“If you feel that you’re running, no matter how slow you’re going, no one can say you’re not.”
Here’s my take on Jim Fixx and running. He got up off his fat ass and the activity became a sport which became a lifestyle and then he became himself.
I was surprised when he dropped dead, on the run. Guessing he wasn’t. He was a man who could pretend to ignore pain.
And here’s what I remember about him.
To his great shock Fixx became a bona fide celebrity. Passersby stopped him, asking for autographs or advice or just wanting to shake his hand. His likeness appeared in a New Yorker cartoon. People named him one of the Most Intriguing People of the year, alongside Brooke Shields and Meat Loaf. Wrote The Washington Post, “By now, Jim Fixx’s legs are almost as famous as Betty Grable’s were during World War II.” In January 1979, the Cowboys faced the Steelers in the Super Bowl; at the end of a quarter, there was Fixx onscreen, jogging by the Eiffel Tower in a white sweat suit for an American Express commercial.
Jim told me all about that commercial. Like he was supposed to run up to the spot in the front of the camera and state his name. Hello, I’m Jim Fixx.
Took him something like 62 takes to get it right. No hyperbole. Sixty-two. We agreed it was funny for the author of Games For The Super-Intelligent. Maybe twenty-six. 26. I’m old now, give me a break.
I became friends with Jim soon after his The Complete Book Of Running came out. Got a review copy and wrote the author my compliments and a note. Note said, how the hell can you call your book complete if it doesn’t have RUNNING magazine in it? The Thinking Runner’s Magazine???
Heard back right away. Mr. Fixx was apologetic and dismayed he’d missed us. RUNNING was mentioned in the next volume. After that, he was okay with me.
Spent a week in Greece with Jim. https://www.jackdogwelch.com/?p=7717
We ran together in Portland, Oregon, when he was in town to promote a cereal company. Post, maybe Quaker. A hilly course up by the zoo.
Trying to find my diaries, maybe find that race. Did find The Complete Runner’s Day-by-Day Log and Calendar 1979 by James F. Fixx. Like finding an album of old family photos. I was thirty-two.
So must’ve run that race in ’78. Maybe I can find that by Monday. Or not. Haven’t found it.
Found it. Saturday. August 5, 1978. “Washington Park 10K. Placed 14th of 280 in 38:08. VERY HILLY course.” Remember now, Jim was the only reason I ran that race. Gnarly topography.
On December 15th in the 1979 Jim Fixx calendar I wrote, “DNR. Spent most of the day in bed. Got really drunk last night at Nike open house.”
Next day. Sunday. December 16. “Noon. Fun Run. 5 mi. = 32:43. (6:08, 20:03, 26:33). TIRED.”
Fixx pasted quotes all over the log book. Bottom of same page as ‘Did Not Run’ – DNR means something different these days – there’s this. Makes me proud now.
On choosing running shoes: “Just remember: The ‘experts’ don’t have to wear your shoes,” writes George Phillips in RUNNING magazine. “You do.”
We talked about divorces, his second, my first. He was right and I was in the wrong, we decided. Rather obvious we agreed.
Oh, I almost forgot this. Parker House, Boston. Marathon weekend. I have the famous Runner’s World editor Joe Henderson on one side of me and best-selling author Jim Fixx on the other. It’s a long hallway and we see this guy come headed straight at us. He’s got crazed celebrity stalker written all over him and I feel the celebrity on each side of me begin to cringe instinctively, the guy says and this is true, “Jack, can I have your autograph?”
That must’ve been the same trip where Jim told me the truth about being a rich and famous writer, which of course has always been my goal. When you get back home, he said, your wife still makes you take out the trash.
Jim wrote a book called Jackpot! About a perfectly ordinary man abruptly tossed into the Great American Fame Machine. On the back cover, there’s an advance comment, call it a blurb, by Bill Rodgers. “Much of what happened to him also hit me. Jackpot! is a true account of the good and evil aspects of fame and fortune.”
Those iconic legs suddenly sprayed a glistening gold.
Jim would be the first to tell you, just a shiny coating.
Greenwich CT 5M. Now the Jim Fixx Memorial.
