Jim Fixx

Dare make the fixation pun? Yes.

A few years ago, I can't remember where, I found a copy of Jim Fixx's The Complete Book of Running, a 1977 guide to the sport aimed at novices caught up in the running boom. It states its aim as nothing less than to change the readers life, promising to set the reader on a path to complete mental and physical transformation, to weight loss, increased energy, even renewed sexual potency. As much as he is known for this best selling book, Fixx is remembered for the cruel irony of the fatal heart attack he suffered while on an easy jog in Vermont at age 52. To read the book today is, as one would expect, to see how little the basics of training have changed in 34 years. But it is also to notice the durability of a narrative genre--the running transformation story. Like a conversion narrative, it begins with an old, failing self that becomes a new, improved, and more authentic self, a self more in line with who we believe we really ought to be. Through neglect and bad habits--in Fixx, these are cigarettes and alcohol (to me more fun than the villain of today's narrative, junk food, though I love junk food too, not being much of a drinker any more)--one loses touch with one's best self; one recovers that self, in more confident form, when one becomes a runner.

In the first chapters, Fixx trumpets the physical and mental benefits of running, while later chapters cover logistics: what to wear (nylon shorts with a split up the side), how to slim down by calculating calories in and out, training advice on interval work, advice on fitting runs into a busy day, and suggestions for marathon training. The chapters back these tips testimony from runners who have transformed their lives.

Fixx's story is the common one, and I'll blog more about it in future posts. I am intensely interested in fitness transformation stories, of which Fixx's is an early example, for their happy endings (you rarely hear then stories of fitness failure, and I'd be happy to hear about conversions to detraining and unfitness, how people lost the running habit - this seems common only among erstwhile college athletes) and for the intriguing note of pathos or anxiety that always touches even the happiest. This is the convert's fear of regression.

A lesson from Fixx: A habit we attribute as the source of our transformation easily becomes a fetish or token in which we lodge everything we doubt to have taken root internally. It's a magical fixation, running, this object that so much is credited with.