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Alison Bechdel has long been an aficionado of exercise, as she chronicles in her graphic memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength. In her drawings and text, Bechdel—best known for her long-lived comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” as well as her graphic memoir Fun Home—examines some of the reasons for her pursuit of jogging, cycling, skiing, martial arts, and nearly every exercise trend of the last sixty years: stress relief and a desire to look like Charles Atlas. There are also deeper reasons for the fitness habit: Bechdel looks for control, inner calm, one-ness with the world, and flow. Throughout the decades, Americans suited up for jazzercise and spinning to train their bodies, of course, but also for something bigger than themselves. Bechdel presents the history of exercise as a search for self and meaning in a consumerist American society.While graphic works such as Bechdel's might appear at first glance to be better suited for leisure reading than academic review, the visual medium in fact allows for layered and wide-ranging historical interpretation. Bechdel's examination of fitness trends is interspersed with her personal history: romantic relationships, aging, injuries, and reliance on substances for coping and numbing. The drawings make tangible the mountains of gear that supported her habits over the years, including roof racks for bikes, kayaks, surfboards, a gear shed filled with skis, life jackets, and skates. The illustrations also attempt to capture Bechdel's search for what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the “flow state.” On empty mountain tops captured in broad strokes without color, she depicts flow as the “quiet ecstasy” of anxiety falling away and feeling one with the world (97). The liquid ease of skiing down a mountain with confidence or summiting a peak seemed to reveal “the very warp and woof of the universe” (139), the “shimmering bliss of nonduality” (191), and ultimately, “inner peace” (203). When she depicts her younger self moving in a “collective trance” with a group in an exercise class, readers can transpose themselves to her place in the sweaty, mirrored room, even if they have never been to aerobics before (107). While the book has a popular appeal akin to a literary memoir or film, its grounding in theory and historical touchstones make it worthy of closer examination.With drawings that capture the feeling of looking out over a powdery white slope, the solitude of the mountains, the exhaustion of a workout, and the excitement of new gear, Bechdel traces her history of exercise life through each decade from the 1960s to the present. As Bechdel matures, she selects new forms of physical attainment in a search for the elusive “superhuman strength” of the title. Throughout the decades, Bechdel also highlights gadgets, gear, tools, purchases, and engagement in consumer economy as central to fitness pursuits.In her teens, the great outdoors and the L.L. Bean catalog called, and Bechdel sought out Gatorade and running shoes to support her habits. Boots, especially, had an androgynous allure that reassured Bechdel as she came to understand her gender presentation and identity. In the 1980s, alongside the excitement and challenges of new queer community and reassessing her familial relationships and childhood, karate and, later, yoga, were the ways she sought to “unfreeze the deeper regions” of herself (114). In her thirties, a Specialized Stumpjumper and a more experienced friend initiated her into a new world of cycling. She describes herself as supercharged, biking and running up mountains but also throwing her body into extremes, with erratic work and sleep habits, and a tendency to work and exercise to exhaustion to the detriment of personal relationships. By the 2000s, work and work success left little time for the physical pursuits Bechdel thought she needed. In her fifties, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), then a seven-minute workout, then step counting, were all brief practices she pursued. As the book closes, Bechdel returns to the running of her youth as it increasingly replaced her drinking habit.In addition to a dizzying succession of fitness trends, Bechdel reaches backwards for cultural icons that shaped Americans’ exercise habits. She turns to nature writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; Beat authors Jack Keraouc and Gary Synder; Romantics Margaret Fuller and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and even Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp twirling on a mountaintop. Fitness entrepreneurs and instructors likewise make appearances, as do magazine, catalog, and books in textual overlays that emphasize the visual culture of fitness.With its focus on acquisitiveness, imperfect gurus, and the search for self-control, The Secret to Superhuman Strength aligns thematically with academic histories of fitness. Unlike many of the exercisers other works describe, however, Bechdel is refreshingly not focused on fatness as a bodily and moral problem, likely a result of her queer, feminist framework. While Bechdel's work is deeply personal, its strong chronological focus and engagement with many touchstones of fitness culture in the second half of the twentieth century make it a promising text for instructors of courses on fitness, the body, exercise, and sport, as well as for any reader looking to reflect on just what they were looking for as they packed their bag for the gym.
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