HOW TO GET STRONG
estimated the route I travelled at forty-five miles of bad road would be equal to fifty of good.…
"Beginning at twenty-five miles per day, walking slowly but keeping pretty constantly in motion, you may add two or three miles per day till you have reached forty. All above that I judge must, for most persons, involve exhaustive fatigue.… The railroads have nearly killed pedestrianism, and I regret it. A walk of two or three hundred miles in a calm, clear October is one of the cheap, wholesome luxuries of life, as free to the poor as to the rich."
He had equally strong views about another kind of exercise, for he says (page 303): "The axe is the healthiest implement that man ever handled, and is especially so for habitual writers and other sedentary workers, whose shoulders it throws back, expanding their chests and opening their lungs. If every youth and man from fifteen to fifty years old could wield an axe two hours per day, dyspepsia would vanish from the earth, and rheumatism become decidedly scarce. I am a poor chopper; yet the axe is my doctor and my delight. Its use gives the mind just enough occupation to prevent its falling into revery or absorbing trains of thought; while every muscle in the body receives sufficient, yet not exhausting exercise. I wish all our boys would learn to love the axe."
Sometime when you are run down, and think you must go to Europe, spend a thousand dollars, hanging around spas and other loafing-places, and imagine this will rebuild you; try instead a month swinging an axe with the lumbermen of Maine or Wisconsin—earning money instead of spending it—and you will get a vigor that will do you good for a whole year afterwards.
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