movement.” Suddenly there were herds of executives issuing forth from office buildings, using their lunch hour to get in five miles. Jim Fixx, who wrote books about the running way of life, declared completion of a marathon to be permanent protection against heart attack. (The great irony of his own death of a heart attack at age 52, while running, did little to slow down the movement’s momentum.) Running was talked of as a “positive addiction” and pre-prozac antidote to depression.
Suddenly the nation was on a giant fitness kick, getting healthier and healthier, smugly comparing itself to the drinking and smoking and couch potato generations BF.
For decades, running the marathon has been considered one of the most heroic things an ordinary citizen can do, perhaps even more than fighting in one of the wars America has specialized in over this same period. Now: many millions,whether runners or not, share the assumption, almost axiomatic, that it’s good for us.
And yet there is reason, 40 years in, to doubt the virtue of all this running. If running (and fitness in general) is supposed to create a healthier America, why the obesity epidemic of the past couple of decades? We are told that we have never been so fat and unhealthy. You could say that they are two different populations, the exercisers and the fatties. That may be, but on average, population wide, the latter seem to be winning out.
And it’s a good bet that a good portion of the current epidemic of joint replacement is in fact the toll the exercise movement has taken on the aging bodies of its adherents, chickens coming home to roost now to the tune of a quarter of a million hip replacements and equal number of knee jobs every year.
In a “Runner’s World” (name of a magazine that has come along way with the movement), certain questions don’t get asked: If running the marathon (and putting in the hundreds of miles needed to prepare for one) is not, however heroic, a model for sensible exercise, what is? You don’t get a lot of credit for being an exercise hero for a half hour walk every day or two, but is there any evidence we need more than that, especially when damage to joints is factored in?
While we’re questioning assumptions, what’s the effect on the national psyche of the belief that a heroic five or 10 (or 26.2) mile run is an acceptable substitute for heroism ( creativity, meaning, calories burnt) at work, in family or civic life?
No Comments