Sweat: A History of Exercise - Bill Hayes

Two fun facts about Plato. He had been a competitive wrestler himself at athletic competitions when he was a younger man. And his name, Plato, was a nickname. His given name was Aristocles, but I guess his wrestling coach, noticing he was very broad-shouldered, made a nickname of the word for broad-shouldered, which was Platon, and called him Plato. You know, a good example, I think, is the very opening passage in the book, which is called Plunge, where I plunge into a really, really, really cold mountain lake. This was October at a lake in upstate New York. It was a beautiful fall day, but not the kind of day where you would normally go swimming. I just decided I have to try it. And when I got out and climbed onto the dock, there were some other people there. This was an artist's residency in upstate New York. And they were all like, what the hell are you doing? It's freezing out, and the lake is 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And I said, because I can, meaning, not meaning like to show off, but because I can, because I'm human, because I'm alive, because I'm healthy, because I'm still at an age with an ability that I can just do that and try it and see what it's like. And that's sort of my philosophy, like, do it while you can. Hello everyone, welcome to RTDirt Podcast, where I, Vasek Armanikis, ask questions to best-selling non-fiction authors about their books and ideas. This episode's guest is actually one of my favorite contemporary writers. His name is Bill Hayes. I fell in love with Bill Hayes's writing ever since I discovered and read his book called The Anatomist, in which Bill Hayes explored the creation of one of the most famous books of all time. It's a classical medical text that we know today as Grey's Anatomy. In this episode, Bill Hayes will tell us more about his recent book that came out in January 2022, and it's called Sweat, a History of Exercise. It's a cultural and scientific history of exercise from the ancient times to modern day, from Hippocrates and Plato to Jane Fonda, and it gives us an opportunity to look at the way we exercise from a new angle and understand what role does exercise play in our lives in 21st century. Before we'll start with the interview, I wanted to say that this conversation was actually one of my favorite conversations that I had for a very long time, and I really hope that you will enjoy listening to it. Thank you, Mr. Hayes, for coming to my podcast. I have received so many emails with questions for you and your book that I hope we'll have enough time to kind of go through them because they are all so exciting. Perhaps I wanted to begin by saying that I fell in love with your writing when I encountered your book, The Anatomist. I really loved it, and I really enjoyed it. And then after some time, my wife came with a book called Insomniac City and told me, you have to read this. The writing is wonderful. I was like, oh, I know this author. And I've noticed that when I saw that you're releasing a book called Sweat, A History of Exercise, I was like, I need to preorder it, and I really enjoyed it. I wanted to ask you, like, The Anatomist is about the anatomy. You are exploring the writing of the famous work. Insomniac City is kind of autobiographical, and Sweat is a history of exercise. And I'm curious, how do you choose the subjects that you are going to write about? In a way, they choose me. It's whatever I am sort of obsessed with at the time. Sweat, A History of Exercise, is closer to my first three books, like The Anatomist, than to Insomniac City. Insomniac City, as you know, is pure memoir, memoir about my life in New York City, my life with Oliver Sacks, whereas my earlier books, like The Anatomist, were this interweaving or combination of history, history of medicine or history of science, and personal narrative or memoir. I've always been interested in history, and I've always been interested in the human body. And maybe if I had followed a very different path, I would have become a doctor or gone into medicine. I never did that. I never even pursued a graduate degree. I've always loved to write. But it just felt natural with The Anatomist and with Sweat to try to bring the history alive through my own experience. And when it came to Sweat, how did I come to pick that? Well, I've always enjoyed working out and exercise. As you know from the book, that was very much part of my boyhood in a small town in Washington State, being raised by a military father who was very athletic himself. So I've always had that interest and tried different things over the years, whether lifting or running or yoga. But the idea for Sweat actually came appropriately enough in the gym one day. And this was many years ago. This book, this is my seventh book, and it took me longer to write than any other book. And we can talk about that separately. But it was about ten years ago that I was in a gym, and I climbed atop a Stairmaster, which is sort of an old-school cardio machine, not like the super fancy ellipticals you find today. And I punched in my program and put down my towel and my water, and I was just about to go. And for some reason, I looked out at the gym floor, all these people, men and women, lifting weights, doing pull-ups, doing yoga. And I just thought, how did we all end up here in gyms? And if I were to trace a line backward in time, where would I land? When did this all begin? And it was really just a question. I got off the Stairmaster, got dressed, and went to the library, just thinking I would find a book on the history of exercise to answer that question. And I didn't. And a lightbulb went on, for sure. I thought, huh, that's kind of interesting. That would be an interesting topic for a book. But it did take me a few years before I kind of... Things led me in my life to really have the time to explore that question. And that's when that journey began. After reading your book, I realized how much our culture is reflected in the way we exercise. When you trace back from the origins to our day, that element of how we exercise tells a lot