What鈥檚 an acceptable baseline of fitness? According to the most adventurous American president in U.S. history, it was an ultra endurance trek. More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt decided that he wanted members of the American military to be able to complete a 50-mile hike in 20 hours. His advisors warned him against it. As soon as he was out of office the military reduced the requirement. But ever since, 50 miles of walking, off the couch, has served as a kind of baseline standard for American fitness. Late last year,聽国产吃瓜黑料聽contributing editor Tom Vanderbilt decided he wanted to get a sense of what that was like. Turns out, it鈥檚 pretty hard.
Podcast Transcript
Editor鈥檚 Note: Transcriptions of episodes of the 国产吃瓜黑料 Podcast are created with a mix of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain some grammatical errors or slight deviations from the audio.
Peter Frick-Wright: From 国产吃瓜黑料 Magazine, this is The 国产吃瓜黑料 Podcast.
The JFK 50-Mile Ultra, in Washington County, Maryland, is the oldest 50-mile race in the country.
Audio from JFK 50-Mile Ultra: Runners, on your mark! [shot and crowd cheers]
Peter Frick-Wright: It was first held in the spring of 1963, and it was one of many that took place that year as part of President John F. Kennedy鈥檚 push to make the nation more fit. There was a perception at the time, as there almost always is, that Americans were getting soft, becoming lazy, that the incoming generation wasn鈥檛 developing the proper grit, cause they were so glued to their new TV screens.
Today, the JFK 50 is dominated by runners, like any weekend ultra, but back then it was more of a walk. Boy scouts did it in uniform. Homemakers took a few days off. Even President Kennedy's brother, Robert, walked 50 miles along the canals of DC in his suit and leather loafers. It was a thing.
Anyway, the 50-mile craze quickly died down and became not-a-thing, and Kennedy鈥檚 fitness legacy ended up being the presidential fitness test, those shuttle runs and chin up sessions you hated doing in middle school.
But in many ways, those 50-mile walks were successful at raising awareness. Since then, as a country, our understanding of the importance of fitness has never gone away, even as we complain about the lack of it in our youth, now glued to Fortnite.
But did you know that Kennedy was actually stealing that whole idea of the 50-mile fitness test from someone else? Producer Robbie Carver has more.
Robbie Carver: There's a phrase you'll hear a lot in athletic circles, usually uttered by men clearly in the top tier of the fitness triangle as way to humblebrag. They'll say they completed some feat or other "off the couch," meaning without having trained for the event. To hear them tell it, one day they're just eating cheetos and watching reruns of the office, and the next moment they're sending a V10. You're meant to be impressed.
The phrase is also meant to temper expectations. 鈥業'd have done better,鈥 someone might say, 鈥榠f I hadn't tried to run that 10k off the couch.鈥
You're meant to be unimpressed.
But underneath both of these is the basic point of what 'off the couch' means, that your base level of fitness, on any given day, is capable of only so much. The question is, how much is that, and where would we find an average american man to test it out for us?
Tom Vanderbilt: My name is Tom Vanderbilt. I'm a contributing editor at 国产吃瓜黑料.
Robbie: Tom Vanderbilt is a bit of a connoisseur of quirky fitness stories. He recently wrote about learning to jump his mountain bike as an adult, for example, and once covered the trend of 鈥渆veresting鈥 ski hills, hiking up the mountain and taking the chairlift back down until you鈥檝e covered the vertical equivalent of Everest. All 29,000 feet, none of the glory.
Tom: I should say ahead of time that I'm not really a ultra marathoner. I once ran a marathon. I'm not really a distance runner or anything like that.
Robbie: So one day while poking around for his next story, he came across a very curious executive order by President Theodore Roosevelt
Tom: It was just some sort of internet rabbit hole, that one thing led to another and I came across this, uh, this executive order. And, uh, I think what, you know, it might've just struck me as, you know, historically interesting or something.
Robbie: Executive Order No. 989 was titled 鈥淢arine Corps Officers鈥 Physical Fitness.鈥 Every 2 years, officers would be tested on their ability to ride a horse 90 miles within 3 days time, and then again on their ability to walk 50 miles within a 20 hour time limit, though also completed within 3 days' time.
Tom: Roosevelt was in the waning, uh, you know, months of his administration, and this is the time often when these executive orders, which really have not that much actual power, they're more sort of, you know, whims and interests of the president, but he thought that his military branches were getting a bit soft.
