=1 "Exercise yes, exercise no"
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Exercise yes, exercise no
Exercise yes exercise no. Animals never exercise. They keep moving. They move and rest and move and rest. They go around naked, eat unfired food, when wild, sleep outdoors. They never die. They return to animal.
Man never dies. He experiences something he names death, but he cannot conceive 'I am not'.
By airplane two hours north of Stockholm in Sweden and an hour of driving into the forest brings me to the finest athletic training establishment perhaps in the world, the only one with spring moss.
Here at Valadalen, the name of a no-town, I meet Gosta Olander, world-famous for having trained more champion athletes than anyone else. He has spent 35 years in the building of these dwellings, athletic fields, skating rinks, ski jump, and a fine mountain hotel with the healthiest young patrons. I ask him his secret. He does not say. He shows me. He takes me to an 800-meter gray sand beach edging a lake. You run a few miles in this soft sand to strengthen your feet and legs. Then you jog over to the spring moss and run on it barefooted. Each step springs you up, so soft and pillowy is the turf. It helps inject a flexive response through your musculature. It is like running on a mattress - only better.
Then you continue running on one side of the many narrow mountain paths made by the Lapps with their reindeer herds, narrow so you run in a straight line up and downhill with stamina. Next you return to the spring moss for release.
It takes only two or three weeks of this for you to become a runner. You take a plunge in the cold pool and are ready for superb Swedish food. What buttermilk and applesauce!
You are doing all this at an altitude of 1,900 feet which produces more red blood cells immediately. In the pure mountain air, in an athlete’s environment of no smoking, no drinking, no indulging, no idle talk, no cars, no sidewalks, no stores, and everyone with one intent.
Next you study the animals in a large zoo who teach you movement. The Himalayan bears show you how to move from center. The foxes, alertness; the wolverines, tirelessness; the deer, sensitivity; the flamingos, how to step; the crows, observation. No animal is so foolish as to define such qualities. Animal lives them as they live him. The ego is man’s invention.
You study the Lapps in wigwam houses with turf sides and boughs for floor, men strong as forest trees, always outdoors.
Nature is speaking Olander’s secret. No wonder all manner of athletes are learning from him. The air is charged with win. What is the secret?
Keep moving. Come out of doors. Learn from the animals. Go to bed with the birds. Get into the game of life. Eat live foods to build live cells. Welcome rain, thank sun, keep supple, sweat, move.
The strength, endurance, and speed Olander evokes in others are of nature. He only channels the big message into the champions, merely human champions winning at artificed games and remembering it the rest of their lives. But they get a rich reward. They live longer and better and cleaner for having drawn from nature, their nature.
Come in the batsdu, the Finnish sauna, where in the hot dry rooms your billion pores let go and out come the poisons and you feel fresher for a week. When you are pouring sweat, jump into the cold pool, in winter into the snow.
Three miles up that mountain is a lake full of fish. Run there. Spring. Save your life. All you have to do is to take to the forest, forget style and that paraphenalia of anti-you. All you have to do is to keep flexive, supple. Move smooth. Move and rest. Move all through. When resting really rest through every cell. Don’t listen to others, don’t be restless for amusements. And when you move don’t tighten your neck. Loosen those wrists. Don’t make faces. Run ahead of yourself. Loosen that neck.
It’s late morning, 5 a.m. The big bear opens one eye and looks at me. He uncurls, gives a tremendous yawn, curls up again, breathes a long outbreath into his fur and goes to sleep. The best sleep is after waking. The best waking is early. There’s something in the air. The owl as large as a small barrel opens an unblinking eye. He sees everything he needs to see.
What is our mother nature but this shrub, this weed, this you in relation to this me, in infinite surprise relations. Pardon these stiff words for the adventure.
You can’t run in heels, in high heels. You really can’t. Here young women are as athletically inclined as men. What good is a construction that can’t run? You can’t be sick and run.
Run is only to run, 10 more steps each day. It costs nothing. To ever be sick is expensive business.
Heart is the mover. Whatever we think as mind only surfaces heart power. Animals move with heart. We are animals too, sense-crippled but cunning.
A man does what he must. Olander was born to teach athletes, to bridge man and nature uniquely. But how about us?