about ourselves, about how we view life. Where does one begin researching such a broad topic? How did you decide what this book is going to be like? Because this book could turn into a 1,000, 2,000-page book, which you actually refer to. There was one book that you are referring to constantly that is huge. We'll talk about it. So where do you begin? Well, that is such a great question. I did begin back at the library a couple of years after that first foray to the library, a wonderful library here in New York called the New York Academy of Medicine and their Rare Books Room. And I started, I have to admit, with the most obvious names in the history of medicine, Hippocrates, translations of Hippocrates, Galen, Plato, some 19th-century writers, people I already sort of knew. And it was the librarian herself who introduced me to Gerolimo Mercuriale. She had put the ten books aside that I had reserved, and she said, well, you must know about Gerolimo Mercuriale. And I had to admit, no, I've never heard of him. And she said, hold on here a moment. And she went back into storage and came back wearing white gloves and holding a pristine edition of Mercuriale's 1569 book, De Arte Gymnastica. And I was immediately captivated, but I couldn't read it because it was written in Medieval Latin. So that started a journey to find an English translation and track down the translator and so forth. And since you've read the book, you know about all my travels and research that I did. But you're right, it was tricky to structure this book to figure out how to tell the story. It could have been an 800-page book, I'm sure. But I write the kinds of books that I like to read. And I also felt like the topic exercise would be a fascinating one for exploring cultural history, as you said, and history of medicine. And I felt that I should approach it in a somewhat lighthearted way, that we're not talking about, I don't know, World War II. We're talking about exercise. And I wanted to keep the tone of it somewhat lighthearted and personal and playful, while also getting into the deeper story of the history of exercise, which goes back at least to the 5th century BC. I love that wonderful balance between your book of Insomniac City and The Anatomist. It's part biography and your personal experience, as I mentioned, and part, obviously, a history. And you connect those two things together. And you explored several types of exercise, from swimming and boxing to fencing. And I wonder, were all of these done exclusively to explore the subject for your book? Or how much of it was the book, and how much was your kind of nature and love for exercise? I think more the latter. I think more my nature and love for it, really. Like the boxing boot camp, you know, the book is not meant to be purely chronological. Some of it is memoir, like remembering back. And the boxing boot camp I did before I was seriously deep into the book. So I did the boxing boot camp because I seriously wanted to learn how to box, a lesson I came to sort of regret, because it was much, much, much more challenging and scarier than I ever expected. But I did it for the experience. I mean, ever since I was a boy, when my dad took me to boxing matches and the film of Ali-Frazier fight, the great fight in 1971, I was intrigued. But it took me many, many years. And where I was living at the time, there was a real old-school boxing gym that offered these boxing boot camps. And I took a chance one day and popped my head in and said, do you have any classes or courses for learning how to box? And by chance, they had this boot camp six weeks, six days a week, 6 a.m. starting the next Monday. So I did it, and I kept a diary, which I incorporated into sweat. With swimming, the same thing. I had known how to swim since I was a kid, like most of us do, but was never a really serious swimmer until I got involved with my late partner, Oliver Sachs. Oliver was famously a great swimmer. He swam open water swims. He did lap swimming. And just as a couple, it became a part of our life as a couple, swimming together a couple of times a week. It's a really nice pool not too far from here, a really beautiful pool. And he urged me on and inspired me. He was such a great swimmer in his 70s that for me to take it up seriously in my 50s, that was more challenging than I expected. So I would say, first of all, I mean, I wasn't doing these exercises sort of as a gimmick or purely for the book. They were all things I was interested in. I was doing yoga occasionally. I've never I've never been a very serious yoga practitioner, but I started going to yoga classes many years ago. I think just wanting to incorporate into my overall workouts some different forms of exercise. When I was a teenager, I got very much into lifting, and I still enjoy lifting, working out. But I also had some really, you know, painful injuries like a torn rotator cuff and pulled abdominal muscles. And I wanted with yoga and with swimming to do something a little gentler on my body. But then when it came to actually writing the book and making the decision to incorporate memoir, personal narrative, I knew I could draw upon these experiences and bring them into the book. This is the reason why I really enjoyed reading your book. It is the personal passion that you have for the exercise while showing the historic side of how those exercises evolved, how did they came to be, and connecting it with the past. You said that Mercurial's work was written in Latin. What made you not to stop and say like, oh, I can't read this. This is a huge book. Well, I'm going to go and find a translator for this. I know. Well, I'm very tenacious. That's part of my nature, I guess, as well. I will tell you the truth, though. When she brought that book out, it was clear that it was such a precious book. It really felt like an honor just to be able to see it, you know, that it had survived 500 years or more. But when I opened the book, I happened to open it up to a page with one of Piero Ligorio's illustrations, an engraving of two pairs of naked men wrestling. And it was captivating for lots of reasons, but