JAMES F. FIXX DIES JOGGING; AUTHOR ON RUNNING WAS 52
By Jane Gross for The New York Times. July 22, 1984
James F. Fixx, who spurred the jogging craze with his best-selling books about running and preached the gospel that active people live longer, died of a heart attack Friday while on a solitary jog in Vermont. He was 52 years old.
Mr. Fixx, a former magazine editor and the author of five books, among them ”The Complete Book of Running,” was found at 5:30 P.M. by the side of Route 15 in Hardwick by a motorcyclist. Before the police arrived, several passers-by attempted to resuscitate the fallen runner, dressed only in shorts and without identification. Mr. Fixx was subsequently identified by the owner of a nearby motel, where he was a guest while waiting to move into a rented summer house on Caspian Lake. He was taken to Copley Hospital in Morrisville and pronounced dead. An autopsy yesterday morning revealed that Mr. Fixx had died of a massive heart attack and that two of his coronary arteries were sufficiently blocked to warrant a bypass operation.
According to Mr. Fixx’s sister, Kitty Fixx Bower, he was ”most aware of the signs” of coronary disease because of their father’s death from a heart attack at the age of 43. Mrs. Bower said that her brother believed himself to be in good health, having run races of 12 and 5 miles in recent weeks and having ”trounced” her in a tennis match on Cape Cod the previous day. ”There’s an irony in this, no doubt about it,” Mrs. Bower said. ”But he had no indication that he ought to check in with his friendly cardiologist.” Lebow Voices Concern
The irony was not lost on Fred Lebow, the president of the New York Road Runners Club and the guiding light of the New York City Marathon. ”We know running doesn’t cause heart attacks and may, in fact, prolong life,” Mr. Lebow said from Chicago, where he is attending a triathlon competition. ”What I’m concerned about now is all those people who talk about the danger of running. What does this prove to them? Sure, we have people dying in Central Park, one or two a year while running. But I’m sure more people die on the golf course or watching the Yankees play baseball. Maybe if Jim Fixx didn’t run, he’d have died five years ago.”
Mr. Fixx’s concern about his hereditary predisposition to heart disease – his father, Calvin, was first stricken at the age of 35 – contributed to his decision to take up jogging. When he began in 1967, to help rehabilitate a tendon pulled while playing tennis, he weighed 220 pounds and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. He ran in his first race, five miles long, in Greenwich, Conn., in 1970, and Mr. Fixx finished last among 50 runners, impressed that the winner was a man in his 60’s. As his passion for running increased, he stopped smoking, changed his eating habits, lost 61 pounds and proclaimed in the introduction to his first book on running that his purpose was ”first, to introduce you to the extraordinary world of running, and second, to change your life.”
Despite that bold claim, and Mr. Fixx’s subsequent popularity on the lecture circuit as the guru of running, his book, which earned more than $1 million, presents a balanced account of the conflicting medical evidence about the connection between jogging and good health. He ultimately concluded that ”although the evidence is inconclusive, most of it clearly suggests that running is more likely to increase than decrease longevity” because ”research has repeatedly shown that with such endurance training as running the heart becomes a distinctly more efficient instrument, capable of doing more while working less hard.” Kept Elaborate Records
Mr. Fixx was known in running circles, and to his friends, as a man with a playful sense of humor about his avocation. He delighted in telling the story of the women he overheard at a cocktail party in his hometown of Riverside, Conn., who had made a mocking reference to ”that man who runs in his underwear.” Besides keeping the elaborate mileage and time records common to serious runners, Mr. Fixx kept a log of the money he found on the road, which ranged from 21 cents in 1975 to $4.91 in 1979. ”Plus tools, like hammers, screwdrivers and wrenches,” he said several years back, ”and even a wheelbarrow once. On Sundays, there will be cans of unopened beer, the residue of Saturday night parties, which I stash along the route and pick up later in my car.”
