The Age of Fitness. Jürgen Martschukat

a few years, virtually every West German knew who he was, and after about a decade three-quarters of West Germans affirmed, at least in theory, that “you have to do sports to stay healthy.”⁵³ The Federal Center for Health Education (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung) also helped spread this message. “Eat well and get fit – you need both” (“Essen und Trimmen – beides muß stimmen”) was the name of another campaign launched soon after.⁵⁴

      A similar tone was struck in the United States. “America Shapes Up,” announced TIME Magazine’s cover story in early November 1981. Over the preceding decade, the article contended, America had been gripped by fitness mania. The photo on the cover showed five women and men brimming with strength and joy, evidently having just finished exercising. They are holding up photos to the camera that show them playing tennis, lifting weights, cycling, doing aerobics, or jogging. Another striking aspect of the picture is how white fitness was in the early 1980s.⁵⁵

TIME Magazine characterized the belief in one’s own youthfulness and magnificence as the true American dream. The near-heroic work on one’s fitness, the desire to be slim and toned, the “One! Two!” of the exercise routine, the grunting and sweating in the gym – together they symbolized the attempt to make this dream come true. Other observers in the early 1980s shared TIME’s assessment, sweepingly asserting that virtually everyone in America attached great importance to their body in everyday life, with respect to their job and as an expression of their personality. It is hard not to think of Tom Wolfe and the Me Decade.⁵⁶

      One of the drivers of the body and fitness mania that overtook the United States in the 1970s was running. Previously, hardly anyone thought of going for a run after work as a beneficial practice, a way of getting or staying fit. Even running marathons was the preserve of a few fanatics. At the time, the United States lacked even the infrastructure that might have facilitated a marathon as a mass event. In 1970, 126 men and one woman set off on the New York Marathon (43 percent were to be finishers), while in Boston – long the most important of all marathons in the United States – women were officially allowed to compete only in 1972. The Berlin Marathon, now one of the largest running events in the world, has only existed since 1974, when 244 people took part, including 10 women. In 1986, the number of runners in Berlin surpassed the 10,000 mark for the first time, a figure already reached in New York in 1979 (11,533, including 11 percent women, with 91 percent of participants crossing the finish line). Every year since 2013 more than 50,000 people have competed in the New York event, with almost equal numbers of men and women and nearly everyone finishing (99 percent in 2013).⁵⁷

While running as a mass sport was still in its infancy in the early 1970s, by the end of the decade about 30 million Americans were claiming to run. Performance- and competition-oriented “runners” strove to distinguish themselves from “joggers.” However, if we peruse Runner’s World, the American running magazine par excellence,⁵⁸ the readers’ letters and the column penned by health consultant Dr George Sheehan (naturally a passionate runner as well as a doctor) reveal how fluid the distinction between “runner” and “jogger” could be. Although Runner’s World described itself as a magazine for real runners, many letters, enquiries, and comments were sent in by middle-aged men struggling more or less desperately with increasing body fat and declining performance, men who were, at best, in the process of becoming joggers. When one has a job and finds oneself growing older, as one reader wrote to Dr Sheehan in March 1975, “a glacier of lard” gradually and inexorably spreads over the body. “Fat starts taking over,” this reader complained, “then and only then do we lose control of our bodies.” More control over one’s body and one’s life, in a society increasingly geared toward the productive use of freedom, was just what fitness promised and demanded. At the same time, fitness was directly linked with the desire, and obligation, to stay young.⁵⁹

The discussions in Runner’s World reinforce the point that fitness meant more than the ability to go for a run after work without collapsing or the setting of personal bests over various distances. Some runners certainly ran for the sport, and debates, for example about proper nutrition (during the training phase, immediately before or even during a race), filled many pages of Runner’s World.⁶⁰ But at least as many if not more runners ran to lose weight, recover from work and enhance their ability to cope with it, gain respite from the stress of everyday life, and to find company, increase their sex appeal, and find themselves. It was the latter imperative that inspired German foreign minister Joschka Fischer in the late 1990s. With his passion for running, he concurrently signaled that he could do anything, even lose 65 pounds and run a marathon. But whatever one’s ultimate reason for running, it was a practice that ought to be more than just a hobby. Running magazines and dozens of books on running published around the time proclaimed that running would change one’s entire life, reorienting it toward health and wellbeing, performance, and success. As a representative example, we might consider an ordinary jogger named Dave Mullens, who hit the sidewalk almost every morning before work with his running group, called “Dawn Patrol,” in and around Palo Alto, California. With the fervor of the religious convert, Mullens emphasized that running had transformed his entire existence. Similarly, Joschka Fischer referred to his “new life as a jogger.”⁶¹ Often, runners reported something akin to a religious awakening, one that put them on the right path. It was a path they had to stick to from then on, because fitness requires permanent work on oneself if one is to avoid losing it again. The crucial thing is “staying the course,” Fischer stressed. “Fitness can’t be stored,” as Runner’s World stated in the same vein, “it must be earned over and over, indefinitely.”⁶²

      When Runner’s World writes about running, it reflects the many different and sometimes contradictory forces that shaped the 1970s as a whole.⁶³ On the one hand, the running movement was energized by the counterculture, and running was part of the “alternative” push to find oneself that was so typical of the time. Many runners saw themselves as anti-capitalist activists in search of a better way of life beyond mass and consumer society. On the other hand, running simultaneously propelled a growing market in sports-related products, centered on running clothes and running shoes, Nike and Asics, the Berlin and New York marathons, Gatorade, Body Punch, Power Bars, and much more besides. Perhaps more ambivalent even than the coexistence of the counterculture and the consumption of branded goods is the status of the endurance athlete as the ideal type of the neoliberal self. They are part of a culture and a movement, but feel independent and selfdetermined. They are focused on their own body as they strive to make themself a better person overall. They constantly invest in themself and strive for health, self-optimization and performance.⁶⁴ Last but not least, the fervor with which many practiced running, and talked about their conversion to a new way of life, linked the pursuit of fitness with religious revival and the search for moral leadership, the latter two trends being particularly evident in the United States during this period. Fitness, it might be said, was the ethos of a new era.⁶⁵

      This new ethos was preached in television ads such as those of the West German “Get Fit” campaign, specialist magazines such as Runner’s World, and more general publications such as TIME Magazine or Der Spiegel, as well as exercise guides of the kind penned by military doctor Kenneth Cooper on aerobics. This ethos gained new ambassadors in the shape of the many people who now formed running groups, participated in city runs, charity races and marathons, or exercised, in accordance with Cooper’s manual, with a controlled escalation of workouts and a points system, a form of self-monitoring that was not a million miles away from today’s self-tracking.⁶⁶

When it came to running, women certainly appeared in magazines and books from time to time, for example in photo spreads, as the subject of an article, and sometimes as authors. Ultimately, however, the discourse of running and the early practice of running were primarily masculine in character. Men were the main actors and the main target group, and the questions, problems, and strategies around which running revolved were male-oriented as well. Even the heart problems that endurance sports were supposed to prevent had masculine connotations. In particular, middle-aged men were exhorted to live like endurance athletes so they could make the most of their potential for many years