captivating just as a very kind of bold, beautiful illustration. And that really captured my imagination. As I leafed through the book, even though I couldn't read it, I did recognize one word in Latin, which I was sure was the word for exercise. That intrigued me. I wanted to read more. And Piero Ligorio's other illustrations. And I think it was in this way, it was sort of like Henry Gray's book, which I write about in The Anatomist. I feel like Henry Gray's anatomy may not have survived as long as it has. It's never gone out of print, were it not for the amazing anatomical illustrations in that book, which were the work of a different Henry, Henry Carter. And similarly, with Mercuriali's book, De Arte Gymnastica, I think those illustrations are one of the reasons it became popular. And there were many editions within Mercuriali's lifetime. So I was just determined to find a translation that I could read. I wanted to know what he had to say about exercise in 1569 and to learn more about the artist. You know, at that time, when I first saw it, I had no idea who the artist was or his story. I didn't even know his name. So I'm really glad I made that journey. You found Dr. Nuttin, if I'm not mistaken, who translated that work into English. And why did Mercuriali decide to write a book on the exercise? Because, as you mentioned, during the ancient Greece and Rome, exercise was important for many reasons. But with the coming of Christianity, the emphasis shifted from the body to the soul, and exercise was kind of on the fringes. Why did this Christian person decide to write about the topic of the body when everybody was focusing on the soul? Yeah, I'm so glad you put it that way. It's so important to remember that adjective. He was Christian. He was Catholic. Well, I mean, one of the most important things, Mercuriali was a physician. And he was, in his role in Rome, excuse me, personal physician to a very prominent and wealthy cardinal, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. So his job was to be a doctor and to advise the cardinal. My impression is that Farnese, Cardinal Farnese, was fairly young and seemed to be in fairly good health. Yet this was Mercuriali's full-time job, even lived in the household with Farnese. So I think he had time on his hands. And he wanted to explore all different aspects of healthy living and what one can do to stay healthy or what to do if you're ill. And so he began digging into, well, he had access to the Vatican Library with its many, many, many treasures of ancient texts, and to the Farnese family library, which had an amazing library of ancient texts. Mercuriali could read not only Latin, but Greek and, of course, Italian. So he was able to really translate, decipher and read texts by ancient physicians, excuse me, physicians like himself, like Hippocrates and the Roman physician Galen in particular. And it was Hippocrates who really articulated the tenets of exercise. Back in the fifth century B.C., he wrote two treatises about healthy living, not just exercise, although definitely exercise and diet and bathing and other matters like that. And Galen, about seven centuries later, I think, took up the topic with even greater passion. So I think Mercuriali was really relating to these ancient thinkers. You have to keep in mind this is the Renaissance. There was a renewed interest in these ancient philosophers and thinkers like not just Hippocrates, but Plato and Aristotle. So he was going through all their work. And, you know, he looked around Rome where there were these ruins of the baths, bath complexes and gymnasiums from antiquity in Rome itself that had gone, you know, into ruins. And Mercuriali's idea, really, his aim was to revive the ancient Greek art of exercise, which is why his book is called De Arte Gymnastica, The Art of Gymnastics. So I think he wrote it from a physician's perspective. I hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Bill Hayes. And I would like to thank all of my listeners and readers who, first of all, asked me to invite Bill Hayes to my podcast and then sent your wonderful questions for this interview. I was so excited to find out that so many of you are familiar with Bill Hayes' books and you also admire his writing. And, of course, I was so happy when he accepted my invitation to come to this podcast and answer your questions. Those of you who are not subscribers of my newsletter and who would like to join the discussion and find out about the future guests and send your own questions to those future guests, you can do it easily by subscribing to my newsletter, which will be linked in the description of this episode. Once you subscribe, you will receive an email from my personal email address, so you can send your own book recommendations straight to my inbox and we can chat about books. I really hope to meet you there and I really hope to hear your questions and your ideas about potential future guests. Anyway, I hope to meet you there and let's continue with the rest of this episode. I haven't thought about perhaps that Mercurial saw all those ruins of the ancient places where people used to exercise and, of course, there are questions in your mind coming up. How do people exercise? Why did they do it? And what was the essential purpose? How did ancient Greeks and Romans exercise? What was their culture? How was their culture interpreting it? I think there are two things. You know, I talk about exercise, sort of the origins of it, beginning with Hippocrates in the 5th century B.C. because he really articulated or wrote the tenets of exercise. It was Hippocrates who said, quote, Eating alone will not keep a man well. He must also take exercise. For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health. So Hippocrates sort of advocating it from a doctor's perspective. But equally important, the Olympic Games had been founded three centuries before in the 8th century B.C. and really ignited this culture, cultural interest in athletics and exercise, a worshipping of the body, real worshipping of the body, so much so that there were gymnasiums in almost every