Every life is worthy and every life is capable of greatness.
We have an obligation to make sure that opportunity for greatness is there. – Covert Bailey
It is a strange place. A strange place indeed.
Reno seems an unlikely location to host a health and fitness seminar. Yet some four hundred of us spent the day listening to speakers tell us what the people downstairs should have heard.
Downstairs they heard nothing. Nothing except the imagined clanging of a jackpot. At 7 a.m., the casino was packed with people who looked like they had died sometime the day before… smoking drinks and swigging cigarettes… little old ladies, with right arms like Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing five cent slot machines.
“Be good to Momma!”
Back upstairs, a middle-aged woman talked at a runner from England.
“I just subscribed to a running magazine. I never knew they had things like this,” she said, without a breath. “You didn’t drive all the way, did you?”
The conversation at the Nevada Heart Fitness Institute’s Second Annual Health Seminar improved greatly.
And the talk began with Jack Scaff, a self-described “frustrated physician” from Hawaii, who gives the impression he could have driven all the way.
Scaff’s primary goal is immortality and, failing that, he is willing to settle for old age. His funeral, already planned, will feature a bagpipe band and a luau for five thousand people.
Jack gave a rather “hostile” presentation because he had seen too many needless deaths. He is a cardiologist who laments, whether we care to admit it or not, that we are living in an era of a catastrophic epidemic – two-thirds of all natural deaths originate with the heart.
In the United States today, heart attacks are the leading killer of men over thirty. You might say, and Scaff does, males are becoming an “endangered species.” Probably the sobering statistic is that, sixty percent of the time, the first symptom of heart disease is death. There are few second chances.
Having identified the problem, Dr. Scaff offers the solution: stop smoking, lose weight, and exercise regularly.
Whenever a jogger dies, it is practically front-page news. How often do you read in the local newspaper, “Man Dies Inhaling Cigarettes?” Yet almost ninety-eight percent of the men under fifty who have heart attacks are smokers.
As for overeating, one statistic stands out. In the first year of marriage, the average husband gains twelve pounds. So, if you really love him, don’t feed him.
Of course, exercise was the focal point of Scaff’s talk. One could almost hear the murmurs of “Amen” as the good doctor emphasized the importance of a regular exercise routine.
The sum of Dr. Jack Scaff’s presentation was essentially that you can save your own life. Don’t blame your mother for making you clean your plate. Forget your high school coach made you run as punishment. Run now, run for your life.
Covert Bailey began: “Frankly, I’m often embarrassed as a nutritionist because it’s not what you eat, but what you do. If you exercise a lot, you can almost eat just about any damn thing you want.”
Not entirely true, but Bailey is aware of his hyperbole. He is an entertaining speaker, because he knows people will pay greater attention. He is a crusader and FAT is the enemy.
“FAT.” Bailey says the word with palpable disgust. His pleasant face screws up.
“If you’re fat, you’re sick. Sick, damn it!”
As he talks, the audience seems to be fingering its collective midsection. Can we ever eat again? But Bailey doesn’t slow down. He hammers away, until fat becomes a four- letter word.
“The fatter you get, the less your body is capable of burning fat. It’s an insidious cycle.
“The really fat person does a series of sprints all day long, because his body can barely utilize fat. It operates almost entirely on glucose.
“It’s not how much you weigh, but how much of what you weigh is fat.”
Then, when you think you can’t stand it any longer, Bailey hits you over the head.
“You know, Frank Shorter is actually obese.”
After the cries of “Heresy!” and the hum of disbelief dies down, Bailey spells it out, pound by pound, mile by mile. Frank, at 5’10”, 132 pounds, is overweight. Frank Shorter is fat.
Oddly, we believe. Covert Bailey is perhaps outrageous, but he makes sense.
At the luncheon, the seminar participants were treated to fruit salad and vegetable soup. A clever ploy by the organizers, scheduling Bailey’s immediately before. A lovely young lady, undoubtedly impressed by the nutritionist, set aside the soup, and waited for the “main course.”
Which was never to arrive.
“Every day you run you are born again… every step is toward that new beginning… the big race is inside.”
Let’s face it – George Sheehan is a Star. This renaissance man begins his presentation with a color movie of himself, with a narration he surely wrote himself. One can almost imagine Sheehan doing his own camera work.
He’s clothed in faded blue jeans and a crewneck sweater to protect him from the air conditioning. He wears running shoes – Tigers, by the way – with once-white leather uppers, obviously comfortable. The shoes are worn and wrinkled, somewhat like the man himself. “Used” but far from “used up.”
As Sheehan himself says, he offers more than “don’t smoke.” This is serious stuff.
“We’re not really talking about fitness,” he notes. “Everybody has to be an athlete.”
Dr. Sheehan talks first of his philosophy of running. He practically rhapsodizes about the activity’s virtues. He speaks almost lyrically of running as “art.” It is “energy, creativity and discipline.”
His eyes seem to brighten as he quotes Ortega y Gasset. Other times, he stands before you, but you know he is somewhere far away.
“How many of us would be ‘Best of Breed’?”, he asks. “Why do kids, who love to play, hate Phys. Ed.?”
Sheehan will let you evaluate your own blue ribbon quality, but he’ll remind you of those gym classes and mandatory participation and regimentation. The joy was erased, at least suppressed. Yet it is restorable.
Be a good animal. Be a child. Then be a child grown wise.
That is Sheehan’s advice.
If you don’t understand, well, go run a marathon.
The second half of the doctor’s talk was a discourse on injuries. He seemed to speak of these matters begrudgingly, because it was expected of him. But Sheehan soon warmed to the task.
In a short while, there was the head of the Department of Cardiology at some New Jersey hospital, one sock off, the other on. His pants’ leg pulled up to the knee, he used his own, somewhat scrawny, calf to instruct us on lower leg problems.
There are essentially factors which cause running injuries, Sheehan said. These are genes, training and environment.
Now, genes are “God’s fault” and you can’t do anything about it. The main genetic problems are foot issues. e.g., Morton’s Foot.
Training-related injuries are the runner’s fault. Not doing enough flexibility exercises, improper diet, insufficient rest, et cetera. If the problems are your fault, change.
By environmental factors, Sheehan means YOUR environment. The type of shoes available or perhaps you live in some concrete jungle and have no soft surfaces to run on. The negative facts of your life, those puzzling anchors, are often difficult to solve but, if you hope to avoid injuries, they must be overcome.
Of course, the audience was curious about a variety of maladies. And Sheehan was the man with the answers. When asked his opinion on what runners should eat, George replied, “The best thing you can expect is that it doesn’t give you diarrhea!”
And when he didn’t know the answer, he actually said he didn’t know. Sheehan tries to confine himself to matters about which he has personal knowledge, what he has experienced.
And he seems to have experienced so very much. If, as William James wrote, “effort is the measure of a man,” then Dr. George Sheehan certainly measures up.
That evening, I ran through the heart of downtown Reno, Nevada, USA. Past the front doors of the casinos, in the streets, between buses and taxis. Exchanging flirtatious compliments with pale painted prostitutes, flowing past the drunks – each in our own way – waving to the slot machines and the people they played.
I felt good, lean and healthy, fit and vital. I shut out the noise and the exhaust fumes. I concentrated on the neon signs, the lights and the colors, the faces of the revelers.
Sometimes, it seemed like watching television with the sound turned off. Another instant I was at the zoo, or looking at one of those ant farms with glass walls.
I thought, how strange these people seem, and they looked at me the same way.
“You Bet Your Life” originally appeared in RUNNING, Vol. 3 No. 1 (December 1977- January 1978)
