If I seem to be rather cavalier about preventive medical care, it is in part because there are so many alternative pathways to health on offer in our thriving consumer culture. The very word “alternative” has acquired a certain zing, as in “alternative lifestyles,” and especially “alternative medicine.” Consider the disorienting multitude of options, all seemingly compatible and equally respectable, facing anyone seeking help for even the most routine problem, like lower back pain, which almost everyone suffers from at some point in their lives. A conventionally minded person might start with a referral to an orthopedist, who will usually make an effort to localize the problem in particular vertebrae that can, at least in some cases, be corrected surgically. Or, advised by a friend or magazine article, the patient might begin with an “alternative” healer such as a massage therapist or acupuncturist. Often these choices are available in the same setting, perhaps a major university hospital like that at the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Medicine, where the menu includes reflexology, reiki, yoga, acupuncture, and “micronutrient infusions,” as well as “physician care.” Stanford’s Center for Integrative Medicine, which offers, among other things, classes in mindfulness and “Positive Psychology: The Pursuit of Happiness,” provides each patient with a three-member team representing both conventional and alternative medicine to guide them through the many possible treatment options. There are, however, no warning signs to alert the patient that these options have long represented warring sides—on the one side science, and on the other, any number of ancient, often religious traditions. Nor is there any clue that one’s choice of treatment modalities is anything more than a matter of personal taste.
I had my own alternative—not “alternative medicine,” but an alternative to medicine. I had begun to work out, to systematically use my body in what could be described as fairly useless ways that had nothing to do with housecleaning or getting myself from one place to another. Early in the 1980s, a friend got me going with her to an unchallenging women’s-only gym in a nearby shopping center. She wanted to lose weight; my lower backaches had forced me to realize I could no longer treat my body as mere scaffolding for keeping my head upright. It needed some work.
And I needed some play. Except for brief bursts of housework, adult life, it turned out in my case, was conducted in the sitting position—in meetings or at a desk. The gym offered an enticing regressiveness, a chance, I wrote at the time, to reclaim “the lost muscular license of youth.” We waved our arms, crunched our abs, or lay on the floor and raised our legs to the beat of Billy Idol’s version of “Mony Mony.” After a day spent manipulating words and trying to coax paragraphs into an orderly sequence, forty-five minutes of zoned-out, militaristic obedience to the fitness instructor in front of the class seemed almost like freedom.
At first I was mortified by the feebleness of my body. But if I wasn’t strong, I was at least possessed of a high tolerance for pain, so the mortification began to develop into a secret competitiveness. In normal life I like to think I am a modest and cooperative person; in the gym I was always covertly comparing myself to others and seething with ambition to outdo them. Soon I graduated from the women’s-only gym to a large, lavishly equipped gym for both sexes, where I began with group classes—staying in the back of the room where I could observe without being observed—and then worked my way up to the weight room where the men worked out. All of this was completely removed from my normal professional and personal life and not even worth mentioning to anyone, I thought—too trivial and narcissistic. The first affirmation I got for all this effort was from a male friend who warned me that my upper arms were getting “scary.”
There is no single satisfying historical explanation for the surge of interest in physical fitness that hit the United States in the late twentieth century and spread from there to other affluent parts of the world. One factor was simply the growing availability of fitness-inducing experiences, such as those offered by gyms. In the 1970s, the few gyms that existed tended to be no-frills weight rooms, not all of them even with showers. Today there are 186,000 health clubs worldwide, generating about $81 billion a year, of which about $26 billion is spent in the United States, with Germany and Brazil not far behind.1 Sometime in the 1980s, entrepreneurs discovered that after the initial investment in equipment, it did not take much effort to maintain a gym, only sufficient staff to keep the towels laundered and check clients’ membership status when they enter the facility.