town in the Greek and Roman Empire. And that interest in athletics epitomized by the Olympic Games. But you have to keep in mind, the Olympics was the biggest of the big. There were three other major athletics festivals or competitions at that time, all four of which I visit in my book, as you know, in my trip to Greece. But there were also a lot of other smaller, minor athletic competitions. So that was very much a part of the culture, as much as, you know, sports and athletics are part of our culture today. And that interest in athletics, I think, trickled down to average people like you and me. But back in antiquity, wanting to emulate the athletes and to exercise for the sake of looking good, for the sake of feeling good and on the advice of physicians. Of course, one thing I should underscore, and I think you know this, but back in antiquity, only men and boys were allowed into gymnasiums and into athletic competition like the Olympics. So women were not permitted or encouraged as they would be today, and as they wouldn't be really until the 19th century or 18th and 19th centuries, many years later. You mentioned that there was one woman who won the competition, and I don't remember the dates, I think it was somewhere 300 BC or around that, if I'm not mistaken, and she was the only one until the 19th century who actually achieved the same result. Was the interest of ancient Greeks in the coat of the body, on better looking, on beauty, similar to what we have now when we see athletes and when people go to the gyms? What was the cultural difference between us and them, let's say? I think it was very similar, and you can go to any major museum like the Met Museum here in New York and see ancient Greek sculpture that shows beautifully idealized, especially male bodies, not so different from the kind of quote-unquote beautiful, conventionally beautiful muscular body you might see today. But there's a really important distinction which we should make, and that is that although Hippocrates and Plato and Galen and so many others had great, very sensible advice about exercise, working it into your daily life, keeping it moderate, not overdoing it, they did not have an accurate scientific understanding of the workings of the human body. For 14 centuries, and we have to blame a lot of this on Galen, unfortunately, there was a belief in the four humors, and they believed that the body was composed of four humors, which are essentially liquids, fantastical, two of them aren't even real, that they believed had to be kept in equilibrium within the body. And if one of the humors was out of balance, it threw you into a state of distemper or illness. And so the goal was always to keep the four humors in balance. And it was this theory of the four humors that led to things like bloodletting. Blood was one of the humors. Purging, some really primitive methods for treating disease. So although their advice on exercise was sensible, there wasn't an accurate understanding of how the human body works until the 17th century, with William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood by the beat of the heart. And that started a chain of events leading to a much better understanding of how the body works and exactly why exercise is so beneficial for you. So it's really with Harvey in the 17th century that a clearer understanding comes. And one of the main reasons that there was such a misconception for so many centuries about the four humors was because, as you know from reading The Anatomist, dissection of human cadavers was largely forbidden in the West. So doctors like Hippocrates or Galen never had the opportunity to dissect a human cadaver and actually see how things work, to put it very simply. They thought the liver produced blood and that the liver was responsible for circulation. Of course, it's not. And so that's a very interesting distinction. Although some of their advice about exercise makes a lot of sense even today, they didn't have an accurate, real understanding of how the body works. What would be the key advice, let's say, if you are in ancient Greece and you would try to get fit? What would be three kind of, let's say, points that you would get advice, like what you should do to become a Spartan warrior or something like that? Well, surprisingly, it's not to overdo it. One of my favorite quotes is from Plato. And what I learned about Plato was that, I mean, two fun facts about Plato. He had been a competitive wrestler himself at athletic competitions when he was a younger man. One of the four sites of games, aside from Olympia, was Isthmia. Well, there was Isthmia, Nemea, Delphi, and Olympia. And Plato competed at Isthmia. And his name, Plato, was a nickname. His given name was Aristocles. But I guess his wrestling coach, noticing he was very broad-shouldered, made a nickname of the word for broad-shouldered, which was Platon, and called him Plato. So Plato, I think, I mean, I'm guessing here, but I think he came to understand that overdoing it, you could get injuries. And I guess I'm imagining that came from his wrestling days. A great quote from Plato, though, he said, it is not the number of exercises but their moderate nature that brings about a good human constitution. Great advice. But another one, which I really like, is from Galen a few centuries later. I can never remember these off the top of my head. And Galen said in the second century, In my opinion, the best exercises of all are those which are able not only to exert the body but also delight the soul. And what I love about that is that he's saying, essentially, don't exercise only because it's good for your health or that it may make you look good or have a better body, but because it makes you feel good. It delights the soul. And I firmly believe that exercise should not be agonizing. It should not be depressing. It should not be something you don't enjoy, but it should be something that gives you some joy, that makes you feel good about yourself, that delights your soul. I'm really sorry for interrupting, but I really wanted to ask you, like, how to achieve that? Because that