Robbie: Roosevelt had famously been a Rough rider during the Spanish American War, and had built his reputation on physical and mental fortitude. It had been many years since the last war, and he feared that his army was becoming more bureaucrat than soldier. Their couch, so to speak, was getting too comfortable. And that worried him. And so came order 989.
Tom: It was supposed to be within the capability of their existing training. It wasn't something that you were supposed to train up for. He wanted his troops essentially to be in that state of readiness.
Robbie: And as part of the publicity for the fitness requirements, Roosevelt himself, 51 years old at the time, mounted his horse Roswell and set off into the freezing rain for a 90 mile romp.
Tom: We know that he himself did the horse challenge and rode from D.C. to Virginia's, uh, Fauquier County, and I think it's something like 14 hours, I believe, and just there and back, it was a, it was a hard ride, and he, uh, declared it at the end to be bully, which was one of his, you know, favorite adjectives, of course.
Robbie: So Roosevelt himself was prepared for the challenge. The military, however, wasn't prepared for Roosevelt.
Tom: If you read some of the, the Navy's own publications, for example, there were, you know, people coming out and saying that this would lead to depression amongst the officers, that it would, it would, you know, morale would suffer. Uh, this was just not a good idea.
Robbie: The surgeon general went as far as to state that the order would put officers lives at risk. Almost immediately after leaving office, Roosevelt's fitness test was overturned, replaced with a much more modest set of criteria such as reducing those 50 miles to 10. The order became a forgotten aside to a presidency chock full of wild stories, until Kennedy, perhaps seeking to channel some of Teddy's robust manliness, revived the idea briefly in 60's. But even that has been more or less forgotten, and the final trickle down of Roosevelt's bold attempt to toughen the tushes of our couch sitters is how fast an eighth grader can run shuttles.
But the order stayed in the history books, and something about it tickled Tom鈥檚 fancy.
Tom: It just seemed sort of a more approachable to me than something then say, if you had asked me to run a 50 mile ultra marathon. That I would not necessarily want to do off the couch out of my house.
Robbie: This idea, of off the couch, wasn't just a convenient way for Tom to avoid long hours of training. It was essential to the core idea Roosevelt was putting forth.
Tom: I think today we often feel like we need to train for these sorts of events, you know, train very specifically, like, you know, a 26-week marathon program or something like that. Versus the idea of just, just trying to maintain a kind of base level of fitness that you could, if called upon, undergo something like this sort of challenge and give it, give it a reasonable go. And that, I think, you know, Roosevelt had that sort of鈥 Again, because this idea of athletic training wasn't really such a prominent thing in his day, He just, he called it the strenuous life, and he just was always giving things a go.
Robbie: So that's the idea. 3 days to complete 50 miles in 20 hours of walking, off the couch, with a bully attitude. Tom doesn't consider himself a runner, or even a hiker, but rather a cyclist. He's 54, in generally good shape but not training for anything specifically. He'd be the perfect litmus test for Roosevelt's challenge, the American Male giving it a go.
Tom: In my challenge, I chose for whatever masochistic reason to try to do this all at once.
Robbie: With the What decided, the next thing to tackle was the where. Should he do 50 miles of the Adirondacks?
Tom: I found this place in the Adirondacks, um, called Cranberry Lake, which was actually almost a perfect 50 mile loop. And you can get a badge if you complete the hike. Of course, you know, people take three days to do this and, uh, you know, so that, but it's quite a long drive.
Robbie: Or maybe just suffer 200 laps of his local high school track
Tom: Maybe even, you know, stop at home for lunch and it would be sort of cozy, but it didn't quite seem, you know, it just didn't, it seemed to lack the Rooseveltian spirit.
Robbie: With the desire to keep his favorite roughback from turning in his grave, Tom turned to a cycling friend, famous for his routeplanning, and asked for a little GPS magic. A 50-mile loop, starting and finishing at his front door.
Tom: And he actually created this, this amazing, uh, route that, you know, I'm in the state of New Jersey. This is a place, you know, some of the stereotypes are true. There's, you know, giant highways. There's, you know, it's hard to take a left turn. I mean, it's very dense. It's the most densely populated state in the country. You don't think this is prime hiking territory. But he came up with this route that just strung together all of these different, you know, local sort of forests and and state parks and nature preserves. And all that. And suddenly I had this I had my answer Um, I was just going to leave from my front door do this try to do this hike and then and then come home.
