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Pain Barriers. Much else is involved, some of it probably undefinable, but it is clear that over the past decade or so, the general population has been receiving messages from its outposts. The women's movement has made it acceptable for women to think of their bodies as strong, sweat-producing machines. World-class swimmers and distance runners, who lowered records by training to exhaustion, talked of pain barriers that could be broken through to achieve new levels of performance.
Medical reporting in the general press improved, and doctors and laymen learned that cardiologists like the late Paul Dudley White were prescribing what seemed at the time high levels of exercise for some heart patients. Meditators preached that it was good to turn inward and attune oneself to subrational body rhythms (runners report that their rhythms of breathing and striding can have the calming effect of a mantra). And if you were what you ate, as the organic-food munchers scolded, who wanted to be a Hostess Twinkie?
The new fitness has produced its measure of snobbery, much of it directed at such harmless but torpid pursuits as golf and bowling. Neither, says the religion of wheeze and gasp, will do much for your cardiovascular system. (A golf course is about four miles long, and is negotiated, usually sitting down, at an average of 1 m.p.h. or less; at the professional level, tournaments are won by jiggling fat men. Bowling consists of brief bursts of slow motion separated by rest periods.) And fitness of the heart, lungs and circulatory system, far more than muscular strength and flexibility, is what the new believers are seeking.
Who is in better shape, the 240-lb. man who can pick up the front end of a Honda Civic or the 89-lb. woman who can run the Boston Marathon in 2:48:33, as 41-year-old Miki Gorman did this year? The zealots of the new fitness say, with rueful shakes of their heads, that if the weight lifter can't run a mile and three-quarters in twelve minutes (assuming he is under 30), he can't claim to be in excellent shape, and that if he can't trundle at least one mile in that time, his condition is poor.
BULLETIN: Farrah Fawcett-Majors has been held up in traffic.
The skinnies of the world have, in effect, righteously established fitness standards that reward their own strengths and forgive their weaknesses. Then, like other converts, they have proclaimed in terms not open to contradiction that their god is the one true god, and that those human tubers who do not forthwith begin regular exercise programs will end up frying in their own fat.
Nothing, not even exercise, is more tiresome than listening to some cholesterol-free windbag hyperventilate about how his energy has doubled, his triglyceride level has dropped, his sexual performance is off the charts, and his life expectancy has approached that of a Galapagos tortoise, all because he has begun daily sessions on an exercise bicycle. Nothing stimulates the gag reflex so quickly as news photos of entire families—mom, dad and six children—jogging in identical warmup suits. And nothing is more appalling than, as a 10-to 15-mile-a-week runner (which is to say a moderate lunatic; some glittery-eyed types run 100 miles a week), to hear the deadening quack of zealotry come from one's own mouth. Long-distance runners are lonely because they are insufferable.