stations, medical coverage, race communications, accessibility to course for friends and family, typical weather, and so on. [Possible points: 400 DM score: 366]

9. RACE AMENITIES

This category includes race T-shirt, finisher’s medal, finisher’s certificate, adequate and efficient finish area, ease of sweatbag retrieval, showers, postrace refreshments, awards ceremony, raffles, results postcard, results book, and so on.

[Possible points: 250 DM score: 233]

10. VOLUNTEERS Are the volunteers experienced and adequate in number? [Possible points: 100 DM score: 97]

TOTAL SCORE FOR DISNEY MARATHON i 906 out of 1,000 points ¢

You can find the scores for ALL the races in Marathon & Beyond’s

marathon profile series on our Web site at www.marathonandbeyond.com.

If Clothes Make the Man, It Is Certainly a Man Who Hadn’t Run a Step in His Life.

Parts I and 2 of Dr. Sheehan’s book appeared in our last two issues.

Six BEFORE AND AFTER

My war with the garment industry began when

I was 11. I was a city boy newly arrived at the seashore, and the boy next door invited me sailing. It was a first for me and also, unfortunately, for my mother. She dressed me in a regular suit with short pants, added a shirt and topped it off with a tie arranged in a bow and a Buster Brown collar. Not since H.M.S. Pinafore has a sailor been attired in such a costume.

That outing had considerable impact on my clothes from then on. I became a cardcarrying member of the fashion conspiracy. I wore whatever was popular. I capitulated to pork-pie hats, pleated trousers and padded shoulders. In time, I accepted cordovan shoes and grey flannel suits, buttoned-down collars and madras ties. I dressed the way everyone else dressed. The important thing about clothes was not to get separated from the herd. Their function was to give you cover, to confer anonymity.

Then I began running and everything changed. For the first time,

I saw that clothes had a function. Sw In fact, they had many functions. I Michael Hughes Me, (oe

discovered that the way I dressed could help my running, could protect me from cold and retain body heat, could improve my circulation and maintain my blood pressure. Appearance ceased to be a factor. Physiology, not fashion, became the dominant theme of my apparel. And as it became functional, as it began to fill its purpose, my running gear developed a style of its own.

Since it was winter when I started, the basic element of this style was the long-john underwear. The simplicity and elegance of this staple of clothing was lost on my family. There was much talk at home aimed at restricting me to the backyard, where I would be visible to only a few of the more understanding neighbors. There was also the hope that I would move on to more orthodox and presumably more attractive warmup outfits.

That never did happen. Long-johns act as a second skin. They prevent heat loss from the large femoral arteries that course down the inner thighs, and they give a pleasantly discernible support to the legs and lower abdomen. This pressure applied from ankles to navel gives me the equivalent of the astronauts’ “G” suit which keeps the force of gravity from interfering with the normal flow of circulating blood.

Where the skin is tight, you need tight clothing. But higher, where the skin is loose to allow for breathing and motion, you need loose clothing. Here, I found a large-sized cotton turtleneck shirt with long sleeves to be ideal. The sleeves can be varied in position according to the temperature, something not possible with buttoned cuffs. And the turtleneck collar controls heat loss from the two large carotid arteries that traverse the exposed area from collar bone to the angle of the jaw.

Just as I use my clothing to maintain my physiological equilibrium, I use it to maintain my psychological equilibrium. I sometimes dress in energetic red, sometimes in cheerful yellow. You may see me moving through the countryside in my calm, contented blue or a happy, optimistic orange. Rarely will you see me in black.

I will never buy another suit or shirt or tie or a pair of dress shoes. I have translated my running experience into everyday dress. I now wear skin-tight Levis, over-the-calf hose, some old running shoes and a cotton turtleneck shirt. When the weather demands, I add a light wool sweater and a nylon windbreaker.