Mr. Fixx, born in New York on April 23, 1932, was graduated from Oberlin College in 1957 and worked as a magazine editor with publications including The Saturday Review, McCalls, Life and Horizon. He began his career as an author with two books called ”Games for the Superintelligent” and ”More Games for the Superintelligent.” ”The Complete Book of Running,” published to coincide with the 1977 New York City Marathon, remained on the best-seller list for more than a year and was followed by ”Jim Fixx’s Second Book of Running” and an autobiography about his sudden fame entitled ”Jackpot.” During his Vermont holiday, Mr. Fixx was to have put the finishing touches on his fifth book, ”The Complete Book of Sports Performance,” which is scheduled for publication next spring.
Mr. Fixx was married twice – to Mary Durling and Alice Kasman – and was divorced twice. He is survived by his mother, Marlys Fuller Fixx of Sarasota, Fla.; his sister, of Santa Barbara, Calif.; and four children from his marriage to Miss Durling, Paul, John, Stephen and Elizabeth. Funeral services are scheduled for 3 P.M. Tuesday at Saint Savior’s Church in Old Greenwich, Conn.
The Washington Post. July 29, 1984.
The Jim Fixx Neurosis: Running Yourself to Death
A MIDDLE-AGED RUNNER had embossed on his T-shirt the statement: “You haven’t really run a good marathon unless you drop dead at the finish line,” recalls Dr. Edward Colt, medical director for five years of the New York City marathon. One week later, this runner ran what must be considered, by his own standards, the perfect marathon: he dropped dead of an excruciatingly painful heart attack.
Last weekend another middle-aged runner died under tragic circumstances, trudging along a solitary Vermont back road. This runner was Jim Fixx, the 52-year-old author, lecturer and all-round guru on long-distance running.
Fixx’s books, “The Complete Book of Running” and “Jim Fixx’s Second Book of Running” encouraged many inactive people to get active again, quit smoking, lose weight and organize their lives along more healthful patterns. But along with these sensible suggestions were intermixed advice and beliefs that may have hastened Fixx’s death and, I am convinced, may hasten the death of other runners.
Indeed, Jim Fixx conforms to a profile, accepted within medical circles, of the type of runner who is most at risk for death or serious injury. I am speaking now of what psychiatrist Alayne Yates and her colleagues at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center refer to as the “obligate runner” — those for whom running is a compulsive drive that preempts fulfillment in other life areas or who run to the point of inflicting physical damage on their bodies.
As many as 25 percent of serious runners may be neurotically attached to their sport, claims Dr. Kenneth E. Callen, associate professor of psychiatry at the Oregon Health Sciences University, in a study published in Psychosomatics, the journal of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine.
First, the obligate runner takes up serious running — defined as more than 40 miles per week — relatively late in life as compared to other athletes. Jim Fixx, for example, was 35 when he started. Most obligatory runners “become unequivocally committed to running in the third to fifth decade of their lives,” wrote Yates and her colleagues in the Feb. 3, 1983 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Second, obligate runners are found among those who generally feel unfufilled in their professional or personal lives and use running as a method for achieving meaning. In this area, too, Fixx fits the profile.
Despite impressive professional accomplishments (managing editor at Horizon, excutive editor at McCalls), Jim Fixx’s sense of direction as well as his greatest life satisfaction date from his discovery of running. In his books and lectures, he offered his readers a similar enlightenment by promising to “show you how to become healthier and happier than you ever imagined you could be.” Nor was Fixx’s enthusiasm insincere. To Fixx, running was an activity that could “change your life” and, in his case, it did.
Third, obligate runners use running as an aid towards the denial of aging, physical dissolution and death. In the survey published in the February 1983 issue of Psychosomatics, Callen described the typical runner likely to wind up hurting or killing himself: a middle-aged man tortured by the prospect of growing old, troubled by diminished physical attractiveness and bored by the absence of job or marital fulfillment.
In their attempts to understand the personality traits common to obligate runners, the psychiatrists at the University of Arizona discovered important similarities with anorexics. “The runners in our sample shared many of the qualities of the anorexic patient,” wrote these doctors in their paper, “Running — an Analogue of Anorexia?” published in The New England Journal of Medicine. “They were generally self-effacing, hard-working, high achievers from affluent families who were uncomfortable with anger and who characteristically inhibited the direct expression of affect (mood). Their singular commitment to running occurred at a time of heightened anxiety, depression and identity diffusion.”