seems, for a person such as, like, I'm the opposite of you. I'm like, for some reason, I'm very distant with exercising. And one of the things that your book revealed to me is, first of all, how much all those philosophers who I admire and worry to exercise and emphasize the importance of the exercise. So, my question would be, how do you achieve that balance and harmony? You say in your book, there was a wonderful sentence that I perhaps will misquote from the top of my head. It was that exercise chooses you and you don't choose the exercise. I think you said something like that. How to find that balance, that harmony, so the exercise would be enjoyable and not just for the sake of buying a gym membership? Well, there are a couple of things. First of all, I really think a lot of people don't give themselves enough credit for the exercise they do get. It's all a matter of intention and how you look at it. So, let's say you walk to work every day and you think of it as just transportation. Like, I have to get to my job, so I walk to work. But if you think of that also as exercise, walking, as Hippocrates and Plato and Galen said, walking is one of the very best forms of exercise. And I encourage people to think of exercise as simply as – forget about the word exercise. Exercise is synonymous with movement. So, any kind of movement. It can be walking. It can be dancing in your apartment by yourself or with your kid or your wife or boyfriend. Or, you know, if you don't have time for the gym or you hate the gym or, you know, aren't able to run because you have bad knees, so it just makes it miserable. I say things like, well, get off from the bus stop, from the bus two or three stops early on your way home and walk the rest of the way home, maybe let's say it's half a mile. And think of it as exercise. Don't think, oh, this is so awful I have to walk home. Think of it as I'm doing something good for my body. I'm doing something good for myself. Try to enjoy the walk in a different way and just be proud of yourself for doing that. Or get off two subway stops early and walk the rest of the way home. Or, as I sometimes do, this is really embarrassing, but, I mean, I don't have time to go to the gym or swim every day, but I have to go to the grocery store. So I'll walk, and on my way home, carrying my groceries, I'll do biceps curls. When I'm waiting at a red stoplight, it's kind of silly, but it's working my biceps a little bit. I sprained my ankle years ago, and it took a long time for my ankle to heal. So I learned after that from a physical therapist that whenever I have to stand, let's say, in an elevator or waiting in line at the bank, to, you know, stand on one foot, just balance on one foot, and then change to the other. And even if you do it for 30 seconds, it really strengthens those muscles in your ankle, which is really a good thing. But you can also feel like, I'm waiting in line at the bank, or I'm taking the elevator to the 12th floor, and I'm doing just a little bit of exercise, something good for my body. Finally, I'm talking too long, I'm rambling, but finally, I think just try different things. You might be surprised by what you find out you enjoy. You know, maybe it's not lifting, maybe it's not running, maybe it's not swimming, but maybe it is fencing, or maybe it's yoga. Maybe it's something you've never tried before. I think anything that gets your body moving, your body will thank you. I used to walk to the station and from the station to work, and since I started working from home, that small part of taking an exercise, of covering that two miles to the station each day, made me realize that it is important. I think that's the reason why we saw so many people exercising on the streets, at least here in the UK. It seems like everyone was exercising because they understood that they are stuck at home, they need to get out, they need that physical movement that they cannot get at home. I don't know what was it like in New York with the pandemic and the exercise. You mentioned in your book, of course, that the gyms were closed. How did it change your routine? Well, it was such a sudden, dramatic change because with the lockdown in spring 2020, all gyms closed, of course, all around the world, and swimming pools and so forth. I adapted a home exercise routine, which I kept up for a good while, but things like push-ups, I have a chin-up bar, sit-ups, a little bit of yoga, nothing too major. It would take me like 15 minutes, I'd say. And then I think I am someone who took walking for granted. I really did. Even though I walk a lot in New York, I always used to think of it more as like a hassle, like having to walk to the subway or walk to the grocery store. But with the pandemic and the lockdown, I live alone, I'm single, it's very lonely, very isolating, and I wasn't getting a lot of exercise. So I made a point of taking a walk almost every single day and really appreciating walking as a form of exercise, as something my body can do very well without much thought, unlike something like swimming, which takes practice. Swimming takes a lot of practice. Walking is something we all take for granted. The other really fascinating, fascinating thing I found during the pandemic, quite moving really, is that people naturally, intuitively, spontaneously gathered in open spaces to exercise together. So I live in the West Village and there's some piers by the water that are like grass-covered lawns. And when I would do my walks, I would notice that people were gathering in those parks to exercise. Now, sometimes they were like group fitness classes, like a yoga class or held outdoors or a boxing class held outdoors. But often it was just people coming on their own and not even interacting, but I think wanting to connect with other human beings, like wanting to be around other human beings. There's something quite beautiful about that. And I think that does happen in gyms naturally. I think gyms are not just places to exercise, but they're kind of social gathering places. And that is exactly what they were back in antiquity. As you know, gyms in antiquity