Robbie: He would get off his couch, walk out his front door, and just keep going. Not so hard, right?
Tom: I thought I was pretty much going to nail it because I, I just had this perhaps somewhat naive view that, you know, I, I do love to walk and I can, I can, you know. Walking seems to take very little effort to me and I just thought, well, if I just, it's, you know, not the five mile walk, but it's just 10 of those strung together.
Robbie: If walking five miles takes basically zero effort for Tom, doing that ten times is, mathematically, still pretty much zero effort. After the break, turns out that's not exactly how it works.
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Tom during his walk: It鈥檚 5:36 in the morning. I鈥檓 about to go on Teddy Roosevelt鈥檚 50 mile hike from my front door
Tom: We started at 6am in my driveway. I probably, you know, could have started a little earlier. Didn't want to necessarily punish myself though. But it was, uh, it was, it was a beautiful day although I should say, it was going to get very warm.
Tom鈥檚 friend Paul: Have you hike 50 miles in one day?
Robbie: Tom set off early with his pathfinding buddy Paul joining him. It was early October, but rather than feeling like the first days of fall, there was still a summer scent in the air.
Tom: You know, the first, the first bit was, was pretty easy. It was just sort of this, uh, converted old railway that runs next to Fairleigh Dickinson University. And it's just a very popular walking trail.
Robbie: In his running shorts and t-shirt, Tom set a brisk pace, keeping the end goal of finishing around 9 or 10 in the evening in mind. And pretty quickly, he began to feel that they were on some kind of adventure.
Tom: This just isn't something that most people do. So we were, you know, kind of going through these, these parts of the trail that, that seemed to vanish. And then they would sort of pop out in, in like a switching yard of a railway, which seemed to be semi private property. And we're getting all kinds of strange looks. And we, you know, passed through these parks very early in the morning and there weren't really kids there. There were sort of like sketchy characters kind of hanging out and so it had, you know, the beginning was a bit, you know, sort of urban, uh, adventure. And, uh, this is still New Jersey. So you might be in like a pretty thick set of woods for a moment, but then the trail would emerge into basically like a suburban office park, uh, parking lot. And then, or next to a really busy highway or some other kind of very urban thing.
Robbie: We've talked a few times on this show about the concept of microadventures, a term popularized by the adventurer Alistair Humphrey, and the value of finding novel experiences close to home. You don't need 6 months and a corporate sponsor to get the impact of a great adventure. Sometimes, you just need to take that first step.
Tom: something that occurs to me now is like, this is just something I鈥檝e ever done in my life, just left spun, you know, somewhat spontaneously from my front door and went out for a really, uh, long walk. I've done all kinds of, you know, events that were very structured and all that, or, you know, had a very clear destination. But, um, so I was sort of just opening this strange, uh, door that I wasn't really sure where it was going to uh, lead.
Robbie: Tom soon left Paul behind, wanting to keep a brisk pace that his friend's bum knee couldn't handle.
Tom during his walk: It鈥檚 taking me a little more time than expected, but the good news is that all bodily systems seem to be functioning well so far, so we鈥檒l see.
Robbie: And so it was that he found himself alone, walking in near complete isolation in one of the most populated states in the country.
Tom: This, this was a pure flow experience and I was really completely losing track of time. My worldview was just down to the path in front of me looking for the next blue or yellow blaze on a tree. Even that process, you know, it felt so kind of analog and wonderful and rewarding. Just, you know, this sort of primitive way finding. And, um, kind of just felt parts of my brain that hadn't been that activated in a while. Just, just, uh, reemerging and having that, uh, time alone.
And yeah, it's not like I had any kind of great revelations or thoughts out on the trail. And I've heard this from other long distance hikers, you know, it's just in some ways having the, the freedom from thought, you know, to, to not think about anything and just kind of this, except this, this sort of rote survival and trying to get to some point that is, is out there on the horizon and, and then just kind of really tuning into the, the landscape and, uh, and the silence.
Robbie: It wasnt the experience Tom thought he'd have, leaving from the front door of his highway-happy state, but that made it all the more special. Thing was, there was still a long way to go, and that going was starting to g