Jack LaLanne - "I am one runaway son of a bitch!"

Jack LaLanne Is Still an Animal | Outside Online:

"For all of my fond memories of the sheer élan that the man exuded, Jack LaLanne eventually faded from my own cultural vista amid the swirl of the sixties and seventies. But during the early eighties, a few years after the great turning of a generation to the secular religion of exercise, I rediscovered him in a remarkable interview published in Playboy. Jack was 69 then, but he reported that he still did his killer workouts every single day. He said that his chest still measured 47 inches, while his belt traveled but 27 inches around his midsection.

Jack suggested in the interview that regular cocaine snorters should take bonemeal supplements to replace the calcium loss in their nasal septums. He promoted dieting and weight loss to Playboy readers by noting that 'if you have a six-inch tool and a 50-inch waistline, the thing doesn't look very big, does it?' Jack said, 'When you married a beautiful girl and all of a sudden you start seeing her tits down to here and her breath stinks and she's not clean anymore and has no pride in herself, you can't love her. You may bullshit yourself, but you can't. Energy makes people beautiful. That's what charisma is. You don't want to be close to someone who's dead and crapped out all the time, who's bitching that it's a lousy fucking world and 'Christ, my ulcers are killing me.' Maybe 50 or 60 percent of all divorces are predicated on someone's being physically unfit.'

It was the knee-jerk demographic assertion at the end that made me ponder once again what a great American Jack really was.

...In 1954, when Jack was half his current age--not long after he won that year's Professional Mr. America contest and something called the Best Chest award--he began to attempt a series of midlife feats of Herculean strength and uncanny endurance that were designed to call attention to his cause. He did 100 handstand push-ups in under six minutes. He swam through the powerful currents between Alcatraz Island and Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco while handcuffed. He towed a 2,000-pound boat the length of the Golden Gate Bridge while swimming underwater with air tanks but no fins, and he somehow did 1,033 push-ups in 23 minutes during an appearance on TV.

In his sixties, Jack began to wear shackles on his legs as well as handcuffs for the swimming feats. He used the "flopping butterfly" stroke he developed to tow 13 boats symbolizing the original colonies across a southern California bay as a 1976 bicentennial feat, and he towed 6,500 pounds of wood pulp across a lake in Japan the year he qualified for Social Security. At the age of 70, he towed 70 friends sitting in 70 different boats across Long Beach Harbor near Los Angeles, despite heavy winds.

Jack, it should be noted, might be five-foot-six if he stretched.

He explained that he trained for the push-up feat with endless reps using 140-pound dumbbells and by climbing a 25-foot rope three times in a row with 140 pounds of extra weight strapped to his belt. When I asked why lactic acid didn't freeze him up after a while, he noted that I clearly didn't understand the value of vitamin supplements and good nutrition.

"Ask the guys who are doing serious triathlons if there are any limits to what can be done. The limit is right here," he said, pointing at the reddish curls still clinging to the side of his head. "You've got to get physically fit between the ears. Muscles don't know anything. They have to be taught."

...I train like I'm training for the Olympics or for a Mr. America contest, the way I've always trained my whole life. You see, life is a battlefield. Life is survival of the fittest.' Then he segued into a mantra I'm sure I heard dozens of times as a very young boy: 'How many healthy people do you know? How many happy people do you know? Think about it. People work at dying, they don't work at living. My workout is my obligation to life. It's my tranquilizer. It's part of the way I tell the truth--and telling the truth is what's kept me going all these years.'

Then--thoughtlessly, perhaps, and only because I do it myself--I asked Jack LaLanne if he ever snacks before bedtime.

"Never!" he snarled. "You don't get it. I am one runaway son of a bitch! I am an animal! I want to eat everything! I want to get drunk every single night! I want to screw every woman there is! We are all wild animals. But we must learn to use our minds. We must learn to control the bestial and sensual sides of ourselves!"