But the demand, as well as the supply, was increasing. In some ways, it was part of a larger withdrawal into individual concerns after the briefly thrilling communal uplift some had experienced in the 1960s. Self-help books proliferated to the point where they became a separate literary genre, as if a fashionable segment of the society had taken up a new project—themselves. Pop psych self-help books advised one to treat relationships as market transactions, always asking whether you’re getting as much as you’re giving. And if that wasn’t working, you could always “be your own best friend.” To historian Christopher Lasch, the fitness obsession was just another aspect of the “culture of narcissism,” representing “a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the recent past.”2
Lasch offered Jerry (“Don’t trust anyone over thirty”) Rubin as an irrefutable exemplar of this retreat. Rubin had a sterling résumé as a radical activist—a flamboyant antiwar leader, a defendant in the “Chicago Seven” trial for inciting the “riots” at the 1968 Democratic convention, a founder, with Abbie Hoffman, of the anarchist Yippie movement. In 1969, he was telling college students that America’s only choices were “catastrophe and decadence or revolution and a new life style,”3 but in his case it was the new lifestyle that won out over the revolution. As the 1970s went on, he sampled every available New Age fad—EST, Rolfing, yoga, meditation—finally emerging as a proud capitalist entrepreneur and promoter of physical fitness. He saw himself not as a sellout, but as a role model for personal “growth.” But there is a case to be made for Lasch’s theory that the new self-involvement represented by fitness was in fact a kind of defeat. When the movement petered out, Rubin’s erstwhile comrade Abbie Hoffman did not transform himself into a self-improvement guru or businessman. He committed suicide.
Of course most of the young, educated people who started jogging and gym-going in the 1970s and ’80s had never expected, much less worked to bring about, a political and cultural revolution. But they had hoped for stable employment, preferably in jobs they found meaningful and creative, and in an age when the entire sociological map was being redrawn, there was little chance of that. First, the traditional blue-collar working class gave way to “deindustrialization,” meaning plant closings and layoffs. As the downsizing fervor spread to the nonprofit sector, whole sections of the professional middle class crumbled off like calves from a melting iceberg. Human service agencies began to shed their social workers, psychologists, and public-interest lawyers. Universities shuttered departments, like philosophy and foreign languages, that were failing to generate sufficient revenue. An alarming new phenomenon appeared—the taxi-driving PhD, predecessor of today’s avatar of educational disutility, the PhD on food stamps.4
In the face of so much class turmoil, young people rapidly rolled back their expectations to fit the narrowing career possibilities. UCLA’s annual survey of undergraduate attitudes found a sharp decline in “altruism and social concerns,” with a record 73 percent in 1987 reporting that their top goal was “being very well-off financially,” compared with 39 percent in 1970.5 I met them all the time on campuses, students who had started out with an interest in social work or environmentalism deciding regretfully to settle for majors in business or economics. But there was not much security even for the most practical-minded, because in the 1980s corporations also began to downsize (or “right-size”) their white-collar workforces. GE was routinely culling out its bottom 15 percent of performers decades before Amazon got the idea. There were no more “jobs for life,” no automatic promotions leading to a gold watch at retirement. Business gurus advised corporate employees to stop worrying about “who stole their cheese” and focus instead on “surfing the chaos.”
But if you could not change the world or even chart your own career, you could still control your own body—what goes into it and how muscular energy is expended. Fitness pioneer Jim Fixx wrote in The Complete Book of Running, “Having lost faith in much of society, government, business, marriage, the church and so on—we seem to have turned to ourselves, putting what faith we can muster in our own minds and bodies.”6 He quoted one of his acolytes as saying that “running gives me a sense of controlling my own life,”7 and I would say the same of working out: I may not be able to do much about grievous injustice in the world, at least not by myself or in very short order, but I can decide to increase the weight on the leg press machine by twenty pounds and achieve that within a few weeks. The gym, which once looked so alien and forbidding to me, became one of the few sites where I could reliably exert control.
To men of the left, like Lasch and Studs Terkel, who also piled on, fitness culture may have looked like a “retreat.” But for women, “control over one’s body” could be understood as a serious political goal. While you did not have to be a feminist to take up physical fitness, most women pouring into gyms had been through the punishing culture of female dieting and thinness, with its purging and fasts. They knew that women were supposed to focus on shrinking their bodies and becoming, as near as possible, invisible. To Gloria Steinem, this was another instance of patriarchal control; we were meant to be not only small, but weak, and to flout this expectation was in itself a form of feminist activism. “Yes,” she wrote, “we need progress everywhere, but an increase in our physical strength could have more impact on the everyday lives of most women than the occasional role model in the boardroom or in the White House.”8
Actor and activist Jane Fonda took up the challenge. She had been a victim of the misogynist thinness culture since the age of twelve, maintaining her startlingly lean body by self-induced vomiting up to twenty times a day. At some point in the 1980s, she realized she was in danger of destroying her esophagus with these constant acid rinses, later saying, “I had a career, I was winning awards, I was supporting nonprofits, I had a family. I had to make a choice: I live or I die.”9 Her recovery hinged on a new zeal for physical exercise in the form of aerobic dancing, which she took to marketing through the then-cutting-edge technology of videos. Millions of women danced along with her videos, reassured by the glamorous Fonda that they could be both sexy and strong. And clearly women had to be strong, since few families could hope to achieve middle-class status—marked by home ownership and private schools for the kids—without two working parents. The old financially dependent, stay-at-home mom was going out of style, although ironically she had far more time for exercise than her counterparts in the workforce.
