[AN AGREEABLE ENDURANCE TEST]
After this volume was published in 1898, the field of experiment was changed from the United States to Europe. The physical exercise and mental recreation of the summer of 1899 consisted partly of bicycling. We landed in Holland, toured Holland, Belgium, and Northern France, and reached Paris in the course of about two months and with upwards of five hundred miles' wheeling. For another month we bicycled leisurely around Paris and added two or three hundred miles to our cyclometer record. During the month of July the author further rode some seven hundred miles in and about the Forest of Fontainebleau.
The idea of an endurance-test was suggested to the author by the ease with which he accomplished a century of miles on the Fourth of July, 1899. Being in Paris, and wishing to celebrate a most beautiful summer day and our National Holiday at the same time, an early start was made and the beauty of the day, the charm of the golden harvest fields lying between Paris and the Forest of Fontainebleau, and the noble forest itself, led us on and on until the cyclometer showed a distance, for the forenoon run, of slightly more than eighty kilometers (fifty miles) in a straight-away line from hotel and home in Paris. Two years before, fifty miles on bicycle, even when accustomed to riding daily during the craze for bicycling, which was then at its zenith, if done in one day, would have completely "done the author up" and would have called for several days of rest for recuperation. In the present case, however, no fatigue had yet been experienced and the day was still young.
The forest studio-home of friend Redfield, the Philadelphia landscapist, was found on the edge of the forest bordering the Seine at Brolles, and we went for a spin together and finally returned awheel to Paris. To make a "century run" in a day had always seemed to the author a feat for athletes and experts only, and when he found that he had made it without any inconvenience and was in no way painfully conscious of it next day, the ambition to see what really could be done was born. It would give practical measure of the improvement due to an economical nutrition. It was known what the newly ambitious contestant for a record could not do two years before, but it was now uncertain what he might be able to do under changed condition of health even with two years' additional handicap of age; besides, it happened to be the half-century year of the author's life and a good time to jot down a record of a new start in life.
Reference to "economical nutrition" in connection with a full measure of recreation needs some explanation. To be economical means to most persons privation of pleasure. It is true that the economic standard attained by Luigi Cornaro had been maintained with ease by the author since the beginning of his experiments in the summer of 1898. This was not accomplished by trying to emulate Cornaro's example, but was reached by a method of taking food, and developed in the course of a special study of the economic natural requirements. The author ate just what his appetite called for, as nearly as circumstances of supply permitted, he ate all that his appetite would allow; enjoyed a gustatory pleasure that had never been equalled under old habits of taking food, and was a distinct epicurean gainer by the economy learned and practised. But—and in this "but" lies the secret—the solid food had been munched appreciatively until it was liquefied and a strong Swallowing Impulse compelled its deglutition. The sapid and nutritious liquids were tasted as the wine tasters taste wine, as tea tasters taste tea, and as all experts test, or "Get the Good" out of, anything. Instead of being drunk down in a flood like water, which has no taste and no reason to stay in the region of taste, delicious country milk was sipped and tasted with the end of the tongue, where the best taste-buds are, until it disappeared by natural absorption. In this way the milk was fully enjoyed, largely assimilated, and, as the result of almost subsisting on bread and milk alone, at times, in response to the country appetite, the disproportionately excessive waste usually encountered when pursuing a milk-diet was not experienced; the digestion-ash (solid excreta) was extremely small and averaged only about one-tenth of the amount commonly wasted in the digestive process in ordinary habits of taking bread and milk hastily and carelessly.
It is significant that, while the quantity of food habitually taken was about one-third of the text-book normal-average prescription, the solid waste was only a tenth of the usual amount, showing a much more economical digestion and a better assimilation. This possibility of a profitable and an agreeable economy was afterwards verified in the Venice experiments.
An æsthetic result was attained in connection with these experiments which cannot be too often advertised. All putrid bacterial decomposition was avoided in the process of digestion, and all sense of muscular fatigue was absent, even following strenuous and unusual exercise.
Instead of involving deprivation and asceticism, that mid-summer month in the Forest of Fontainebleau, occupied in making an economy and an endurance-test, was a carnival of tempting plenty in the way of good food enjoyed to the full satisfaction of a healthy appetite. The endurance-test recounted in the letter following is evidence of the effect of such sumptuousness when approached by different methods of gratification. The powerful young artist who volunteers the story lived in the ordinary way and the aged reformer and research-dietetician, whom the young athlete paced, treated his food as recommended in this book.