The Valley News (N.H.), May 9:
In a time when new means of communication demand brevity – Moby Dick was not written for tiny screens – the discovery of a great American literary figure’s treatise on “Manly Health and Training” reminds us that it wasn’t always so.
Walt Whitman is the surprising source of a fitness regimen, the reading of which is more of a marathon than a sprint. His nearly 47,000-word series was published in 1858 in The New York Atlas, a relatively obscure newspaper, and then lost to history. But it was rediscovered last summer by Zachary Turpin, a University of Houston graduate student who spends spare hours browsing digital databases of 19th-century newspapers, entering pen names Whitman used in writing for the press. For The Atlas, he employed one of his favorites, Mose Velsor. Eureka!
The New York Times noted that much of his advice wouldn’t seem out of place today – Whitman leaned toward the Paleo diet and favored long bouts of moderate exercise such as walking or rowing. But some of it hasn’t aged as well: He advocated bare knuckle fighting to, in contemporary terms, Make America Great Again. He wanted America to be “a hardy, robust and combative nation . imbued with the love of fight.” His thoughts on race and eugenics would be judged politically incorrect by today’s standards.
But such deficiencies are bowled over by the passion of Whitman’s call for “a perfect body, perfect blood – no morbid humors, no weakness, no impotency or deficiency or bad stuff … all running over with animation and ardor, all marked by herculean strength, suppleness, a clear complexion . a laughing voice, a merry song morn and night, a sparkling eye, and a ever-happy soul!” The scope is breathtaking, even when the exercise is not.
In recent wellness columns, The Times has been reporting on a contemporary fitness development: short bursts of high-intensity training that provide many of the health benefits of longer sessions. A recent article looked at the effects of three 20-second bursts.
We are all for efficiency, but that approach lacks the vision of Whitman, who would barely be warmed up in a minute. In his words:
“Give our advice a thorough trial – not for a few days or weeks, but for months. Early rising, early to bed, exercise, plain food, thorough and persevering continuance in gently-commenced training, the cultivation with resolute will of a cheerful temper, the society of friends and a certain number of hours spent every day in regular employment – these, we say, simple as they are, are enough to revolutionize life, and change it from a scene of gloom, feebleness, and irresolution, into life indeed, as becomes such a universe as this, full of all the essential means of happiness, full of well-intentioned and affectionate men and women, with the beneficent processes of nature always at work, the sun shining, the flowers blooming, the crops growing, the waters running, with all else that is wanted, only that man should be rightly toned to partake of the universal strength and joy. This he must do through reason, knowledge and exercise – in short, through training; for that is the sum of all.”
Whew. If you are inspired by Whitman’s exuberant epiphany, one modern piece of fitness advice applies – stay hydrated.
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