This “grim asceticism” mentioned by these authors elsewhere in their paper can be confirmed by anyone who takes the trouble to observe the pained, but stoic, faces of obligatory runners when they perform their rituals on our city streets and country byways. Observing these runners, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that many of them are attempting to discover who they are and who they want to be via running.
“The heightened commitment to sport or diet provides the runner and the anorexic with a clear identity in that it differentiates them from other less dedicated people,” writes Yates and her colleagues.
Another characteristic of the runner at risk for disaster is a tendency to think of running in quasi-mystical, even irrational terms. “It is here with my heart banging against my ribs that I discover how far beyond reason I can push myself. Furthermore, once a race has ended, I know what I am truly made of. Who can say how many of us have learned some of life’s profoundest lessons while aching and gasping for breath?” wrote Jim Fixx.
Such a monomaniacal search for identity and perfection, Yates and her colleagues discovered, is characteristic of the obligate runner. “Assuming an identity as a runner served an adaptive function, providing a sense of self, a feeling of control over internal and external circumstances, a difficult but obtainable goal.” In most cases, attaining a goal is less important than the continued effort to achieve it. “The goal itself is entirely secondary and is reset at will to rationalize continuation of the process.”
Eventually such “dedication” and “commitment” leads to behavior that one could be forgiven for labeling as simply “addictive.” When questioned whether or not running was an addiction, Jim Fixx had this to say: “It’s a question of definition . . . . Take me. I run every day and some people call that crazy. They say, ‘It’s taking over your life.’ But I think it’s just great.”
Most obligate runners would agree. Indeed, this helps to explain why sports clinics are besieged by requests for anti-inflammatory drugs, orthopedic devices and psychological techniques aimed at bolstering the obligate runner’s determination to deny and ignore painful experiences.
“To acknowledge an injury and stop running is intolerable to them (the obligate runners) because it proves what they have feared facing all along — their own vulnerability,” according to Michael H. Sacks, associate professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, who specializes in treating runners and running-related problems.
In the case of Jim Fixx, it stretches medical imagination to think that he did not have chest pains or some other forewarning of his heart attack.
The obligate runners’ flight from vulnerability is rendered socially acceptable as a result of misguided but widespread attitudes concerning how runners should respond to physical pain. The runner, mentioned earlier, who literally ran himself to death in the presence of excruciating pain, is an extreme example of a process many obligate runners are putting themselves through every day: run that extra mile no matter how it hurts, break through the “wall.”
In a 1982 article in Sports Illustrated, long-distance runner Alberto Salazar is described as “possessed of a certain pride” because he was willing to run 105 miles a week on a stress fracture — tiny bone cracks caused by pounding the pavement. In one marathon, he pushed himself into heat prostration. When his body temperature reached 108 degrees, he was packed in ice and administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Fortunately, he survived. How many other lesser-known runners have died because they, too, were “possessed of a certain pride”?
Concerning the emotional health of runners, Oregon psychiatrist Callen has this to say of his large sampling of 494 runners: “Twenty-five percent state that they have experienced emotional problems associated with running. In almost every instance, the problems is one of depression, anger or frustration associated with not being able to run due to an injury.”
Yates and her colleagues noted a similar pattern: “When the obligatory runners in our sample were unable to run, they experienced depression and anxiety about physical deterioration. Not surprisingly, they continued to run in spite of illness, which was often denied, or contraindications, such as arrythmias, atherosclerotic heart disease or stress fractures. Such unreasonable dedication has resulted in permanent disability or even death.”
Other obligate runners — apparently Fixx was in this group — fail to seek medical opinion despite the fact they have reason to believe that they might be genetically predisposed to coronary disease or other health problems. Fixx’s father had a heart attack at the age of 35 and died of heart disease at 43. Nevertheless, Fixx last December adamantly refused to take a stress test even though it was pressed on him at the Aerobics Center in Dallas.
This failure to seek help is particularly tragic since many of these people could now be treated by coronary bypass surgery.
Already, Fixx’s tragic death has been written off by some as a coincidence. Perhaps he would have died earlier if he didn’t run regularly. No one can “prove” that running killed him. But such statements fail to address the fact that, on the average, the contemporary American male doesn’t die at 52, even when he weighs too much, underexercises, smokes excessively or, within lmits, otherwise abuses his body.
