Jack LaLanne, 96 Billy Blanks, Jane Fonda, P90X, Jillian Michaels, CrossFit, the rest of us that aim to stay fit, homage goes to Jack LaLanne.
I'm sure he would be pissed that he didn't make it to 100. He clearly was a head of his time in a lot of things regarding health, though. Try that on your 43 birthday. Or that when your 60. I did the Alcatraz swim once (unshackled and not towing a boat) and found the currents in the bay to be the hardest part - even worse than the cold water.
Strange that I read this last week, but Jack had some predecessors. Now, in the TV age, he's the prototype, that's for sure. But here's a story of the guy who was Jack Lalanne before Jack was born... http://www.slate.com/id/2281699/ Born in Asserballe, Denmark in 1866, J.P. Müller was, for a time, as famous as that other Danish export, Hans Christian Anderson. Maybe more. At the turn of the last century, Müller's wildly popular cult of physical fitness swept Mitteleuropa, turning parlor-sitting dandies from Copenhagen to Berlin to London into ironmen. Müller's My System was published first in 1904 as little more than a long, bound pamphlet graced with an image of the Greek athlete Apoxyomenos naked and toweling himself. The exercise guide, which promised that just "15 minutes a day" of prescribed* exercise would make "weaklings" into strong men (and women), was ultimately translated into 25 languages, reprinted dozens of times, and sold briskly well into the 20th century. Müller was the Tom Paine of free body movement and fresh air. Like many a radical, he was resisted at first, called pornographic (partly because he often appeared in a loincloth—even while skiing in St. Moritz). His was a call to throw off the restrictive shackles of the Victorian era—a literal stripping away of restrictive layered clothes and corsets, a rejection of the "pallid, sickly looks" once prized as beautiful, and the "false dignity which forbids people, for instance, to indulge in so healthy and beneficial an exercise as running." He admonished: "Do not let a day pass without every muscle and every organ in your body being set in brisk motion." And bathing—the man had a fondness for cleanliness many of his contemporaries did not share: "This does not only refer only to people of the 'working' classes. I have often met 'gentlemen' in frock-coats and top hats and ladies in evening dress of whom you could tell by the smell of them, even at a distance of several feet, that they seldom or never took a bath."