There's a lot of other, more edifying, things she could be doing. Credit: Patricio Murphy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

It seems I have a doppelgänger: a self-described “vigorous type” with a lifelong obsession with exercise, although this minor variation on Shriver happens to be gay. Born three years after me in 1960, Alison Bechdel grew up in roughly the same America as I did — as she notes, “before the dawn of the exercise epoch”. Girls weren’t expected to bestir themselves beyond 15 seconds of jogging in place in gym class, while bulging muscles on females were still considered gross. Nevertheless, Bechdel and I both resolved in our scrawny childhoods to become physically strong. We both invented ball games in the yard with rules of our own devising.
As I learned from her new graphic novel The Secret to Superhuman Strength, we both eschew team sports, preferring to compete primarily against ourselves. (Bechdel skis, and though I play tennis instead, I prefer rallying for hours on end to matches.) We were both regarded by schoolmates as mediocre athletes; that is, we were both chosen in the middle of the pack for kickball teams. We both took up running as a lark, beginning with short solo distances — in junior high, I did circuits of the football field while the rest of the class scarfed down miniature pizzas; Bechdel started spontaneously running to visit her grandmother. We both steadily increased this distance, and we both pushed our route to ten miles. Over the course of artistic careers, we’ve both been as dedicated to working up a sweat in a literal sense as we have been to our exertions on the page.
We’ve both gone through similar phases: weight training, long-distance cycling. Why, I positively seized on the fact that Bechdel spurns swimming — a difference! — and has got into yoga, which (so far) I’ve resisted. But over the last 50 years, we’ve both also been subjected to the larger western world’s gathering fixation on fitness, which has overtaken our meagre private labours and crashed over our heads like a 30-foot breaker. Overwhelmingly, then, what Bechdel and I have most in common is that at nearly the same time we both took a step back from what Bechdel calls an accelerating “cardio-pulmonary frenzy” and wrote books about it.
A word from our sponsor: my 2020 novel The Motion of the Body Through Space regards a woman of 60 who’s pursued a rigorous, albeit intensely private, fitness regime since childhood. At the very point that regime has almost entirely destroyed her knees — so much for those ten-mile runs — her sedentary husband announces he’s going to run a marathon. When he ramps up to the triathlon, for which he engages a sexy younger trainer, the marriage, to put it mildly, is imperilled. The purpose of my project was to examine what in God’s name is propelling this latter-day preoccupation with fitness and whether the trend is a force for ill or good. (Answer: both. Now you needn’t buy the book.)
Yet the graphic novel may be an even better form than the straight prose kind for exploring this topic. Illustration brings to life various forms of self-torture, and Bechdel’s rendering of her multiple exertions throughout the years is dryly self-parodic. The drawings are stylish as well as entertaining. The narrative moves nicely along. Simultaneously detailing her romantic and career travails, Bechdel’s accompanying text is lush enough to parse with some profundity our mysterious exaltation of roundly unproductive suffering. The whole package is presented with more than a soupçon of welcome self-derision. I loved it.
Nevertheless, I confess to some ambivalence about discovering that the powers-that-be created two of me, just in case something unfortunate happened to the spare. One reason people like Bechdel and me avoid competitive sports is that by nature we’re too competitive, and so might take conclusive defeat fatally to heart. Thus the rivalrous devil on my shoulder jeered over these pages, “Oh, yeah? You’ve biked a hundred miles in a day? Well, I’ve cycled so-called centuries cross-country for months!” I know. Pathetic. Indeed, an aim of both my novel and Bechdel’s is to question why we’ve come to invest so much status in fitness. How come many of us now compare ourselves to others in accordance with who does more repetitions of deltoid dips, even more so than with who earns more money or builds the more dazzling career?
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