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It’s 5:30 A.M. on an unseasonably warm October morning, and I’m standing in the driveway of my New Jersey home, waiting for my friend Paul. The lawn sprinklers have just kicked on, their susurration joining the predawn chorus of crickets. A bright, waxing gibbous moon is reflected in the hood of my Subaru. I’m about to take a good, long hike—the longest I’ve ever done in a day—for no real reason other than an obscure edict from the 26^th president of the United States.

On December 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt signed, with little fanfare, , headlined “Marine Corps Officers’ Physical Fitness.” It directed each officer of the United States Marine Corps to undergo a physical examination and a series of tests every two years.

The tests were simple. Officers would have to ride a horse 90 miles, “this distance to be covered in three days.” Officers ranked “in the grade of captain or lieutenant” were also required to walk 50 miles, with “actual marching time, including rests, twenty hours.” Seven hundred yards of this needed to be completed “on the double-time”—something like a slow jog. This test too could be spread across three days, allowing the soldiers sleep and recovery time.

Order 989’s rationale was spelled out bluntly: “In battle, time is essential and ground may have to be covered on the run; if these officers are not equal to the average physical strength of their companies the men will be held back, resulting in unnecessary loss of life and probably defeat.”

Neither the Army nor the Navy, which each got their own respective executive orders with the same test, escaped Roosevelt’s attention. “I have been unpleasantly struck,” he observed in a letter to Secretary of the Navy Truman Newberry, “by the lack of physical condition of some of the older officers, and even some of the younger officers.”

Roosevelt was in the waning days of his presidency, a time when outgoing leaders often try to settle up unfinished business, notes Ryan Swanson, associate professor of history at the University of Mexico and author of . “Executive orders sort of come and go, and aren’t really that enforceable.” But the one-time Rough Rider’s final volleys stemmed, Swanson argues, from concerns that, after a long period without a war, the Army was becoming a bunch of bureaucrats, unprepared for conflict.

And then there was Roosevelt himself. There was probably no other President in U.S. history so concerned with the bodies of the body politic. “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life,” he said in a famous 1899 speech that mixed personal uplift with more than a bit of saber rattling. Swanson says that Roosevelt, like other Progressive-era reformers, worried that “urbanization was making us weaker”—that we were living in unhealthy cities, that we were toiling in offices rather than plowing the fields of the Agrarian Republic (by 1900, only 40 percent of the country worked in agriculture).

There was, undoubtedly, some political stage-management at work. Roosevelt knew how to project the image of a strong leader. But he certainly walked the walk. Plagued by asthma and extreme myopia as a child, battling injury and struggling with his own weight as an adult, Roosevelt spent virtually his whole life engaged in the “strenuous life.” One of the first things Roosevelt did upon assuming the White House was to build a tennis court, on which he played hundreds of times. He was an avid boxer and dabbled in jujitsu. And one of his favorite ways to shake off the stresses of high office, notes Swanson, was to set off on impromptu hikes through Rock Creek Park, five miles north of the White House. He particularly favored what he called a “point-to-point walk” wherein he would perambulate from point A to B, directly, no matter what cliff, pond, or impenetrable vegetation was in the way. Roosevelt, recalled British ambassador Mortimer Durand, “made me struggle through bushes and over rocks for two hours and a half, at an impossible speed, til I was so done that I could hardly stand.”

And so, when Roosevelt issued his series of executive orders on the fitness of the military branches—the predecessors to today’s physical readiness tests, or PRTs—it wasn’t merely the fiat of an armchair general. This was a man, after all, who, after being shot during a speech in Milwaukee, continued orating with a bullet inside of him. (The bullet was slowed somewhat by a sheaf of papers tucked into the inner pocket of his coat).

The orders immediately kicked up complaints. As historical journal The Grog recounts, “Navy Surgeon James Gatewood complained that the endurance test would leave participants in a ‘depressed physical state.’” The Navy’s surgeon general said it could put the lives of officers over 50 at risk. As if to carry the torch for his own initiative, on January 13, 1909, Roosevelt (then 51) and a small party of Naval officers set out for a horseback ride to Warrenton, Virginia, a distance of 49 miles each way. Following a 3:45 A.M. breakfast of steak and eggs, Roosevelt, on his own steed Roswell, set out into a day marked by freezing rain, eventually returning to the White House at 8:30 P.M., declaring the ride—yep, you guessed it—“Bully!”

Shortly after, Roosevelt was out of office. His successor, William Taft, demolished the tennis courts. A , 193, did away with the test and called for a monthly ten-mile walk, “to be completed in neither more than four nor less than three hours.” Roosevelt’s challenge may have faded into historical memory, were it not for its later rediscovery by John F. Kennedy who engaged in his own Rooseveltian crusade, albeit with a Cold War twist.

According to the podcast Ultrarunning History, Kennedy charged his Marine Commandant with putting a group of his officers to the test in 1962. While not intended for the general public, word got out, and there was a brief, nationwide “50-mile frenzy” in the early 1960s, with everyone from Eagle Scouts to a mother of three to the President’s brother, Robert, completing 50-mile walks. But this mania soon subsided, and all most of us know today of Kennedy’s fitness program were the push-ups and shuttle runs we might have been asked to do in our grade school gyms.