14 Oct 2004 @ 17:56, by Raymond Powers
Jack Turns 90
Happy Birthday to Jack LaLanne, the father of virtually everything to do with fitness in America. By Steve Edwards Showing no signs that there is any exaggeration in his slogan, "I can't die. It would ruin my image," Jack LaLanne celebrated his 90th birthday on September 26th, looking as spry and fit as a man half his age. And if you were to ask him how old he feels, his response would be "29," the prime age of a man in terms of fitness.
LaLanne, as most of you probably know, was the person that almost single-handedly popularized weight training as a means of general conditioning. He also opened the first gym in America in 1936. In 1951, he brought fitness into American homes with The Jack LaLanne Show, which remained on the air for more than 30 years. On his show, LaLanne showed viewers how to exercise using items found in any household.
Since you can find general information on LaLanne on many Web sites, we'll celebrate his birthday by listing some of what I consider to be the more entertaining highlights of his iconoclastic career.
Explaining the age estimation mentioned above, LaLanne once devised a scale where you could compute your "fitness age." Since this scale topped out at 29, he always claimed he was really 29. A few years back on the Larry King Show, Jack could barely sit still for the interview (giving the impression that he rarely sits still) and prodded—literally—King to ask him his fitness age. When King finally took the bait, Jack exclaimed, "Twenty-nine!"
When he first started out, LaLanne had a very hard time getting anyone to pay attention to him and was referred to as a "muscle-bound charlatan." Desperate for work, he made a deal with the coach of a local college football team that if he could impress the coach, he'd be allowed to train the players. Meeting up at a steep sandy bluff, LaLanne put the team's largest player on his back and sprinted straight up the hill. He got the job, and the rest is history.
A proponent of supplementation, LaLanne takes hundreds of vitamins and supplements daily. Though one of these is desiccated liver, his diet is mainly vegetarian, and on his Web site you can purchase a juicer along with various recipes for natural concoctions. Jack's diet advice is, "If man makes it, don't eat it."
His birthday challenges are legendary and almost none of them have been repeated. My favorite is the one on his 70th birthday, where he pulled 70 people in 70 boats across Long Beach Harbor (around 2 miles), while swimming with his hands and feet shackled. Responding to one interviewer who seemed incredulous, he said, "[I swam] like a dolphin [showing a dolphin motion]. They don't have hands or feet."
He also pulled a barge loaded with 2,000 pounds the length of the Golden Gate Bridge while swimming underwater. It's very hard to generate force this way—unless you are a dolphin. He wanted to top this off by swimming entirely underwater from Catalina Island to Los Angeles, about 26 miles, but had to call it off because, he said, "My wife told me she'd leave me if I tried it."
In an edgy Outside magazine article written by Donald Katz, the always-quotable LaLanne pooh-poohed a lot of modern training "knowledge" with some gems, including saying Suzanne Somers "should have been thrown in jail" for peddling the ThighMaster as a fitness solution and that Tony Little was an embarrassment: ". . . the guy who screams on TV. He's like an imbecile!" But my favorite was his critique of modern sports medicine that included, "Fifteen minutes to warm up! Does a lion warm up when he's hungry? 'Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.' No! He just goes out and eats the sucker. You gotta get the blood circulating, but s#%t, does the lion cool down? No, he eats the sucker and goes to sleep."
For years, he offered up $10,000 to anyone who could keep up with him for a one-hour workout. In his mid-eighties, he allowed a fitness magazine writer to take him up on the challenge, even though he no longer publicly offered it. When the author first saw him, as he stated in the article, he thought it would be easy money, noting that Jack resembled his grandfather. The next line was something like, "We're not quite done with the warm-up, less than five minutes in, and I'm about to puke." LaLanne then went on to outlift him by an average of 50 pounds on each exercise. At the end of the workout, they got into Jack's 55-degree pool where the writer was harnessed to the wall and told to butterfly. He stopped after about a minute, totally out of breath, only to hear, "I used to do that for an hour every morning."
Now 90, LaLanne isn't about to slow down and you still hear scuttlebutt around the fitness world of the Catalina-to-LA swim. He calls retirement "a death knell."
"You've got to work at living," he always says. "99.9% of Americans work at dying!"
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