for men and boys were not just places to box and wrestle and walk and spar, but for philosophers and thinkers to be in conversation. And that was expected. And I think exercise can serve that same purpose today. You know, there's a chapter near the end of my book where I write about the AIDS pandemic of the 80s and 90s and how gyms in San Francisco were such an important part of that really scary, scary time when so many men, especially gay men, were dying. Gyms as gathering places for information. There would be flyers for ACT UP meetings and Project Inform meetings. The latest on medications when that was an incurable, deadly disease. Notices of memorials taped to the front desk. And then just working out, gaining muscle was a way to fight the virus, you know, to stay as strong and healthy as possible. But they really were sort of like community centers. And it's fascinating how the covid pandemic is the complete opposite. Of course, gyms were closed for a long time. Now they're reopened. But the very idea of being close to people was. You know, like. Similar to unsafe sex during the pandemic, you couldn't be. You weren't supposed to be closer than six feet to other people. You had to keep your distance. You still do really wear masks, et cetera. So, you know, gyms are very different during covid pandemic than during the AIDS pandemic. But exercise is still very important, of course. We understand what we really love. And it's kind of like with this pandemic, the gyms that we took it for granted or like just being social, it just disappeared. It made me understand also like how we easily build up those communities around the activities that we do. Because I, as many people started exercising, because as I said, I wasn't getting that 10 minute walk. And after some time, months or two, you already see other people who do the same. And it creates a community of asking each other, how is it going? You know, how is the pandemic affecting your family? So, it is very interesting that it revolved around the exercise during this time. Because there was pretty much no other reason to go out. I wanted also to ask you what I was asking myself or the question that I was asking myself while I was reading your book. I realized that this book is a work of a couple of decades. If I'm not mistaken, it's a collection of different pieces and experiences that you have. I wonder what is your writing process in terms of collecting all those bits, all those stories? What is it like for you? How do you collect the personal part, let's say, of your book? Well, I'll say first of all, I'm not the kind of writer who gets up every single day and writes. I never have been. Or, you know, makes myself or assigns myself to write 500 words a day or a thousand words a day. That's just never been my practice. I'm more intuitive. On the other hand, I love a deadline. I've written books like my last book, which was about the pandemic called How We Live Now. I wrote that book in three months. It's a much shorter book, but I wrote and photographed that book in three months. You know, even before I met Oliver Sacks, I kept journals or diaries occasionally. But he was a great journal keeper. There's something like 600 or 700 journals in his archive, and he wrote every day in his journal. And he encouraged me to keep a journal, which I did, and I still do. So some of the personal bits, especially in Sweat and in Insomniac City, for sure, and How We Live Now, come out of that journal writing. So while I don't sit in front of my computer with an assignment every day, I do try to record my own experiences and thoughts in a journal or a diary. The other thing for me, well, as you said, this book, Sweat, spanned over at least a 10-year period. And part of the reason is that I set it aside completely for three, almost four years, and didn't work on it at all, even considered abandoning the book completely. Mostly because I was just so overwhelmed by all the research, and I didn't know. I didn't want it to be an encyclopedia that would be 800 pages long. But I think the time away from it actually really benefited the book, that I could see the kind of book I wanted to write. By that point, I had written Insomniac City, and people really responded to that memoir. And I realized that putting memoir or personal narrative into this book really could help sort of enliven the story, the history. And the other thing, I think you kind of asked me this earlier, but I didn't quite answer it. I am a big believer in rest, both in exercise and in writing and other creative pursuits. I think you can get into a rut whether you're doing the exact same exercise every day or writing every day but feeling miserable about it or trying to pick away at the same piece. I think it's really important to step away and have other things to occupy you. I'm a big believer in what I call crop rotation, which is – it's sort of like this quote from Hippocrates. What does he say? I can't remember the exact quote. It's in the book. But if you get tired of wrestling, then run. If you get tired of running, then wrestle. And for me, if I get tired of writing, I can pick up my camera and do photography. If I get tired of photography, I can write. So I try to sort of go back and forth. But I think rest and taking breaks, whether in exercise or in your work or your creative life, is really important. Yeah, no, I find it personally also very important to have different focuses that help you to balance each other. You described six principles when you were a personal trainer, and I loved how you connected those six principles that apply to how to exercise, how to get into good shape with your writing. I really want to ask you if you can explore those six principles. The first principle that you say is specificity. Yeah, it's about being specific in your pursuits, really thinking about what you are trying to pursue. So if it's strength you want, then you need to be doing resistance training or strength training. And being specific in your artistic goals, too, and looking at your own strengths and weaknesses. And not that it's bad to, you know, kind