Infatuated by an obscure 1573 book advocating exercise, De Arte Gymnastica by physician-scholar Girolamo Mercuriale, Hayes devotes a tad too much page space to it. Otherwise, Hayes entertainingly describes his adventures in the world of fitness, learning how to box at a pugilists’ boot camp, swimming, running, and performing power yoga in a New York gym class. A brisk jaunt through the history of working out in Western civilization.
There is a playfulness in Hayes’s writing, which reaches from a rich topsoil of endearing wordplay to the deepest layers of curiosity and empathy. He takes a profound, historian’s pleasure in tropes that echo across centuries ... Hayes is wrong about some things – he thinks Mercuriale looks like Shakespeare, which he doesn’t at all - and absolutely fascinating in his own, idiosyncratic fascinations. In between, he splices in his personal sporting journey, from swimming to boxing to running, to being a gym rat, to glancing medit – certainly the route isn’t chronological –ations on his father, and somehow he arrives at today’s conception of exercise ... while Hayes is extremely alert to race and gender politics, never gulled by the exclusions of historical record, he’s not so hot on these big ideological fissures. If that sounds like a criticism, it isn’t; rather, a way of saying, I would have liked more views, more observations, on more subjects – basically, I would have liked this book to go on for a lot longer. Erudite, ludic, eccentric, energetic and historically transporting, it’s like falling through a gym and landing in a joust.
Hayes’s book brings the narrative up to the 20th century with an exploration of modern exercise gurus like Jack LaLanne and Jane Fonda ... At once a book about exercise history, and a travelogue, a literary discovery tour, and another of Hayes’s personal and exhilarating memoirs.