But if women are in a way “masculinized” by the fitness culture, one might equally well say that men are “feminized” by it. Before the 1970s, only women were obsessed with their bodies, although in a morbid, anorectic way. But in the brightly lit gyms, where walls are typically lined by mirrors, both sexes are invited to inspect their body images for any unwanted bulges or loose bits of flesh and plan their workouts accordingly. Gay men flocked to the gyms, creating a highly chiseled standard of male beauty. The big change, though, was that heterosexual men were also “objectified” by the fitness culture, encouraged to see themselves as the objects of other people’s appreciation—or, as the case may be, scorn. For both sexes in the endangered white-collar middle class, the body became an essential element of self-presentation, not just its size and general shape but the squareness of shoulders, the flatness of tummy, and, when sleeves were rolled up, the carefully sculpted contours of muscle.
Fitness, or the efforts to achieve it, quickly took on another function for the middle class—as an identifying signal or “class cue.” Unfit behavior like smoking or reclining in front of the TV with a beer signified lower-class status, while a dedication to health, even if evidenced only by carrying a gym bag or yoga mat, advertised a loftier rank. Consider the matter of food choices. In the 1970s, foods seemed to sort themselves out along class lines, with the affluent opting for those deemed to be “natural,” organic, whole grain or just “whole” (whatever a “whole food” is), and, above all, “pure.” Intertwined between all these descriptors was the inescapable insistence on low-fat; that whole grain bread was not to be buttered. Jane Brody, the New York Times health columnist, relentlessly promoted the low-fat way of life to the masses, producing columns from the 1980s on with headlines like “Our Excessive Protein Intake Can Hurt Liver, Kidneys, Bone,” “Carbohydrates Can Help You Lose Weight,” and “‘Chemicals’ in Food Are Less Harmful Than Fat.” Heeding her and other antifat fanatics like cardiologist Dean Ornish, Americans reduced their fat intake from 40 percent of calories ingested in 1970 to 34 percent in 2000,10 with the result, which makes sense retrospectively, that we had an “obesity epidemic” as people gave up fat for “healthy” treats like fat-free cookies. But the long crusade against dietary fat succeeded in establishing that fat is for economic losers—an association prefigured by the word “grease,” as in “greaser” or “greasy spoon.”
Working out is another form of conspicuous consumption: Affluent people do it and, especially if muscular exertion is already part of their job, lower-class people tend to avoid it. There are exceptions like the working-class male body builders—“meatballs”—who can be found in places like Gold’s Gym, as well as the lower-class women who attempt to shed pounds at Curves (a descendant of the women’s-only gym where I started my workout career). By and large, though, working out is a reliable indicator of social status. Author and “sustainable living expert” Wanda Urbanska reported a conversation overheard between two women at a California gym, in which one complains about a new boyfriend, “The only thing wrong with him is he will not work out. He flat out refuses.” To which her friend replies, “So you’re going to have to let him go.” “Do I have a choice?” the first woman responds.11 The safest option for a single hoping to meet a partner who can pull his or her own weight is to restrict one’s romantic interests to fellow health club members.
There is something almost utopian about the social spaces created by the fitness culture. Forget about the people who don’t have the money or the time to participate. Ignore the low-paid janitors, maintenance workers, and front-desk clerks, whose jobs don’t even offer health insurance. Just focus on the entitled inhabitants of the gym (or running or rowing group), who are encouraged to make themselves healthier and more attractive in a leisurely, carefully designed way, stopping for an occasional juice drink or chat. In this world, the sexes are more or less equal, people of all skin colors and sexual orientations mingle freely without the need to drink or dress up, bodies are displayed with a minimum of self-consciousness, there’s free Wi-Fi and, in the locker rooms, free shampoo and moisturizer.