of daydream and just let your unconscious go, but the more specific you can be, the better. That certainly was true for sweat. There was that time when I was completely overwhelmed. I didn't really know what I wanted the book to be or how to put it together. And with time away from it, it became clearer and clearer that this wasn't just the history of exercise, but my own history of exercise, too, that I had to put the two together. The second principle is about overload principle, and we kind of, like, covered it. But in the third one, you say about principle of progression. And I think it is one of the key things when the problems that I faced with the exercise is about pushing yourself forward while you are doing something. And I would love if you would explore about how do you pursue progress kind of with your artistic endeavors and also with exercise. What is your philosophy about that? Yeah, I think you do need to push yourself beyond what you think your limits are. You'd be surprised just how far you can really go and try things you've never tried before. So for me, you know, buying a camera, I'm self-taught in everything I do. You know, I never went to med school. I never studied science, but they always interested me. So I decided to write books that would bring me into those worlds where I would learn things I wanted to learn about, pushing myself to do things I couldn't really have imagined, like dissect cadavers, in order to learn about anatomy or, in this case, to learn how to box. Even though I didn't have a book in mind at that point, but it was more about testing my body. You know, a good example, I think, is the very opening passage in the book, which is called Plunge, where I plunge into a really, really, really cold mountain lake. This was October at a lake in upstate New York, and it was a beautiful fall day, but not the kind of day where you would normally go swimming. And I just decided I have to try it, and I did, and it felt amazing, freezing, but amazing. And when I got out and climbed onto the dock, there were some other people there. This was an artist's residency in upstate New York, and they were all like, what the hell are you doing? It's freezing out, and the lake is 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And they said, why would you do this? And I said, because I can. Meaning, not meaning like to show off, but because I can, because I'm human, because I'm alive, because I'm healthy, because I'm still at an age with an ability that I can just do that and try it and see what it's like. And that's sort of my philosophy. Like, do it while you can. It is very inspiring when you talk, because there is a lot of emphasis on the creative part that we are doing. But also, while we are alive, it is also exploring what is our body capable of. And I found that very inspiring in your book. And as I said, I wasn't born with that innate passion for exercise as you have, but it was really inspiring to read your book and to see that it is the same way we explore our brain and our intellectual possibilities. Our body has the same kind of intellect, you know, that I personally don't know about. One of my favorite quotes is from this great contemporary philosopher, Colin McGinn, who has a little book, it's really wonderful, called Sport. And he says, the erudite body is a good body to have. In other words, stuff your body with as much physical information as you can, not just cerebral information, but physical information. But at the same time, I want to emphasize, it's not always about pushing yourself to do things like boxing, but also giving yourself credit for what you do do, and maybe you don't even think of it as exercise. So, walking to work or walking your kids to school, it's like you're doing two things at once, but you can tell yourself, yeah, I got some exercise. You know, it's just important to keep your body moving. And different parts of your body. So, you know, if you're only walking, well, maybe do what the great Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did. She learned how to do push-ups. A very, very, it can be a very challenging exercise, a simple push-up. But if at age 81 with cancer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg could teach herself how to do 20 push-ups a day, then I think most of us could probably do that, too. Even if you start with just being able to do one, the next day maybe you can do two. And push-ups are a great, simple upper body exercise that you could, after we finish our podcast, you could do in, you know, three minutes. And you'll feel it. You'll feel it the next day. But you'll also feel a sense of pride. Like, wow, I just did five push-ups. And tomorrow maybe you'll be able to do six. And pretty soon you'll be up to 20. And so I think it's also good to exercise different parts of your body. I find the way you speak about exercise, I find it so inspiring. If it wasn't too awkward, I would start doing push-ups right now. You have to promise me you'll try. Towards the end of the kind of our conversation, I wanted to ask you about Mercuriale and the name of the artist who did the images. I unfortunately cannot remember his name. I wanted to ask you if, let's say, I'll disappear here, and they both will appear magically, and they will both speak English, perfect English. What would be the question that you wanted to ask them, but obviously you couldn't? Is there a question that was on your mind while you were flicking through their work? Well, I want to ask them if they ever could have imagined that a guy named Bill Hayes, in a place called the USA, in a city called New York, could ever have imagined that he would write a book about the two of them. I would hope they would say yes. What would I want to ask them? I think I'd want to ask them something about their actual working relationship on that book. It never became that clear to me how Mercuriale came to approach Ligurio, his name was Piero Ligurio, to do the engravings, how quickly he put together the drawings. Something more maybe about their relationship. I never had the impression they were really