Short Cuts: If Wishes Were Horses...

…beggars would ride. (Proverb)

There is a Nike ad, first aired during the London Olympics, making the rounds of opinion these days. (The ad is embedded in Alice G. Walton’s article about it.)  It shows a heavy, red-faced sweaty boy jogging by himself down a quiet country road.  The ad has generated a lot of controversy.  Some people feel that it is selling exercise as the path to greatness (it’s advertising Nike, after all), some people think it’s cruel or unwise to depict someone who is obviously not fit and burdened by his weight doggedly running, when perhaps some other form of exercise might be better for his body.  Some people, on the other hand, applaud the implication that the seeds of personal greatness lie in what you’re willing to do to accomplish it.

It’s unlikely that Nike’s motives are altruistic—they’re a business, selling fitness gear—but that doesn’t mean that the ad needs to be looked at in a purely cynical, or even a purely practical light.  Dr. David Katz (who disapproved of the ad) said that long distance running is not a good idea for a very heavy person: it’s hard on the connective tissues, joints and cardiovascular system, and therefore a poor choice to demonstrate someone developing their own greatness.  I appreciate the sensible concerns of the physician, but I also appreciate the glorious promise implicit in this lonely jogger.

One of the difficulties for many people, fat or thin, is how hard achievement actually is.  It’s lovely to imagine yourself successful, but for most of us, success is the result of lots of effort, often without gratification for long periods of time.  The value of this ad, to me, is that it isn’t sugar-coating exercise.  If you are fat (or even if you aren’t), you know damn well exercise can be uncomfortable and embarrassing, especially if you are just starting out.  When heavy people are depicted exercising in the media, it is often in before-and-after pictures, or as part of a montage, where they start fat and end up fat-free and rippling with muscle.  The suggestion is that, if you do whatever the ad is recommending, you will end up looking like these highly sculpted specimens.  The brilliance of the Nike ad is that it isn’t guaranteeing unrealistic change, although it opens the door to possibility.  The boy jogging is clearly not going to be thin or fit tomorrow, or without discomfort, but he is taking action right now, with no short cuts, and without any promises about his future perfection.

Success is a wonderful goal, but it’s not romantic and it’s generally not pretty. Achievement is a slog—it’s a fat kid jogging down the road, motivated by who knows what.  The implication of the ad is that he is determined to become healthier, and that he’s got a long road ahead of him to achieve it.  I appreciate the honesty.