Anything added to this is simply for concealment, a camouflage to keep this second skin and its various colors from public view. For this reason, the ideal warmup suit is a gray nondescript Salvation Army reject which is warm and has pockets to hold keys and glasses and entry fees. Thus attired, I can get to the starting line without arousing comment. I can also be sure that when I finish it will still be there. No one would bother to steal it.

* Eo *

In sport, as in anything else, those who have, get. Those in the money sports go first class.

Lying back now, I can see myself in a pro football locker room—bright, warm and carpeted with soft music piped in and the TV team setting up a commercial for a new hair oil or antiperspirant. I am seated in front of my locker deciding which of my 16 pairs of shoes to wear in today’s game. Down the aisle are showers with nozzles as big as those in the old Hotel Astor, and taking a shower is like being wiped out at Redondo Beach.

From the other direction comes the wonderful aroma of liniment radiating from the trainers and their marvelous ministrations, the taping and the massages and the slapping of those suddenly supple muscles. In the corner, someone is icing the post-game Coke and beer.

But then I come back to reality. I’m a runner, not a football player. He goes first class, I go steerage. So I run out of a Volkswagen. My car is my dressing room. And although it is bright and warm and carpeted and has music piped in, from there on nothing that happens to me bears any resemblance to a day in the life of a pro.

My reality is that some meets have no showers, some meets have no toilet facilities and some meets don’t even have a place to dress. But life being what it is and runners what they are, I grab the entry money and the highway tolls and set out to win what passes for fame and fortune in the running game.

This is the main reason you can find me almost any Sunday changing into my running gear in the front seat of my VW. It is an area not quite as roomy as those Wilt Chamberlain commercials would have you believe. And it seems even smaller at the critical point midway in this procedure, especially when I suddenly realize there are some strollers closing in on me. Such happenings make any other changing quarters acceptable, however dark or gloomy or deteriorating they may be.

The runner who hasn’t gone through a survival program that has taught him to do without toilets and showers is in big trouble. Even where there are showers, runners who view hot showers as a must soon learn that they have to finish in the top 10. After that, you take a cold shower or none at all.

For toilets, I have had to search out a friendly gas station owner, or failing that, to do the best can. Even where accommodations are adequate, local ground rules can sometimes make things difficult. At one race in Central Park, for instance, the crowd of more than 300 runners was allotted three rolls of toilet paper. “People come in and steal it,” our friendly park department man kept explaining. It took a near-rebellion to change his mind.

So for most races and many practice runs, my car is still my dressing room. Everything connected with my running is somewhere in that car. It may take a half-hour to find it under all the accumulated shoes and socks and old sweat shirts, but I know it’s there.

The one drawback is that this collection has a smell as distinctive in its own way as any created by Chanel. This may be the reason this long distance runner not only runs alone but also rides alone.

Of all the body functions, passing urine is the greatest waste of time. It delays, obstructs and hinders, and does so at the most inopportune times. A bowel movement can be satisfying, especially when you get along in life. An elderly lady who was temporarily residing in a nursing home confirmed this. “All they talk about here,” she told me, “is their grandchildren and their last bowel movement.”

Emptying the bladder, however, is rarely the topic of conversation, except perhaps as a complaint. It is a nuisance, an interruption of purposeful activity. Children understand this and put it off to the very last second. For this reason, herding younger members of the family into the bathroom before long car rides is standard practice. For remarkably similar reasons, this sudden irresistible urge also occurs with age. The “weak kidneys” of my childhood have returned. My visit to the toilet before the ride to my grandfather’s has now become the visit to the toilet before the ride to my grandchildren’s.

Being a competitive runner has undoubtedly worsened my problem. Urine flow can vary from a trickle to a torrent. Its formation involves the most intricate physiology in the body. It is one of the most skillful things the body does, and to any but the closest observers is the most unpredictable. As a runner, I add to these exquisitely programmed variations in kidney function a diminished nervous control of the bladder due to pre-race excitement.

When this happens—when grandpa the runner has the same childlike intensity, the same inner agitation, the same absorption in his play that his grandchildren have—he is bound to have similar problems with his bladder. He is getting into trouble not because he is growing older but because he is getting younger.

