Although he had a penchant for physical exercise, Theodore Roosevelt faced the same battle that we all do, against time. His physical activities while President varied greatly. He enjoyed his strenuous [hikes](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/s/D6GeJBcZ3S), and he enjoyed stick-fighting with General Leonard Wood. At first they used relatively light sticks; when these kept splintering, they switched to stouter ones. Thereafter it was calcium that shattered instead of cellulose; one especially sharp blow broke Roosevelt’s right arm. “I have had to temporarily stop singlestick with General Wood,” the president recorded. A different man might have inferred from this that hand-to-hand combat was best left to his juniors; not Roosevelt. He took up the singlesticks again once his bone mended, and on off days he boxed with young military officers. Following one boxing bout in late 1904, he reported further injuries. “I am sorry to say I have wrenched my thigh again and succeeded in breaking a blood vessel in one eye.” Although the thigh slowly mended, the eye never did. Indeed, the injury precipitated a gradual deterioration of the left eye that ended in Roosevelt’s losing sight on that side. Meanwhile the president continued to box, and to receive additional bruises.
Roosevelt was hardly the first or last to deny the obvious—-that he, like everyone else, was getting older. But for him the inexorable loss of strength, flexibility, and recuperative powers came particularly hard. From the age of eleven his self-esteem had been intimately entwined in his conception of his physical prowess. Of course, what he had accomplished in the literary and especially the political fields vastly outstripped anything he had done as an athlete or outdoorsman. And sometimes this afforded solace. “Gracious me!” he declared a few weeks after the 1904 election. “I am so glad I am elected President, so that it does not make any difference really whether I am or am not as physically fit as formerly.” On other occasions, though, the corporal toll came harder. “I eat too much and have very little exercise, and work all the time in sedentary fashion,” he complained to Kermit, “and so naturally I get out of condition.” To a longtime friend he lamented that he had become “both old and fat.”
As he lost the battle of the calendar and the belt, Roosevelt discovered that peace and quiet, rather than the boisterous activity he had customarily employed, were what he required to revive himself. “I have been having a real rest this summer,” he wrote Cabot Lodge in August 1906, “and incidentally have grown to realize that I have reached that time of life when too violent physical exercise does not rest a man when he has had an exhausting mental career.” With all that being said, he did find something that he thoroughly enjoyed: Tennis. Indeed, the tennis court at the White House became famous as the meeting ground for his “tennis cabinet, the shifting group of aletic intimates who also talked politics with the president, although not so often or with such effect as the conspiracy-minded of his critics imagined.
And he continued to hurt himself. “Last Monday I strained my ankle playing tennis,” he told Kermit after one excessively strenuous afternoon on the court, “but did not think it amounted to anything and played a couple of sets more, with the result that I have had to abandon even riding, and am now engaged busily in doing nothing when I am not at my Presidential work!”
Source: T.R., The Last Romantic, pages 564-566
Warny55 on
His expedition in the Amazon really took years off of his life.
Moidada77 on
I mean we eventually lose that battle anyway
TiberiusGemellus on
His son Quentin had been shot over France a year earlier. That must have broken him.
Spudnic16 on
Despite all that he still asked congress to serve as an enlistee during WW1
chrisGPl on
And racist
elreduro on
Did they model peter griffin around theodore roosevelt?
7 Comments
Although he had a penchant for physical exercise, Theodore Roosevelt faced the same battle that we all do, against time. His physical activities while President varied greatly. He enjoyed his strenuous [hikes](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/s/D6GeJBcZ3S), and he enjoyed stick-fighting with General Leonard Wood. At first they used relatively light sticks; when these kept splintering, they switched to stouter ones. Thereafter it was calcium that shattered instead of cellulose; one especially sharp blow broke Roosevelt’s right arm. “I have had to temporarily stop singlestick with General Wood,” the president recorded. A different man might have inferred from this that hand-to-hand combat was best left to his juniors; not Roosevelt. He took up the singlesticks again once his bone mended, and on off days he boxed with young military officers. Following one boxing bout in late 1904, he reported further injuries. “I am sorry to say I have wrenched my thigh again and succeeded in breaking a blood vessel in one eye.” Although the thigh slowly mended, the eye never did. Indeed, the injury precipitated a gradual deterioration of the left eye that ended in Roosevelt’s losing sight on that side. Meanwhile the president continued to box, and to receive additional bruises.
Roosevelt was hardly the first or last to deny the obvious—-that he, like everyone else, was getting older. But for him the inexorable loss of strength, flexibility, and recuperative powers came particularly hard. From the age of eleven his self-esteem had been intimately entwined in his conception of his physical prowess. Of course, what he had accomplished in the literary and especially the political fields vastly outstripped anything he had done as an athlete or outdoorsman. And sometimes this afforded solace. “Gracious me!” he declared a few weeks after the 1904 election. “I am so glad I am elected President, so that it does not make any difference really whether I am or am not as physically fit as formerly.” On other occasions, though, the corporal toll came harder. “I eat too much and have very little exercise, and work all the time in sedentary fashion,” he complained to Kermit, “and so naturally I get out of condition.” To a longtime friend he lamented that he had become “both old and fat.”
As he lost the battle of the calendar and the belt, Roosevelt discovered that peace and quiet, rather than the boisterous activity he had customarily employed, were what he required to revive himself. “I have been having a real rest this summer,” he wrote Cabot Lodge in August 1906, “and incidentally have grown to realize that I have reached that time of life when too violent physical exercise does not rest a man when he has had an exhausting mental career.” With all that being said, he did find something that he thoroughly enjoyed: Tennis. Indeed, the tennis court at the White House became famous as the meeting ground for his “tennis cabinet, the shifting group of aletic intimates who also talked politics with the president, although not so often or with such effect as the conspiracy-minded of his critics imagined.
And he continued to hurt himself. “Last Monday I strained my ankle playing tennis,” he told Kermit after one excessively strenuous afternoon on the court, “but did not think it amounted to anything and played a couple of sets more, with the result that I have had to abandon even riding, and am now engaged busily in doing nothing when I am not at my Presidential work!”
Source: T.R., The Last Romantic, pages 564-566
His expedition in the Amazon really took years off of his life.
I mean we eventually lose that battle anyway
His son Quentin had been shot over France a year earlier. That must have broken him.
Despite all that he still asked congress to serve as an enlistee during WW1
And racist
Did they model peter griffin around theodore roosevelt?