A Fit Body Necessarily Mean a Fit Mind? : Author Takes a ‘Mindful’ Modern Look Into Age-Old Notion

When Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer was compiling data for her new book, she turned to a horse and a tennis racket rather than a laboratory rat and a Rorschach Test. As both an avid athlete and academic, Langer is a firm believer in the classical Greek notion of sound mind/sound body, and she has incorporated that idea into her theories of human behavior.

In her book, “Mindfulness” (Addison Wesley), Langer argues that sports and other fitness activities may help improve your psychological well-being--and possibly add years to your life--by making you more mindful or alert to your surroundings.

“When I ride (horses) and various things are happening at the same time--I’m moving fast through varying terrains on an animal with its own mind--I tend to be very mindful, which makes me feel fully alert and exhilarated,” Langer says.

Does the same thing hold true for running, cycling and aerobics? Do fitness activities in general enhance or detract from the life of the mind? What better laboratory to research these questions could there be than our country’s ivory towers?

Ray Vernon, Harvard University professor emeritus of international affairs, has written volumes on foreign business matters, but when it comes to explaining his passion for sculling, he’s hard-pressed for words. In describing the drive that keeps him rowing more than 1,000 miles a year, the 75-year-old scholarly sculler can only say, “My body craves it (the rowing work-out). If I don’t work out, I start biting my fingernails down to the second joint.”

March through December, Vernon sculls the Charles River in Cambridge solo five days a week, and on Sunday mornings takes a leisurely 10-mile double-scull. The three months when the Charles is thick with ice, he works out on a rowing machine.

Sculling is a relatively new sport for Vernon. A devoted four-wall handball player for 25 years, he did not pick up his first pair of oars until age 50, when a wrist injury forced him to mothball his handball glove. Twenty-five years later, however, sculling continues to fascinate him.

“It’s one of the most elusive sports in the world. Like golf, if you think negative thoughts, you throw off your game. It calls for endless improvement.”

It’s clear to this Harvard man that the Greeks were right about this sound body/sound mind business.

“Rowing clears my head, reduces the amount of sleep I need, improves everything needed for good, hard mental work,” Vernon says. Of course, he notes, there are exceptions to every rule: “There are some people in terrible condition who are fine scholars.”

When he turned 30 and his peers began getting nostalgic about team sports, Gerald Peary, associate professor of journalism and film at Suffolk University in Boston, decided to learn to play basketball.

“I was a terrible athlete as a kid,” Peary openly admits. “I was the guy picked first for spelling bees and last for sports teams.”

He doesn’t understand where the urge came from, but suddenly, after three decades as an armchair fan, he wanted to pass and shoot.

Fourteen years and one Fulbright scholarship later, the 5-foot-11, 155-pound Peary remains enchanted with the game.

“The sound of a bouncing basketball is like the Pied Piper’s flute,” he says. “I hear the bmmpp, bmmpp, bmmpping of the ball, and I’m mesmerized, ready to travel to the edge of the earth for a pickup game.”

And he has. The first thing Peary did after settling into his St. Thomas honeymoon suite was find a gym. The only visitor on a court of 30 islanders, he was ecstatic.

“It was as if I were playing basketball in the ‘50s,” he says, referring to “the players’ beautiful two-handed set shots and wonderful flying curves.”

Three years ago, while studying Yugoslavian film comedy in Belgrade as a Fulbright scholar, Peary turned into a Sunday night basketball fanatic. Yugoslavs, Peary explains, are very tall people, naturally boisterous and talkative, and basketball is their excuse to make a lot of noise.

Peary’s thrice-weekly visits to the YMCA have become essential, he says. The two-hour games (plus a low-fat diet) keep his cholesterol and pomposity in check, and his humor intact.

Peary has given up the dream of learning to dribble--”Alas, alack, I’m destined to shoot or pass the ball forever”--but hopes in the next five years to be master leaping and rebounding.

That he’s still playing at age 44, he says, is what really matters.

“All my life I’ve been in mediocre shape. Since most people quit playing in their 30s, I’m doing far better than 90% of men my age.”

Bob McGrath, professor of art history at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, emphatically rejects the sound mind/sound body theory. Having skied competitively the last decade, this downhill sage speaks from a well of experience.

“For me, athletes are so consuming, they tend to work against my intellectual advancement. I can’t think of a single instance in which my intellect has improved from competition. Character, yes. Many aspects of my personality have been improved, and disimproved.”

At the masters level, the 54-year-old American art expert is ranked one of the top five alpine skiers nationally, and one of the top five bicyclists in New England (in his age group).

Though the seeds of competition were planted at a young age--he competed internationally against the likes of Olympic skier Tony Sailer in the ‘50s--McGrath took a break during his graduate studies at Princeton.

“When I got interested in girls and books, in that order, I renounced athletics and immersed myself in the life of the mind.” Working 12 hours a day, six days a week, his waist expanded right along with his mind, he says, and might have kept expanding if a Dartmouth colleague hadn’t challenged him to a tennis game.

“I got thoroughly trounced and so angry I decided to redeem myself.” Thus his competitive ferocity was reborn, first on the tennis court, and after a subsequent trouncing on skis, on the slopes. He’s been racing ever since, winning each new age group (he’s on his third) the first two or three years, and then falling back to a respectable second or third place until reaching the next age category.

Since regaining that competitive edge, the 5-foot-11, 160-pound professor is able to keep his downhill skills sharp two weekday afternoons and on weekends. It isn’t enough, he admits, but between family and career responsibilities, that’s all the time there is.

The future holds many more races, but no specific goals for McGrath.

“My competitive fires are beginning to wane slowly, though they’ll never vanish. Now I’m focusing on having fun and enjoying the competition more.”