Pit-stops for urination, especially if you are a runner on the way to a race, involve higher mathematics. For one thing, the first call of the bladder occurs at about six ounces and usually can be ignored. The last call comes at approximately 12 ounces and says, “Stop, wherever you are!” Normally, the kidneys form about two ounces an hour, but a quart of fluid taken over a short period of time will pass through the kidneys in an hour. So a runner trying to hydrate his body before driving to a race may find it impossible to make it all the way there without relieving himself.

But knowing this is not the solution. I insist on having my coffee before I leave, and will not give up the cola I sip on the turnpike—despite knowing that the caffeine in the coffee and cola is a diuretic that hastens urine production. I am unable to face life, much less a race, without my coffee and cola.

Eventually, there is no ignoring this biological process, and I make a stop. It is made after much the same procrastination and with much the same reluctance that one brings a car into a gas station when the gauge gets closer and closer to

“E.” Emptying bladders and filling gas tanks are the most useless of my daily actions. I put them off until absolutely necessary.

My relief, however, is only temporary. The kidneys go on producing urine at a marvelous rate so that a half-hour later I am again possessed with this urgency to void. Only now I am on an open meadow, standing with a hundred or more runners. The only cover within miles is a waist-high trash basket.

But when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. I make myself as inconspicuous as possible and nonchalantly go ahead. When taunted I simply answer, “Wait until you’re my age.”

I refuse to be embarrassed. I learned that early in the distance running game. Years ago, when the Boston Marathon was more of a private club than a national event, I was kept with the 200 or so other entrants in a snow-fence stockade on the Hopkinton Commons for about 15 minutes before the race. Hundreds of townspeople and friends surrounded the enclosure, watching us warm up. When my desire to urinate became uncontrollable, I finally asked a veteran how to handle the problem.

He pointed to a runner, calmly urinating in full view of the spectators. ““That’s a Yale professor over there,” he said. “If he can do it, we all can.”

* Eo *

It is axiomatic that a runner should compete on an empty stomach. It is equally true that he should go to the line with an empty colon. Yet the athlete gets plenty of advice on his pre-event meal and little or none on his pre-event bowel movement. He is told what and when to eat to ensure an empty stomach, but not told what and when to eat to ensure an empty colon.

Just why a full stomach and a full colon interfere with performance is not well understood. Certainly there are few things more psychologically distressing than running while feeling bloated and distended. But there seems to be definite physiological disturbances as well.

Fortunately the runner has two allies that help his pre-race catharsis: (1) apprehension, and (2) the gastro-colic reflex. The effect of apprehension and anxiety on the gut has been well documented. Such reports go back to the biblical account of the Assyrians’ charge and its effects on the gastrointestinal tracts of the Israelites. The classic work, however, is Dr. Walter Alvarez’s Nervousness, Indigestion and Pain, a fascinating collection of case histories where anxiety and embarrassment and other emotions caused incapacitating abdominal disorders, including diarrhea and distention.

The runner, therefore, should have no difficulty evacuating his colon. The mere anticipation of the race is ordinarily enough to cause a bowel movement. The long lines at the toilet facilities at most marathons attest to this fact.

Where this is not sufficient, the runner should take steps to manipulate the gastro-colic reflex and set it into action. This is a reflex whereby a propulsive

movement of the colon is triggered by stimulation of the stomach. One of the best methods of doing this is the morning cup of coffee. Obviously, the coffee does not traverse the 30 feet or so of intestines and cause the bowel movement. It just sends the message. In fact, almost all foods introduced into the stomach will set the colon into motion.

Unfortunately, some foods not only set up this reflex, they cause cramps and diarrhea. It comes down, therefore, to trial and error. And the runner is bound to have a few catastrophes before he establishes a predictable routine. At one point, I thought I had arrived at the perfect pre-race schedule for me: a quart of orange juice and a quart of skimmed milk.

