The Bull Moose Runs

Between rough-riding and canal-building, Teddy Roosevelt kinda-sorta invented "jogging."

Monday, April 28, 2014, 9:00 am
Andy Friedman

So I’m reading “The Bully Pulpit,” Doris Kearns Goodwin's new 900-page dual biography of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, as one does, and I come across this astounding sentence on page 134: "Even Roosevelt, with his singular disciplined drive, managed to quit work early four or five afternoons each week for a game of tennis or jog through Rock Creek Park…"

What? A "jog through Rock Creek Park"? This was the 1890s, 80 years before the first stirrings of the running boom, back when "aerobic" was a word known only to scientists, and people only ran when fleeing their oppressors. Could it be that Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president of these United States, icon of Mount Rushmore, hero of San Juan Hill, was also our nation's true running pioneer, our Ur-jogger? When the thousands of men and women who flock to Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., every day run the paths by the creeks and woods, are they tracking the century-old footsteps of a Bull Moose?


I called Goodwin to find out, and the answer is… sort of, maybe. "I don't know that he'd call it 'running,'" she told me. "He'd call it 'hiking,' but he was hiking fast. It wasn't just a leisurely walk in the woods." Nor a pensive stroll around the square - Goodwin claims T.R. "ran three or four miles a day" while at Harvard.

One story that became part of Teddy's immense legend in his own era: The ambassador of France accepted an invitation to "take a promenade" with the president, and, as he wrote later, presented himself at the White House "in afternoon dress and silk hat, as if we were to stroll in the Tuileries Garden or in the Champs Elysees." But it wasn't a "promenade" the roughly dressed Roosevelt had in mind. Much like many of us when a newbie joins our running group, Roosevelt felt that if a visitor pops by during the time for the day's outing, the visitor must keep up or be left behind. The ambassador, being diplomatic, went along. Soon, Roosevelt was leading him on one of his jaunts through Rock Creek Park, and one of the rules, as Goodwin explains, was that the hike was "point to point" - no going around. You were going from Point A to Point B, and you had to climb over, under, or charge through whatever was in between them. Consider it a primordial Tough Mudder.

So the ambassador of France is stumbling through Rock Creek Park in his shiny shoes and spats, trying to keep up with the president, who was most likely barking out ideas and demands and exclamations along the way. They came to a stream too wide to jump, and the Frenchman assumed, with great relief, that the ordeal had ended. "Judge of my horror," he wrote, "when I saw the President unbutton his clothes and heard him say, 'We had better strip, so as not to wet our things in the Creek.' Then I, too, for the honor of France, removed my apparel, everything except my lavender kid gloves… [I said,] 'With your permission, Mr. President, I will keep these on, otherwise it would be embarrassing if we should meet ladies.' And so we jumped into the water and swam across."

Despite his impressive exertions - Roosevelt also boxed, played tennis, and jumped horses, among many other vigorous endeavors - we can't truly trace the origins of our modern sport to his impressive legs. But he belongs in the pantheon of running pioneers because he was one of the first, and easily the most well-known, Americans to popularize the notion of exercise as self-improvement. (Ben Franklin's and Thomas Jefferson's exhortations along those lines seem to have fallen largely on deaf ears.) As Goodwin told me, Roosevelt became president during the transition of America from a rural, agrarian country to a world power of urban might. The battleships that Roosevelt used for his "gunboat diplomacy" came from the growing cities, made by workers who had once raised crops, here or in their native countries.

Roosevelt himself had been a sickly, unathletic child, bookish and shy, until his concerned father said to him, "Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body, the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body." It was said by a wealthy Knickerbocker to his son in 1866, and it could be emblazoned on a poster in a running store today.

And so Roosevelt made his body and became an evangelist for physical exercise. On one occasion, says Goodwin, he thought his military officers were getting soft, so he challenged them to accompany him on a three-day excursion on horseback. He thought Americans were getting soft, so he provided for them an exemplar of vigor and motion and joy. Who knows how many people he inspired to wrestle, box, play, move? America loved Teddy, and they all knew, if they wanted to catch a glimpse of him, they had to catch him.

Goodwin credits Roosevelt's exercise regimen for his astounding energy: In addition to two terms as president, he traveled the world (in the days when that was a potentially fatal pastime), wrote more than 35 books, governed New York, ran the NYPD as commissioner, survived an assassination attempt that put a bullet in his chest, and was a devoted and active husband and father. He kept moving until the day he died, at the age of 60, felled by a coronary embolism. Death took him in his sleep because, the vice president at the time said, "If he had been awake, there would have been a fight."

I remain disappointed that Teddy didn't invent recreational running, because then we could call our hobby "Roosevelting." But still: When you rise up from your office or workstation, when you leap into motion and go from "point to point," with no care for the obstacles in between, when you move for the sake of motion, and because "without the help of the body, the mind cannot go as far as it should," you are, indeed, running in the steps of Roosevelt, even if you would have outpaced him. (Maybe.) Next time you visit Mount Rushmore, pay your respects to our first Jogger in Chief, and make sure you get there on foot.

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Peter Sagal is a 3:20 marathoner and the host of NPR's Wait, Wait… Don't Tell Me! For more, go to