Steps In The Right Direction

My case history is, I think, typical enough. I am now 45 years old. By the time I had reached 32, however, I was well on my way to cardiovascular bankruptcy. The seat of my pants was the only working physical resource I had left. When it wasn't parked in an office chair, it was ensconced in a car on its way to somebody's living-room sofa for a parish call. I needed eight cylinders and a ton and a half of metal to fetch one pound of junk mail from a post office two blocks away. The idea of walking simply never occurred to me. I had put away childish things.

Unfortunately, the price of such maturity is high. Since I never, except for a brief college flirtation with four-wall handball, had the least interest in participant sports, I had reached the prime of life with about as much muscle tone as an overcooked lasagna. Item. One Holy Week—it was back in the old days when there was more bowing and scraping than there is now—I had to kneel 12 times in a row during the ceremony of the Washing of the Feet. By the time I got to foot No. 10, I was dizzy, weak-kneed and ready to argue that having 12 apostles was an instance of divine cruelty. Item. Cutting across someone's backyard I had to step up a stone ledge about 30 inches high. I made it only after two tries, and my legs trembled all the way to the house. Item. I would wait on one leg for the downstairs John to be empty rather than negotiate the staircase to the free one on the second floor. I had, in short, forgotten what it was like to have a body that was not a burden. Brother Ass, instead of carrying me, had to be lugged everywhere at the price of a pounding heart and perspiring brow.

Things are better since then. By and by I shall mention a few of the blind alleys I went up in the name of exercise, but my first word has got to be one of satisfaction at the recovery of some measure of body sense. At what it's like, for instance, to clear a puddle six feet wide, with room to spare. At being able to feel cool on a hot windless day by running downhill. At the pleasure of being out in a 10-knot breeze and being able to turn it off by running with it—and to double its force by running against it. At remembering how we really catch our breath by exhaling hard, not by trying to inhale, and at being able to do it after an uphill run without stopping the run at the top of the hill. (It's not all effortless, of course. As time goes on, one's wind comes back considerably faster than one's legs. But it's nice to know that old flesh and bones, even if only in halfway decent shape, can be a stimulating pleasure instead of a pain.)

By now, no doubt, you have concluded that I am a jogger. In a minor and technical sense, I suppose, I shall have to concede the point. But in all the major senses I deny it. I run every day, and yet I find jogging, as normally conceived, a detestable pastime. As much as I can I dissociate myself from it utterly. To begin with, by a stroke of good luck, I took up running about six months before the current jogging fad began to be publicized. I have an instant and adverse reaction to doing anything, however praiseworthy, once it has been proclaimed as being In. This kind of nick-of-time luck has been with me for years. I dug my wine cellar about a year before TIME magazine wrote its article on the 1953 vintage and kicked off the long chain of events that has since blessed us with better wines and cursed us with wine snobs and high prices. I also grew a beard just a few months before face hair began sprouting again everywhere. In my own mind, therefore, I am not now nor have I ever been a wine buff, a beard buff or a jogger. I simply drink wine, grow hair and run now and then.

In the second place, I find jogging a delusion and a bore. It is a delusion because most men take it up in the hope it will work off an encroaching potbelly. Unfortunately, however, even if spot reducing were possible, which it isn't, the number of calories consumed by one hour's running is only 900. Five minutes' worth of banana split checks in at 1,100. Case closed. It's intake that has to be curbed if you want to lose weight. Exercise will make you feel better, but it can't get ahead of the fat man's diet we all live on.

That jogging is a bore is just as easily proved. As commonly practiced, jogging is done in order to achieve something other than itself—like weight loss or muscle tone. Considered in itself, it is about as interesting as navel-watching. It will keep you amused for a day or a week and then turn into a supremely dull chore. Even taking out the garbage has greater entertainment value. Human activities capable of exciting the mind, refreshing the soul and clearing away the slums of boredom in which we live have to be worth something in themselves. Golf is. Softball is. Skiing is. So are swimming, handball, cooking, wine bibbing and sex. But plodding 10 laps around a cinder track in a silly suit is not. (And anyone who does the equivalent 20 laps around an indoor track is simply asking to have himself certified and committed.)

By my principles exercise makes sense only if it is the byproduct of some more weighty and more human activity. As a matter of fact, it won't be kept up long enough to be of any use unless it is. I went through a fair number of idiot exercise gambits before I came up with my present satisfactory routine. I did sit-ups, running in place and a couple of other approximations to solitary confinement, and then I settled on two activities that I found both refreshing and invigorating: wood splitting and walking-running. They illustrate my principle beautifully. Wood splitting first.

It provides me, obviously, with wood for my fireplace, but that is only the smallest corner of my satisfaction with it. It takes time to develop the coordination to use a 10-pound sledge, three steel wedges and a splitting ax efficiently. Especially the splitting ax. You go through a fair number of handles before you are able to connect smartly all the time, but even at that it's one of the cheapest forms of recreation and health insurance around—assuming, of course, you can get the logs to split. For less than a $20 initial outlay and $10 a year upkeep it will restore your heart, shoulders, arms, back and gut to decent muscular shape—all at the bargain-time rate of about 15 minutes a day.

As I said, though, there are other satisfactions. One of the great delights of life is to take a slice of a really big tree (say, 30 inches in diameter, cut to fireplace length) and work it down into a pile of cordwood. If it is oak or maple or one of the soft, straight-grained woods it splits like a dream. The halving of the piece has to be done with sledge and wedges, but after that the splitting ax does the whole job. Every shot produces a clean separation; first along the radii of the log, giving you long thin wedges, then across the wedges, down the grain made by the growth rings, giving you handsome, almost square fireplace pieces. The body gets its exercise, but the chief recipient of pleasure is the mind. The whole world has texture, shape and grain, and man was made to run the thumb of his intellect across it. Whether in beholding the fit of twin almonds in the shell or the startling whiteness of freshly split maple, he stands before creation in the image of God and catches a glimpse of what only God saw till then: the hidden, the unobserved, the mysterious deep-down things. Fifteen minutes a day of that are like pure, cold water on a parched tongue. Especially when you live, as we do, in a hell of fakery and superficiality.

On the other hand, if the logs you split are elm the whole vision changes. Put away the splitting ax; elm just laughs at it. It splits all right, but it doesn't come apart. One wedge is driven in all the way. The crack starts. A second is driven in next to it. The crack widens, but still no separation. You turn the log on its side and drive the third, praying it will force the opening enough to loosen one of the first two so you can keep going. An expert can get by with three wedges, but a duffer can easily lose all three in a log that still hasn't split in two. And even when an expert's split is complete he may need a hand ax to chop through the crossed sinews of elm that refuse to break their grip.