RUMORS OF IMMORTALITY

When we compiled our list of “25 Who Reinvented the Marathon” torun in conjunction with our celebration of “25 Years of Marathon Madness” (M&B, September/October 1997), we placed Dr. Ken Cooper 19th on the list.

Cooper is a former Air Force doctor who conducted extensive research on the benefits of aerobic exercise in stemming cardiovascular disease. His 1968 book, Aerobics, began a minirunning boom when in it Cooper advised people to run/jog three or four times a week, roughly three miles at a time, as a prophylactic against the greatest of all American killers: heart disease.

His book sold extremely well. In the process, his message reached many of his fellow Americans who had come through World War II and the Korean War, and in the process he undoubtedly added many quality years to countless lives. The minirunning boom that Ken created was too early to affect greatly the millions of Americans born after World War II. When his message arrived in the late ’60s, they were immersed in that glorious stage of life known as teenagehood when young people feel invincible.

MaylJune 1998

Their generation’s messiah would come in 1972 in the person of Frank Shorter. He was one of their own, and he made the crazy point that you didn’t have to quit taking part in sports just because you were no longer a student at a high school or university. You could actually continue to participate in sports after graduation. You could run to stay fit, to keep the famed American potbelly at bay, and to feel good about yourself.

Millions of fellow Baby Boomers followed Frank’s lead. Medical researchers were thrilled. Besides the pool of adult exercisers Ken Cooper had generated in the 1960s, there was now an even larger pool of adults getting into running, and many of them were willing to serve as guinea pigs in the cardiovascular health wars. The benefits to one’s health and fitness and well-being from long-distance running seemed obvious. Many of the researchers themselves were or soon becamerunners. The enthusiasm was contagious. So contagious, in fact, that it actually got out of hand.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Tom Bassler made the audacious statement that if you could run a marathon in under four hours, you were immune to heart disease. This bold pronouncement by a medical doctor merely fed into the already growing feel-good aspect of running until runners began to believe

the inevitable, that childhood’s end had never come, that they were once again invincible.

The soft-spoken, cautious, and modest Ken Cooper was suddenly overshadowed by brash medical folks with more appealing messages. Ken Cooper continued to work quietly at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas and sort of faded from the radar screen.

Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running made the sport accessible to everyone who wanted in, and he glorified the Boston Marathon and the marathon in general, making it an aerobic holy grail. On a monthly basis from the pages of Runner’s World, Dr. George Sheehan sang paeans to the benefits of running. Dr. Jack Scaff in Hawaii took Canadian Terence Kavanagh’s post-cardiac-patients-asrunners theory farther by training them to run marathons. A segment of America was on a runner’s high of invulnerability and self-congratulation.

of a heart problem—while on a run. Jim Fixx had run marathons in under four hours (he had run 3:15:54 in Boston 1975, for example). Those who had heartily endorsed Bassler’s theory of invincibility suddenly began to add caveats. Suddenly runners who weeks before had felt well-armored against the Grim Reaper were running scared and exposed. The influx into running slowed. The first Running Boom came to an end.

Back into the vortex jogged Ken Cooper. He wrote Running Without

Fear (published in April 1985), abook meant to alleviate the fear of aerobic exercisers that they might be endangering themselves by engaging in their sport, as Fixx had. The book opened with acareful examination of how and why Jim Fixx died. (Fixx had been to Cooper’s institute not long before his death to research a book and had turned down Cooper’s offer of a stress test.) In typical fashion, Ken Cooper made the subject of Fixx’s death (due in large part toa family history of heart disease) accessible to the lay amateur athlete. His careful consideration of Fixx’s case and a re-examination of what aerobic exercise does and does not bestow was, as usual, level-headed and commonsensical. Then, as was his wont, Cooper went back to work doing research.

Within the last five years, Cooper has released research that seems to indicate that too much aerobic exercise may compromise our bodies through excessive production of free radicals, which could in turn open the way for certain cancers and heart disease. Coopernow recommends a more moderate exercise program than some of us are used to practicing. And, as a result, he has been criticized for it. Our choice of Ken Cooper as one of the people who largely influenced marathoning over the past 25 years was criticized by several readers who are reacting negatively to his caution that too much of a good thing may be just that—too much.

Cooper’s caution is not especially appreciated by those who have found

May/June 1998