The death of Jim Fixx can and should lead to a reexamination of the value and wisdom of running in the 40-80 mile per week range. This is particularly true for runners who during their first 25 years led comparatively sedentary lives.
At the very least, one point appears unarguable: Obligatory running does not protect against the onslaught of serious cardiovascular disease.
Only six years ago a physician and authority on marathon running declared: “When the level of vigorous exercise is raised high enough, protection from coronary heart disease appears to be absolute.” Based on the unfortunate experience of Jim Fixx, we now know that this is nonsense.
It’s time to put running in its proper perspective: an acceptable, although often tedious exercise which can confer benefits when carried out in moderation and within the bounds of common sense.
But running doesn’t make anybody immortal. It doesn’t bestow or confirm identity. And it can’t infuse meaning and purpose into lives that are otherwise unfulfilled.
You really need to read this.
https://www.si.com/track-and-field/2020/05/21/jim-fixx-legacy-running-coronavirus
‘Jim Fixx,’ Says Sedentary Man
For one guy in New Mexico, the case against running is simple.
By Mark Remy for Runner’s World. February 4, 2015.
In light of a recent study apparently claiming that strenuous running may do more harm than good, one man is speaking out.
“Jim Fixx,” says Ken Fallacia, 37, a sales rep from Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a message aimed squarely at the nation’s runners. “Jim Fixx.”
The study in question has gotten plenty of attention, in outlets from the BBC (Too Much Jogging ‘as Bad as No Exercise at All’) to The Los Angeles Times (When It Comes to Jogging, Less Is More, Study Argues).
In a recent column, Runner’s World contributor Alex Hutchinson sums it up:
The new article is published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, analyzing data from the Copenhagen City Heart Study. (And here, on cue, is one of the requisite newspaper articles: “Fast running is as deadly as sitting on the couch, scientists find.”) The exact same data was published back in 2012 in the American Journal of Epidemiology. This time the authors are the same, but with the addition of James O’Keefe, who has been an author on pretty much every single one of the “running will kill you” studies.
Hutchinson, an award-winning science writer, goes on to share the study’s raw data en route to explaining that it is nowhere near “any reasonable threshold of statistical significance” – i.e., nowhere near warranting the hyperbolic headlines seen in the mainstream media’s coverage.
Fallacia, however, brushes such arguments aside.
“Jim Fixx,” he points out.
Fallacia is an unlikely authority on the subject of health and fitness. He concedes that he has no personal experience with runners or running, no training in the fields of physiology, exercise science, or cardiovascular health, and no background in medical research, epidemiology, or statistics, and that he has never taken even an introductory level course in logic. Still, he asserts, “Jim Fixx.”
The married father of two, whose interests include being a 37-year-old sales rep, cultivated his views on running over a period of several moments in 1998. That’s when he first heard that Jim Fixx, whose best-selling book The Complete Book of Running is widely credited for helping to spark the running boom, died of a heart attack while running.
Friends and colleagues say he has been deploying his devastating rhetorical attack on the merits of cardiovascular exercise in general, and running in particular, ever since.
“Jim Fixx!” explains Fallacia, his sense of gleeful vindication almost palpable. “Jim. Fixx. Jim Fixx.”
Asked whether his borderline pathological focus on this one isolated incident – for which doctors blamed heredity and lifestyle factors, not running – had anything to do with a desire to rationalize his own slothful existence, Fallacia would only smile and shake his head.
“Jim Fixx,” he said.
Pressed to clarify his remarks, Fallacia replied:
“Jim Fixx. Jim Fixx Jim Fixx Jim Fixx Jim Fixx Jim Fixx. Jim Fixx? Jim Fixx.”
Fallacia says he is looking forward to offering advice to the next runner he happens to meet.
“Jim Fixx,” he says, before sitting down to catch his breath.
“Jim… Fixx.”
I’d feel better about that report if his name wasn’t Fallacia.
Jim Fixx was a reason to go, not to stop. My inscribed copy of Jackpot! says simply “FORWARD!”