HEALTH & FITNESS WITH BILL HAUDA
That which Nietzsche said made me stronger Although Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was, by all accounts, inept at sports, he certainly understood the basic concept underlying athletic training.
"That which does not kill us makes us stronger," the German philosopher observed.
When Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote that famous phrase in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he was philosophizing about life in general and the challenges humans are presented with.
Challenge us and we will rebound with even more strength.
Little did he know he was in a very specific way conceptualizing the training regime of competitive and recreational athletes alike. Said a little differently, stress produces strength. While too much stress can obviously hurt or kill you, stress to just below that point will strengthen you. Stress a muscle and it becomes stronger. Stress a bone and it becomes thicker. Just don't stress anything to the breaking point.
Another way of saying what Nietzsche wrote is the popular old exercise saw "no pain, no gain." Or "feel the burn." Again, you need to exert, but not to the point that it kills you. Still another is "red-lining" pushing yourself just short of the point of collapse. "Red line" is a reference to a tachometer in a car, in which going into the red rpms can adversely affect the engine.
Although I have a problem with people sitting around thinking but
never sweating, I like Nietzsche a lot. His observations and humor are dark (a lot like mine, which comes from two decades as a newsman). His observation about challenging ourselves had a profound impact on me. It is the essence of the attitude with which I, and many of the people I know, approach exercise and training.
I grew up as a nonexercising nerd. Got a couple of National Science Fair awards in chemistry, but didn't even know the school had a cross-country team. During my time
in the military and much of my professional career as a journalist in Madison, Wisconsin, my hardest exercise was pretty much hoisting a cheeseburger to my mouth. By the mid-'70s, I had an evolving spare tire, and unfortunately it was not on my car. At a family affair, a relative snapped a photo of me without a shirt on. That did it. I was determined to lose 20 pounds.
I began to sneak out at night and run around the block. Running wasn't yet in vogue and I was determined not to be
seen by my neighbors. Eventually the block got smaller and boring, no longer a challenge, so it became all around the neighborhood.
From the neighborhood runs, I would look at the state Capitol building across Lake Monona and think, "Wouldn't it be nice to be able to run all the way around that lake."
A year later, the 17-mile loop from my home around Lake Monona had become a regular weekend routine. By the fall of 1976, I had run one marathon and was now addicted to the
intoxicant effect of endurance athletics.
The next year, in 80-degree weather in the middle of a smog alert, I squeaked out a 2:59 at the long-defunct Mayfair Marathon in Milwaukee. It was a Boston qualifier. So in 1979, I ran the revered Granddaddy of them all in Beantown with a personal best of 2:48:48. In all I traveled east for 13 Bostons, among the roughly 50 marathons I ran.
But I found there were ways other than running to challenge myself. A 100-mile bicycle event.
Bicycling 150 miles in a day. A 100-kilometer ski race in northern Minnesota. Triathlons, in which I found the former sedentary nerd could regularly take home first- or second-place age-group hardware. Everywhere I looked there was a new challenge. And the challenges still exist. This year my goal is to exceed 6,000 miles on a bicycle.
Not without discomfort and pain, mind you. Not without sometimes pushing too hard and burning out. Not without doing mental games to maintain enthusiasm
and motivation.
Like most people, I suffered through sore knees, tendinitis, bursitis, arthroscopic knee surgery and other ailments as I continually pushed myself to the red line. To keep motivated, I logged every mile I ran or biked. My current 50,000-plus miles of training and competing is more than twice the distance around the Earth at the equator.
Logging miles, times and successes is important to motivation. I'm amazed at myself and what I have managed to accomplish, or
have yet to accomplish. How about three times around the world?
Nietzsche played a major role in what I did. During the period I was running at noon every working day from the old downtown Madison Athletic Club, I even convinced the club manager to post the Nietzsche quote on the bulletin board. She and the people working out there certainly understood the concept.
I find it somewhat fascinating to reflect on how that single insightful Nietzsche observation personally gave me
direction, taught me how to train, kept me motivated and provided me with a wonderful quality of life. For that I thank my friend, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.
Bill Hauda is a veteran of about 50 marathons, including 13 times at Boston, a former competitive triathlete, a bicyclist, founder and first president of the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin, and currently a BFW board member. A professional journalist, he has written newspaper, news service and magazine articles and columns on
running, health and fitness since 1978 and is currently director of Wisconsin's two major cross-state bicycle tours, GRABAAWR and SAGBRAW.
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