“There’s a fairly sharp limit to the degree of muscularity that a man can attain without drugs,” Pope explains. “Most boys and men who exceed this limit, and who claim they did so without drugs, are lying.” Before the Rise of the Machines and the Dawn of the Super-Males, you went to the gym to become an athlete. Teddy Roosevelt focused on performance, not appearance, and it made him an athlete for life. Like all self-made men, he was afraid of backsliding, so even after he became president, Roosevelt stuck with what he learned at Wood’s: he boxed with soldiers, swam naked late at night in the Potomac, and squared off with his buddy, an army general, for bruising battles with wooden cudgels.
Some evenings, Roosevelt would slip out of the White House, pick a spot miles in the distance, and head straight for it. The challenge was to reach the goal no matter what obstacles were in the way. “On several occasions we thus swam Rock Creek in the early spring when the ice was floating thick upon it. If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes,” Roosevelt would recall. “We liked Rock Creek for these walks because we could do so much scrambling and climbing along the cliffs … Of course under such circumstances we had to arrange that our return to Washington should be when it was dark, so that our appearance might scandalize no one.”
Decades later, Roosevelt’s midnight rambles inspired one of the strangest fads of the Kennedy administration. After becoming president, John F. Kennedy was appalled to discover that half the young men called up for the draft were rejected as unfit. Americans were becoming dangerously soft and therefore, in Kennedy’s eyes, stupid. “Intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong,” Kennedy declared. “In this sense, physical fitness is the basis of all the activities of our society.” JFK was interested in true fitness, not bench presses or beach muscle, so he zeroed in on the two factors that matter most: endurance and elastic strength.
Thus began America’s weird, brief love affair with ultradistance. JFK found an old order from Teddy Roosevelt that required U.S. Marines to hike fifty miles or ride one hundred in less than seventy-two hours. (Teddy, naturally, led the way by doing the ride himself during a winter rainstorm.) Some of Teddy’s troops finished the hike in a single day, so JFK made that his challenge: Could modern Marines cover fifty miles of wild terrain in twenty-four hours? But before the military could give the command, civilians—including Kennedy’s own kid brother—beat them to it. At 5 A.M. one freezing Sunday in February, Bobby Kennedy set off with four Justice Department aides to hike the C&O towpath from D.C. to Harpers Ferry. All four aides dropped out, but by midnight Bobby had hiked fifty miles in less than eighteen hours.
The race was on. College frats, Boy Scout troops, high school classes, postmen and policemen, “pretty secretaries” and “beautiful girls” (as U.S. News & World Report put it) all tackled the “Kennedy Challenge.” Congressional staffers marched off in mobs, and a pub in Massachusetts offered free beer at the finish of its own fifty-miler. “The 50-mile hike verges on insanity,” warned the National Recreation Association, and the doom prediction was seconded by the American Medical Association: “We get distressed when people go out and strain themselves.” News photographers fanned out to capture the carnage—and instead found the same expression on faces across the country: grins of pride. People who’d never moved their legs for more than an hour at a stretch were thrilled to discover that just by heading out the door, they could keep on going. Speed records tumbled: Bobby Kennedy was beaten by a high school girl in California, who was edged out by a fifty-eight-year-old postman in New Jersey, who was bested by a Marine who smoked it home in under ten hours.
Kennedy’s murder brought the armies of Challengers to a halt—except in one small town in Maryland, where the same shock of personal discovery has been playing out every year since 1963. Only four people finished the first race. Seven the next. Eighteen after that. But while all the other Kennedy Challenges died away, Boonsboro kept getting stronger. It’s a tough race; the JFK 50 sends you up the steep and rocky Appalachian Trail and then down long switchbacks to the C&O towpath to follow in Bobby Kennedy’s footsteps. A half-century later, Boonsboro is still holding fast to Kennedy’s vision. Now, nearly a thousand entrants set off on the Saturday before Thanksgiving to discover for themselves what Kennedy suspected from the beginning: if we have the confidence to start, we’ll find what we need to finish.
The JFK 50 is no longer the country’s longest race, and it’s never been the sexiest. Big-city marathons have rock bands and movie stars; Tough Mudders have Arctic Enema ice-water plunges and mud scrambles and electric-shock hazards; while the JFK has … silence. For long, lonely stretches, it’s just you and your doubts. No cheering, no glimpses of Pamela Anderson and Will Ferrell, no victory lap through Central Park. But like one of those old family diners dwarfed by new sky-rises, JFK survives for a reason: it’s where soldiers and Marines are honored as elites, and a thirteen-year-old girl who’s told she’s too young for the New York City Marathon can run a double through the mountains instead. It’s where Zach Miller, an unknown cruise-ship worker who trains on a treadmill at sea, could shock even himself in 2012 by uncorking one of the greatest performances in the race’s history. The JFK could have been designed by Teddy Roosevelt and Georges Hébert; it’s the kind of enduring testament to the spirit of natural movement—to proficiency and purpose—that you rarely find anymore.
Unless, of course, you’re in Brazil. Down here, another route to excellence has been dusted off from the past. It’s been lost for so long, it now sounds exotic and oddly stirring. And one of the few who still know how it’s done—how to be fit to be useful—has just jumped out my window and is waiting impatiently below to lead me into the jungle.
CHAPTER 28
The athlete that you remember is the beautiful dancing athlete.
—EDWARD VILLELLA,
undefeated welterweight boxer and lead dancer in the New York City Ballet
ERWAN LE CORRE and I are staying in a small cabana hotel in the woods, built by a French hippie couple who came to Itacaré twenty years ago to explore the jungle and never left. From behind the cabanas, a smooth dirt trail wanders over the forested hills and down to the beach, about three miles away. As much for his mind as for his body, Erwan likes to run it barefoot. Awareness of the world begins with your feet, he believes.
“Do you know why you get stressed after staring at your computer for a half-hour?” Erwan asks after I join him outside. “Because humans evolved to always be aware of threats around them. That stress you feel building up is your body’s reminder to get up and take a look at the landscape. Same with your feet—if you’re not letting them do their job and tell your back and knees when they can relax, then your body stays stiff, giving you knee problems and backaches.” Your bare feet can sense when you’re balanced and on solid terrain, in other words, so they can signal to the rest of your body that it’s safe and can loosen up a little.