Fortified with this, I ran a good marathon. So I took the same feeding before a nine-mile cross-country race a few weeks later. I had a satisfactory movement before the race started and was two miles into the woods when I developed an uncontrollable diarrhea. I finally had to stop and let my pants down and perch on a rock while the rest of the field streamed past.

Lam still working on my problem. I expect little help from physicians. They know little about diet. While I wait I am sticking to my regular day-to-day diet, and depending on my natural cowardice and a cup of coffee to do the rest.

Eo * *

Ican put up with Madison Avenue using athletes to promote beer and cigarettes and even men’s perfume, but when I see athletes in commercials for antiperspirants and deodorants, I rise in protest.

It just makes no sense. The athlete wants or needs no antiperspirant, no deodorant. He is a hitting, throwing, running, jumping advertisement for sweat. Good honest sweat. The kind of sweat that made America and has now virtually disappeared from the country. The kind of sweat that went down the drain with the advent of an affluent technology and the rise of the service industries. The kind of sweat that was eliminated when our occupations turned from action to conversation. The kind of sweat that makes distance runners and middle linebackers and catchers and heavyweight boxers. The kind of sweat that comes from those three million eccrine glands in order to dissipate heat when a person goes into prolonged purposeful action.

For this kind of sweat, you need no deodorant. Honest sweat has no odor. The sweat that comes with effort and exertion, from running hills and bases and slants off-tackle is a dilute salt solution of mint purity. It has a salty, not unpleasant taste and in fact its chemical composition has been duplicated in a drink now being used extensively by marathon runners. There is, therefore, no reason to worry about honest sweat covering your body or saturating your clothes. A daily change of clothes and that old-time favorite, the Saturday night bath, should be all anyone needs.

Ihave found this to be true for myself. Almost every day in the early afternoon, I change from my street clothes into my running gear and put in a sweaty hour on the roads. At the end of the run I towel off, put my clothes on and go back to work. No shower. Showers are time-consuming and can lead to a chill and all the complications thereof. Showers are also unnecessary if they are used simply to rinse a dilute odorless salt solution off your body.

So what is this billion-dollar deodorant industry up to? Who is their constituency? Who needs these double-strength antiperspirant deodorants the hucksters are peddling? The answer is simple: the guy watching the commercial, the guy with a top-heavy mortgage, rebellious kids, irritable boss and depressed wife, the guy with nervous sweat.

Nervous sweat comes from the apocrine glands which are relatively few in number and are situated in certain hair-bearing areas like the armpit. These glands go into action at the instant of any emotional distress. They can be triggered by any crisis, be it at home or on the job. Their secretion may bear an odor itself, but in any case provides an excellent culture medium for odor-forming bacteria. The irony of the whole thing is that the apocrine glands are vestigial organs, which means that anatomists don’t know why we have them. They have no apparent function in the human, but like the appendix we still have to contend with them.

One way to contend with them is to get rid of the trigger mechanisms of fear and anxiety and guilt and apprehension. And one of the better ways to do this is to work up an honest sweat. The ensuing relaxation and feeling of wholeness, of being in touch with yourself, can bring you safely through confrontations that would ordinarily set the apocrine glands into action. Just when I am about to punch the next person I see right in the nose, I take my daily run and return full of sweetness and light. And this feeling persists at least until it is time to go home and put the clown costume away for another day.

* Eo *

You can’t take a shower any time you want. The hot shower is the final act of a ritual, the culmination of a totally exhausting body-mind experience. To take one without the proper preparation is as gross as eating when you’re not hungry or drinking when you’re not thirsty.

Ihave some evidence for this wild theory. A Sports Illustrated article by the late Yukio Mishima, the Japanese poet and novelist, said the feel of a hot shower after vigorous exercise was one of the elements essential to man’s happiness. He summarized it this way:

“Athletics exert man’s strength to the utmost. To run and leap, to dart about with sweat pouring from your body, to expend your last ounce of energy and afterward to stand beneath a hot shower—how few things in life can give such enjoyment!”

