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 26th president of the United States.
On December 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt signed, with little fanfare, Executive Order No. 989, 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 The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete. “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.