But stay around a little longer—thirty years of attending various gyms around the country in my case—and the picture looks a little less idyllic. Despite the pulsing pop music and comfortable clothes, gyms are not sites of spontaneity and play. There are rules beamed out from video monitors, mostly innocuous ones, like no cursing, “staring” at others, or expressing effort in audible form such as grunts or panting. Once, in a Key West gym, which you might imagine to be a somewhat permissive environment, I saw the manager chastise a young woman for moving too freely and rhythmically. “No dancing in the gym,” he announced, nonsensically, as if to underscore the seriousness of our undertaking. A regimented dancelike experience, as in aerobics or Zumba, is fine, but unsupervised dance moves reek of hedonism, and working out is supposed to be a form of work. Most people come with a plan like “legs and shoulders today” or “45 minutes of cardio and 15 minutes of abs,” usually preceded by a warm-up and topped off with several minutes of stretching on a mat.
Working out very much resembles work, or a curious blend of physical labor and office work. Members not only lift weights, for example, they often carry clipboards on which to record the number of reps and sets and the amount of weight lifted for each workout, like a supervisor monitoring a factory worker’s performance. Even socializing is rare, if only because gym members are increasingly plugged into their iPods and can be alerted to an attempted communication (such as “May I work in?” or “Are you done with this now?”) only by frantic waving and gestures.
The major interaction that goes on in gyms is not between members or between members and staff, but between the fitness devotee and his or her body. The body must be trained, disciplined, and put to ever more demanding tests, all administered and evaluated by the devotee’s conscious mind. Compared to the mind, the body can be thought of as an animal, usually a domesticated or partially domesticated animal—capable of reflex and habit, though not of course conscious decision making. The poet Delmore Schwartz described his body as a “heavy bear… / Breathing at my side, that heavy animal, / That heavy bear who sleeps with me.”12 We learn from coaches and fitness class instructors that, like any other beast of burden, the body is always inclined to take the path of least resistance unless we can “trick” it with a sudden variation in the workout routine. Western philosophy has long separated body from mind; fitness culture takes this dualism further—to an adversarial relationship in which mind struggles for control over the lazy, recalcitrant body. I plan to work out today, but I will not tell you exactly what I’ll do, lest my body find out.
And why should the mind want to subdue the body systematically, repeatedly, day after day? Many gym-goers will tell you cheerfully that it makes them feel better, at least when the workout is over. But there’s a darker, more menacing side to the preoccupation with fitness, and this is the widespread suspicion that if you can’t control your own body, you’re not fit, in any sense, to control anyone else, and in their work lives that is a large part of what typical gym-goers do. We are talking here about a relative elite of people who are more likely to give orders than to take them—managers and professionals. In this class, there are steep penalties for being overweight or in any other way apparently unhealthy. Flabby people are less likely to be hired or promoted;13 they may even be reprimanded and obliged to undergo the company’s “wellness” program, probably consisting of exercise (on- or off-site), nutritional counseling to promote weight loss, and, if indicated, lessons in smoking cessation.
Employee wellness is not a traditional concern of large capitalist enterprises, which are historically better known for imposing unhealthy conditions on their workers—exposure to hazardous substances in the case of blue-collar workers, punishing workloads and unholy levels of stress for workers of all collar colors. At some point in the 1970s and ’80s, though, companies got the idea that promoting individual health might reduce their expenditures on employee health insurance, an insight that eventually led to what is now a $6 billion industry in creating and managing corporate wellness programs. Participation in these is not entirely optional. Some employers will raise workers’ contributions to their health insurance by $500 or so and then “waive” the price increase for employees who undergo a health assessment and submit to the follow-up regimen, typically involving weight loss goals. Many workers complain—at least to outside researchers—that corporate wellness programs are coercive and overly intrusive, just one more source of workplace-related stress.14 Promoters of corporate wellness programs claim that they reduce employer health insurance expenditures by a hefty percentage, but a massive 2014 study by the Rand Corporation found that they have “little if any immediate effects on the amount employers spend on health care.”15
It was the existence of widespread health insurance that turned fitness into a moral imperative. Insurance involves risk sharing, with those in need of care being indirectly subsidized by those who are healthier, so that if you are sick, or overweight, or just guilty of insufficient attention to personal wellness, you are a drag on your company, if not your nation. As the famed physician and Rockefeller Foundation president John H. Knowles put it in 1977:
The cost of sloth, gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, and smoking is now a national, and not an individual, responsibility.…One man’s freedom in health is another man’s shackle in taxes and insurance premiums.16
Or, in the words of former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano, “We have met the enemy and they are us.”17 Never mind that poverty, race, and occupation play a huge role in determining one’s health status, the doctrine of individual responsibility means that the less-than-fit person is a suitable source not only of revulsion but resentment. The objection raised over and over to any proposed expansion of health insurance was, in so many words: Why should I contribute to the care of those degenerates who choose to smoke and eat cheeseburgers?