In most instances, the hot shower puts the seal on a great effort. You have to put pain, agony and exhaustion together to get the great shower. A college football coach once said if there was a heaven on earth it was a locker room after a victory. I’d amend that to a hot shower after agonizing effort.

The hot shower has no more to do with getting clean and odor-free (except maybe symbolically) than the marathon has to do with running an errand. They are both beautiful, purposeless activities which bring man back to his body and are incomplete without each other.

Part Il

Seven

THE DOCTOR

Doctors and Health

The annual physical examination has been called a useless annual fiasco. I’ll drink some Gatorade to that. You can no more give people health than you can give them wisdom. Society can and must guarantee access to educational opportunity and health services, but learning and health are personal responsibilities.

The main problem with these exams is that the doctor is most concerned with disease. He gives a patient “a clean bill,” meaning that all tests are normal. He ignores the fact that the patient is actually physically unfit and even a potential candidate for serious disease.

All American males, for instance, are candidates for heart disease—now generally recognized as the greatest health threat in any industrialized society. And obesity, lack of exercise, high blood pressure, smoking and a high cholesterol increase their chance of having a heart attack by 10 times.

Dr. Donald Cooper, an expert on Flabiosus Americanus (the Flabby American), says that no more than 2% of our population gets enough exercise to keep anywhere near physically fit. Which means that 98% of those who wave to me while I’m running on the roads are in trouble and heading for an early old age.

Dr. Tenley Albright, former Olympic gold medalist in women’s figure skating and now a Boston surgeon, wrote that sports should teach the medical profession a great deal. Mostly, she said, it should make the physicians realize that normal is not just average. True normal is really the equivalent of a well-trained, physically fit athlete—the obvious example of the human body at its maximum efficiency.

The annual physical, then, should look for fitness rather than disease.

* Eo *

Ailing athletes are, other than their present complaint, apparently in fine physical shape compared to the run-of-the-mill spectator. Further, they have unrivaled motivation to get well.

With all of this going for them, athletes should be a prime example of our medical establishment’s ability to decrease disability and restore health. Unfortunately, they are a prime example of the medical establishment’s failure to accomplish either purpose. The prolonged ailments of our top athletes, their recurrent injuries and their slow response to treatment, are all too common feature stories on the sports pages. Forced retirements of star athletes are so numerous, few seem to quit for any other reason.

If athletes were given less care and more thought, the doctors might come up with some original ideas on why illness persists, why injury doesn’t clear up. If more non-physicians—podiatrists and physiotherapists, for instance—could be induced to lend their ideas and talents, we might see a completely new approach to sports medicine. And if the athlete had to wait longer for surgery, he might have time to recover from his ailments.

What I’m saying is that medicine, and particularly sports medicine, cannot be let to drift along with the traditional deference we give to the physician and his supposed infallibility. In medicine, this takes the form that physicians alone possess the truth. The profession that learned from a soldier how to treat gout, from a sailor how to keep off scurvy, from a milkmaid how to prevent smallpox and from a Jesuit how to treat malaria now requires that you have an M.D. behind your name before it will listen to you.

But then we are all part of this credential society. We honor the man with titles. We yield at every turn to the expert. We make the degrees behind a man’s name determine his credibility. We allow each nation, each discipline, each specialty to set up its idea of Absolute Truth.

Take, for example, our reaction to acupuncture. Physicians schooled in their own dogma reacted with disbelief. Acupuncture violated the doctrines of neuroanatomy, and therefore was impossible, heretical and a delusion.

The fact of the matter is that acupuncture works. Why it works we don’t know, any more than we know why a lot of things work. But it works and that should make physicians just that much more receptive to ideas that originate outside of the lecture halls of the medical school.

The fact that acupuncture works, however, is of little importance, even though the public now looks on it as a new panacea. It is simply one more method of relieving pain, one more heroic diversion from the task at hand—which is finding those rules of health which will prevent disease in the athlete.

