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Outside Magazine August 2001

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Better Shape Up
Once a nation of adventure-athletes, America is getting fatter by the day.

By Mark Jenkins

SOMETHING AWFUL is happening in this country. Something deeply harmful, and yet so smoothly woven into the sequined fabric of modern American life as to be all but invisible.

"It's the unspoken epidemic," says Rich Killingsworth, a health scientist for the Centers for Disease Control who lectures extensively on building fit communities.

Some 18 to 22 percent of Americans—more than five million children and 53 million adults—are obese (defined as weighing 30 pounds over ideal weight), a figure that has doubled since the 1970s.

"Obesity aside," Killingsworth says, "25 percent of children are overweight, 35 percent of college students are overweight, 61 percent of adults are overweight. Poor diet and inactivity now account for the greatest number of deaths in America besides tobacco—over 300,000 annually. The cost to the U.S. is over $150 billion a year."

The news has only gotten worse in the five years since the Office of the Surgeon General published its first ever Report on Physical Activity and Health. The 1996 document offered sobering and incontrovertible evidence that went to the root of the problem: 25 percent of American youth and adults had no vigorous activity in their lives at all; daily participation in physical education by high school students had dropped from 42 percent to 25 percent in less than five years. The report went on to detail the oft-heralded physiological and psychological benefits of regular exercise, including reduction in overall mortality and lowered risks of Type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and depression and anxiety disorders.

What does all this have to do with adventure and an active life in the outdoors?

A few years ago I climbed Aconcagua, the 22,834-foot Andean peak, by the easy route. My partner and I went for the summit on the same day as a professionally guided group of 16 well-acclimatized climbers, most of them Americans, but only half of them made it. Oddly, it was the older climbers who topped out—every one of the climbers in their teens and twenties had failed. When I questioned the guide, he shrugged.

"This is normal," he said.

I asked if the youths had turned back because of altitude.

"Nope," the guide replied. "They're just really out of shape."

I was in the Wind River Range last summer, four miles in, when I came upon a group of teenage backpackers sprawled across the trail. They'd had enough. They told me they'd planned to spend a week, but this was as far as they were going. Drained and irritable, they were camping there and heading back in the morning.

In Utah I helped rescue four mountain bikers who were too out of shape to ride back to their car. On Mount Kenya I helped hump out a tubby American climber who'd had a heart attack.

Like it or not, a modicum of physical fitness is a prerequisite for adventure. Not merely for safety and survival, but simply to experience the animal joy of outdoor sports and self-propelled wilderness travel.

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