The idea that we are each individually responsible for our own health is perhaps most significant for what it omits: not only environmental and socioeconomic factors, but doctors and health care providers of all sorts, who were by and large unprepared for the fitness revolution. A 2014 “white paper” from the Bipartisan Policy Center reported that 75 percent of US physicians felt that their medical training in nutrition and exercise was insufficient for counseling patients with obesity-related problems.18 In fact, doctors and fitness gurus seem to occupy non-overlapping worlds. You will often find, stamped in small letters on fitness equipment, the advice that you not undertake a fitness program without first “obtaining a physical examination,” but of course an exam is not required for gym membership, nor are you likely to find posters in gyms reminding you of the need for medical screenings. Similarly doctors’ offices do not, at least in my experience, offer literature or advice on exercise programs, nor do they encourage clients to be environmentally responsible. A doctor may inquire as to whether you “exercise,” but in most cases he or she is satisfied with a simple “yes.” The exception is the rare celebrity doctor, like the scientifically discredited “Dr. Oz,”19 who ministers to millions of TV viewers at a time, offering a mix of nutritional and exercise tips along with alternative and “natural” remedies such as aromatherapy and mud baths.
Besides, the fitness movement’s core ideology of self-improvement and self-responsibility tends to render physicians irrelevant. Why ask a possibly flaccid medical doctor for diet and exercise tips that you can readily find on TV or the Internet? Why waste precious time sitting in a doctor’s waiting room when you could be working out? Jerry Rubin credited yuppies—that being the identity he embraced after growing out of the Yippies—with bringing about “America’s health revolution,” explaining that “yuppies don’t wait to get sick and then let a doctor do the rest with pills and surgery; they work to avoid getting sick in the first place. From this has emerged the nation’s new awareness of self-responsibility for fitness and nutrition.”20
One way for the medical profession to maintain its grip in a world of increasingly do-it-yourself health care was to establish the doctor’s office as a kind of way station along the patient’s “fitness journey,” a place to check in periodically on one’s blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and other markers of fitness success. And for years in the 1980s and ’90s, fitness devotees were content with this arrangement, carefully managing their diets and exercise regimens, and reporting to the physician now and then for a pat on the back. But then, almost without warning, the job of monitoring people’s health underwent a sudden burst of automation. There had always been a degree of self-monitoring—weighing oneself and, in the case of diabetics, checking blood sugar levels throughout the day. In the twenty-first century, technologies arose to enable continuous, convenient, unobtrusive self-monitoring of dozens of variables, including blood pressure, heart rate, calorie intake, number of steps taken in a day, even mood. Epileptics can wear devices that will warn them of oncoming seizures; asthmatics can be alerted to incipient attacks. In 2014, Forbes reported that the market for devices was “red hot,”21 and indeed, a year later, that one-third of American consumers were using at least some kind of wearable health monitoring device.22
The medical profession was no more prepared for self-monitoring than it had been for the fitness revolution. Most frontline practitioners were still reeling from the challenge of electronic medical record-keeping, and that only dealt with data a doctor could collect—not the potentially unlimited streams of data patients could now gather for themselves. One reaction was to denounce the self-monitoring devices as mere “toys,” not FDA-approved or accurate enough to base medical decision making on. More churlishly, some doctors accused the devices of fostering hypochondria, as patients became obsessed with insignificant fluctuations in their biodata. When the health-obsessed computer scientist Ray Kurzweil first attempted to engage a physician in his ultra-detailed concerns, he was cut off by the doctor, who said, “Look, I just don’t have time for this; I have patients who are dying that I have to attend to.”23
Other physicians were more welcoming—most notably Eric Topol, the cardiologist, geneticist, and self-monitoring innovator who was declared one of the “rock stars of science” by GQ magazine in 2009.24 Declaring that the self-monitoring movement was the “biggest shake-up in the history of medicine,” he announced that the new role of the physician was to prescribe not drugs or surgery, but self-monitoring apps. “You name the condition, we get the apps to match up with your phone,” he told the BBC.25 And physicians could still play a role in helping the patient interpret the volumes of unrelated data that his or her devices were collecting; unless of course that function is also automated. Already, a swarm of new start-ups is developing “aggregator platforms” that will integrate the various data flowing in from wearable devices, potentially leaving the doctor almost entirely out of the loop.