We now know that the tremendous stresses of training and competition cause injury and disease, but only in the susceptible athlete. That susceptibility, either in (a) structure, as in inherently weak feet, or (b) function, as with weak hamstring or

abdominal muscles, must be diagnosed if we are to progress beyond the patchwork, shore-up, make-do medicine that is being practiced today.

To do this, we need doctors willing to think and patients willing to work. Health, like excellence in any form, comes from the individual’s own efforts. The doctor who doctors best is a thoughtful spectator to this process.

* Eo *

Sooner or later, it’s bound to happen. The general manager of a faltering ball club will call a press conference and the reporters will flock in to hear the field manager get the axe. The high hopes of spring training have collapsed, dashed on the grim realities of July and August. The team has never reached its potential.

But then the general manager starts talking, and a guy in the back of the room asks his neighbor, “Did I hear right? They’re firing the doctor?”

He will have heard right. On that fateful day, both clubowners and fans will have reached the conclusion that a losing season may not be entirely the fault of the manager. He may instead be hampered by a roster shot through with injured and unavailable athletes.

The doctor responsible for fielding 25 healthy men every day is the one who has blown his assignment, and he must pay the price. Injuries, which we now see as a most vital consideration in the team’s success or failure, are the responsibility of the team doctors. And from the stats I see in the sports news, they are doing a poor job. There is hardly a team that hasn’t been minus a key man most of the season, and many have had whole platoons out of action at one time.

Injuries are still being treated with pills and shots and other labor-saving devices. These items have very little to do with returning a player to fighting shape. A pulled muscle is a weak muscle (or else it wouldn’t have pulled) and should be strengthened, not cuddled and massaged and heated to jelly.

What we need now are men specializing in the restoration of human beings to optimum muscular function. In medical parlance, this is called rehabilitation, and the doctors who do it are called “physiatrists.” Unfortunately for athletes, physiatrists are as rare as .400 hitters. And to make matters worse, few are interested in athletics.

That attitude could easily be changed. Treating athletes is one of the most satisfactory things a doctor can do. They will persist in any treatment no matter how painful or difficult, and in the end the doctor has the satisfaction of seeing a human being performing at the top of his physical powers.

Too much is being done now for the relief of pain. Pain is something a doctor should welcome. It tells him that somehow the whole experiment has gone wrong. Elimination of pain by pills and shots and heat treatments diverts the physician from the task at hand, which is to return to the starting point and begin again at the beginning.

When they finally fire a doctor, we may get the beginning sports medicine needs.

Eo * *

The athlete who consults a physician often wonders what goes on in medical school. He begins to question the priority of disease and disaster, the emphasis on crisis and catastrophe. His own problems of health and preventive medicine, of maximum performance and day-to-day living, seemed to have been ignored.

Physicians who handle emergencies with éclat, who dive fearlessly into abdomens for bleeding aneurysms, who think nothing of managing cardiac arrest and heart failure, who miraculously reassemble accident victims, are helpless when confronted by an ailing athlete. They are even less able to counsel the athlete and his never-ending questions about health.

Health is what makes the athlete medicine’s most difficult patient. It is as simple and as complicated as that. Health, said Chesterton, is the mystical and mysterious balance of all things by which we stand up straight and endure. Athletes want that mystical balance by which they can do all things. They want that

My tests indicate on unhealthy level of fitness

mysterious harmony of body and spirit which they have come to know as fitness. And because no one man can give them that, because no one man can specialize in health, which is to specialize in the universe, the athletes overwhelm any physician who presumes to treat them.

The athlete needs a medical team to treat him. A team composed not only of physicians but also of professionals from all the health science fields. The physician educated in isolation from these colleagues is usually unaware of the contributions these people can make, and is unwilling to give them authority and autonomy in caring for patients. The physician still sees himself as a member of an elite group in which some members are more elite than others.