close friends, but they kind of traveled in the same circle. So maybe a little bit more about their relationship on the book. I think they both had big egos and were very ambitious, and they both thought they were going to be, well, in Mercuriale's case, the Hippocrates of the Renaissance, in Ligurio's case, the Leonardo da Vinci. And neither was. Both of these men were pretty much lost to history, certainly not household names like Hippocrates or Leonardo da Vinci or others. But I've always had an interest in these kinds of obscure figures who get lost to history. That was true in The Anatomist with Henry Gray. I mean, certainly people knew about Gray's anatomy in the book, but not many people knew anything about Henry Gray or about the illustrator Henry Carter. It was true in my first book, Sleep Demons, where I write about one of the first sleep scientists named Nathaniel Kleitman, who's otherwise completely unknown. Or in my book about blood on Paul Ehrlich, who was a very important scientist, but otherwise kind of lost to history. So I've always kind of been drawn to these people on the fringes who get, for one reason or another, get lost to history. And I really hope Sweat brings people to recognize the contributions of Mercuriale and Ligurio. Why do you think Mercuriale got lost? Because it seems such a valuable work, such a broad work as well. Why did that work just disappear in history? I can possibly explain the sleep, why did the person who first started studying our sleep and why we dream, why would he get lost? Perhaps because it is a very specific subject. But with Mercuriale, which is such a grand encompassing work, why is that? I think there are a couple of reasons, or maybe three. One is just fate, I guess, but he did write only in medieval Latin, sort of academic Latin that went out of favor. And so a lot of his books were never translated into English or Italian. In fact, as you know, in the book, I come across other manuscripts that have never been translated or published. And then I think the other reason, which is important, is that as much as Mercuriale got right, and he did get a lot right, he was still operating on this completely inaccurate view of the human body, the four humors. And so with the scientific revolution and the new understandings, correct understandings of the human body, physicians and thinkers like Mercuriale sort of became out of favor. And it's not to blame him, but, you know, it's just how it was. And Mercuriale himself never had a chance to dissect cadavers and really understand. He thought it was just based on intuition and what they had been told. I mean, what he studied in medical school was the thinking of Galen on the four humors, which was just wrong, just wrong. So Mercuriale, as a doctor, was doing things like bloodletting and purging and all these other sort of primitive treatments based on the four humors. So I think that's another reason that his work hasn't been taken as seriously. But he was definitely innovative, not only with the book on exercise. He also wrote one of the first books on dermatology and other subjects. Are you writing anything right now? Is there anything that has already captivated your curiosity, your attention, your passion? And the last question that I ask all of my guests is, what are three books that you would kind of recommend that captured your attention, that you really enjoyed reading, that you would like to perhaps share with the listeners and readers as well? I'm not working on another writing project right now, but I am working on a second collection of my photography. I did a volume of street photography a few years ago, purely street photography here in New York. And now I want to do a volume of my portraits. I've been doing portraits here in my apartment for five or more years. So I think that'll be the next book. As for books to recommend, well, you know, I love writing memoir. And one of the best memoirs, I think, is by Vivian Gornick. It's called Fierce Attachments. And I just think it's a model of a perfect memoir. It's very economical, very compressed. It's about her relationship with her mother. And it's fascinating and so beautifully written. I have to pick an Oliver Sacks book because I think he was amazing. You know, I would start with, there's a very beautiful little book called Gratitude, which collects Oliver's last four essays addressing his own illness and facing his mortality, essays written originally for The New York Times. There are lots of great Oliver Sacks books, but that's a beautiful one to start with for sure. And then, you know, one of my earliest influences was Joan Didion, the great essayist and novelist who just died. I think her book, her collection, The White Album, her collection of essays about the 1970s, which is the era in which I grew up, I think that's a classic I would also recommend. Thank you so much. It's such brilliant choices and recommendations. Where would our listeners who are not familiar with you yet find you on the Internet? Is it Twitter? Is it Instagram? I'm on Instagram as Bill Hays Photography. So it's mostly my photography. I'm on Twitter at BillHaysNYC, but I also have a website, which is just BillHays.com. I hope you enjoyed listening to my interview with Bill Hays. And if you would like to find out more about him, you can do it easily by clicking on the link in the description of this episode. I've collected all of his books, all of his interviews, his photo albums, his social media profiles, everything that might interest you and will help you to stay connected with his future projects. I would like to thank all of you who continue to support Artitude Podcast and my project in general. This has been such an incredible journey. I've launched this a year and a half ago, and I cannot believe how many interesting authors, how many interesting readers and listeners I've met so far. I only wish I would have launched this a bit earlier, a bit sooner. I hope this journey will be a long and interesting journey as it is so far. Thank you all once again, and I'll see you in the next one. Transcribed by https://otter.ai