But for the average seeker of health and fitness, like myself, whose self-monitoring has probably not advanced beyond the Fitbit (which counts the number of steps you take each day) stage, it hardly matters whether physicians endorse or condemn the new technologies. We have our own goals and quotas to fulfill—number of stairs to climb on the StairMaster, reps to perform with ten- or twenty-pound weights, minutes to travel on the inclined treadmill—and in these endeavors we are far more likely to be influenced by fitness websites, personal trainers, and other gym-goers than by any sort of health care professional. In fact, in the ultimate concession to the DIY trend, growing numbers of physicians now employ nutrition and fitness “coaches,” who, like personal trainers in gyms, will patiently attend to the minutiae of one’s self-care,26 leaving the doctor to scan the horizon for oncoming threats.
It’s tempting to invest one’s daily workout with a kind of dwarfish heroism. It may look like I’m just doggedly repeating the same routine with slight variations from day to day, but the real drama lies in the invisible confrontation between mind and muscle, in which I am the only conscious participant. Can I increase the load on my quads, and by how much? Are the lats getting a little lazy, and what will it take to shake them up? In the course of my own fitness “journey” I have gone from being an embarrassed weakling to something of a show-off—taking over a machine from a young, strong man and ostentatiously increasing the weight on it, preferably while he is still watching. At my zenith, I could draw spectators for my leg presses at 270 pounds and lunges while holding a twenty-pound weight in each hand. None of this has had much effect on my daily life, other than to make me cackle contemptuously when a supermarket clerk asks if I need help getting my groceries to the car.
Then, in just the last few years, I began to hit a wall. I developed temporarily disabling knee problems, which X-rays showed were attributable to overexertion rather than, as was to be expected at my age, arthritis. My lower back easily clenched into knots. I had to try to develop a less adversarial stance toward my body, or at least learn how to “listen” to it. I adjusted my routine accordingly and expanded my menu of stretches. The ideology of fitness, which had so far encouraged me to treat my body as a recalcitrant mass I was required to carry around with me everywhere, showed a softer side, emphasizing the “wisdom of the body” and the need to develop some sort of détente with it. For a moment I even toyed with the idea of a yoga class, possibly including meditation, before deciding that I’m not quite old enough for that.
If anything, the culture of fitness has grown more combative than when I first got involved. It is no longer enough to “have a good workout,” as the receptionist at the gym advises every day; you should “crush your workout.” Health and strength are tedious goals compared to my gym’s new theme of “explosive strength,” achieved, as far as I can see, through repeated whole-body swinging of a kettlebell. If your gym isn’t sufficiently challenging, you might want to try an “ultra-extreme warrior workout”27 or buy a “home fitness system” from P90X, which recently tweeted a poster of an ultra-cut male upper body, head bowed as if in prayer, with the caption “A moment of silence please, for my body has no idea what I’m about to put it through.”28 Or you could join CrossFit, the fastest-growing type of gym in the world and also allegedly the most physically punishing. “We have sought to build a program that will best prepare trainees for any physical contingency,” the company boasts, “not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable,”29 and the latter category includes the zombie apocalypse.30 The mind’s struggle for mastery over the body has become a kind of mortal combat.
The South African runner Oscar Pistorius, who is now serving a sentence for the 2013 murder of his girlfriend, had more to overcome than most athletes: His legs had been amputated below the knees when he was a toddler. But he managed to become both a Paralympic and Olympic champion. Tattooed on his back is a modified verse from Corinthians:
I do not run like a man running aimlessly
I do not fight like a man beating the air;
I execute each stride with intent;
I beat my body and make it my slave
I bring it under my complete subjection…31