Arecent poll taken by Professor Stephen Shortell of the University of Chicago makes this perfectly clear. Physicians asked to rate the status and prestige of 41 professional categories in the medical health field ranked no other professional group above any of the medical specialties. They gave first place to the thoracic surgeons and listed 22 more varieties of doctors before coming to dentists. The physicians seemed particularly ignorant of the importance of podiatrists (40th), who were placed below nurse’s aides, or osteopaths (37th), who were given a niche just above practical nurses.

The result is, as the British therapist James Cyriax points out, “Huge numbers of relievable disorders in otherwise healthy people are not relieved, not because nothing can be done but there is no one to apply knowledge already there for the asking.”

Who is there, then, who will save us, the athletes and potential athletes? Who is there to bring these specialists up and down the Shortell list together in one complete team dedicated to the nation’s health?

I nominate the family practitioner. He is the one man who could orchestrate the whole of patient care, the one man who is close to patients and colleagues, the one man who could come to know the contributions of the other medical health care professionals. He is one generalist among the specialists.

The physicians place the family practitioner 22nd, at the dividing line between their medical establishment and the professions they consider subordinate to them. I see this primary-care physician as the one man who can unite the medical profession and the others in the health sciences. He alone can go anywhere on this 41-category scale to get help. Freed from the ego problems of the experts whose reputations depend on success, he can advise and counsel and let others take on the onus of the specialist’s infallibility.

* Eo *

Athletes have already done a thorough job of raising the consciousness of physicians interested in sports. They have, among other contributions: (a) established a new normal for man; (b) changed our concept of aging; (c) confirmed the idea of the totality of man; and (d) shifted the emphasis from disease to health.

Before we discovered that athletes were attaining maximum metabolic, muscular and cardiopulmonary steady states, we were using “average” individuals as normals. We were, in effect, using life’s spectators instead of life’s competitors, and were coming up with overweight, out-of-breath subjects testing well below their potential. This can clearly be shown by comparing these pseudo-normals to the athletes in their age group. Their test results are frequently as much as 50% below the athletes’ performance.

One effect of this poor performance is to consider early aging as a natural process. Athletes are beginning to make physicians take a new look at this judgment. “The average man,” reports Dr. John Naughton after analyzing peak oxygen intakes of 213 men from the ages of 20-55, “becomes physiologically old early in life, which may explain how many succumb to disease of chronic deterioration at an early age.” What we now call aging is actually disease.

The athlete has also proven that this exercise and dieting and the resultant fitness has an effect on all our processes—mental and psychological as well as physical. He is making philosophers re-think the body-mind problems which have been with us since the 17th century when Descartes divorced the soul from the body.

This total effect of physical fitness—the new body image, the new self-respect, the new confidence—led Dr. Roger Bannister to describe it as “a state of mental and physical harmony which enables someone to carry on his occupation to the best of his ability and with great happiness.”

What Bannister is describing is a state of health that can be quantified by tests of physical fitness, by tests of muscular endurance and strength and speed and percent body fat. But it is also a quality, a method of living. To tell a healthy person not to abuse his body is as unnecessary as telling a saint not to steal. Health is really a form of behavior, a trait like honesty and a way of pursuing one’s goals in life.

“Health,” says Dr. Bob Hoke, a specialist in occupational medicine, “is a living response to one’s total environment.”

Health, then, is not merely the absence of disease just as sanctity is not merely the absence of sin. Health is man adapting, man striving, man living the present and thrusting himself into the future. Sport allows us to see purely this living to the utmost, or at least the attempt to do so.

“Tf there is one statement true of every living person,” writes William Schultz, the author of Joy, “it must be this: he hasn’t achieved his full potential.”

The athlete whose efforts have taken him beyond our pedestrian ideas of normal and average and aging and disease sees this quite clearly. Unimpeded by the mediocrity of our vision, he moves toward a horizon where men will make the most of themselves and their world.

Dr. Sheehan on Running will continue in our next issue.