The spread of Covid-19 has forced people around the world to confine themselves to their homes and refuse to walk in the fresh air. Can we avoid the breakdown of energy during self-isolation? Nelson Mandela, leader of the South African liberation struggle and former boxer, kept fit after being imprisoned for 27 years. How did he do it?
February 15, 1990. Nelson Mandela wakes up at 5:8115 a.m. as usual and begins his daily hour-long workout. But this time, instead of a prison cell, his gym is a matchbox room located at XNUMX Vilakazi Street, Soweto. And soon he will be besieged by journalists, fans, diplomats and family members who will come to greet him after his release from prison four days earlier.
During the interview, he is laconic, but after questions about boxing, his restraint disappears like a hand. Beaming with joy, he launches into a story about his favorite boxers and how he followed the boxing news in prison.
Mandela started boxing while studying at the University of Fort Hare. During the years of study, work and liberation struggle in Johannesburg in the 1940s and 1950s, he trained even more seriously, although not enough to compete.
“I have never been a great boxer,” he wrote in his autobiography, Long Road to Freedom. “I was a heavyweight and I didn’t have enough strength to make up for my lack of speed – or speed to make up for my lack of strength.”
He especially valued the rigor of training, a regime periodically broken by arrests and struggles. He wrote: “I took out my anger and frustration on a punching bag instead of attacking a comrade or even a policeman.”
Hide in training
Mandela considered daily exercise to be the key to physical health and peace of mind.
“Exercise dissipates tension, and tension is the enemy of peace. I have found that I work and think better when I am in good physical shape, so I have relentlessly submitted to the discipline of training all my life.”
He ran four times a week and trained three nights a week at a boxing gym in Soweto so he could immerse himself in “something that wasn’t wrestling.” He said that he woke up refreshed the next morning, feeling “lighter mentally and physically” and “ready to return to battle.”
Since 1960, Mandela has been organizing an underground military branch of the African National Congress “Umkhonto we Sizwe”1, traveling all over the country under the guise of a driver and traveling abroad to organize support, so boxing became less common.
The “Black Pimpernel”, as he was called (an allusion to the aristocratic British spy nicknamed the Red Pimpernel from the novel of the same name), was arrested in 1962. He spent the next 27 and a half years in prison, including 18 on Robben Island.
Behind bars
When Mandela arrived at Robben Island, the prison guard chuckled, “Welcome to the island. This is where you will die.”
One of the prisoner’s problems is the need to put up with boredom. As he himself said: “Life in prison is monotonous: every day is similar to the previous one, and every week is the same, so that months and years merge into each other.”
Every day of number 46664 was filled with backbreaking labor: he worked in a limestone quarry, using a heavy hammer to break stones into gravel. The work was not easy, but Mandela did not give up exercise. Now they started at five in the morning and took place in a damp cell with an area of 2,1 square meters. m, and not in a sweat-soaked boxing gym in Soweto.
“I tried to follow my old boxing routine, which consisted of running and strength training,” he said.
He started with a 45-minute run in place, followed by 100 finger push-ups, 200 ab exercises, 50 deep squats, and the calisthenics he was used to at the gym (including star jumps and burpees: position standing, then squatting, moving to the bar on straight arms, returning to a sitting position and exiting to a standing position through a jump up).
Mandela followed this schedule from Monday to Thursday, then rested for three days. He maintained this pace even during his years of isolation.
Overcoming tuberculosis
In 1988, at the age of 70, Mandela contracted tuberculosis, which was exacerbated by the dampness in the cell. He was taken to the hospital with a bloody cough. When he was transferred to the warden’s house at Victor Werster Prison, he resumed an abridged version of the exercise program to include swimming in the prison pool.
He was released from prison along with other political prisoners on February 11, 1990, nine days after the ban on the African National Congress and other liberation movements was lifted. He then became the first president of democratic South Africa, a post he held from 1994 to 1999.
Naturally, when he reached the age of 80, he reduced the exercise program, but never abandoned them. He died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95 from a respiratory infection. Mandela believed that the habit of playing sports helped him survive and get out of prison and prepared him for the trials that awaited him.
“In prison, it was absolutely necessary to give vent to your anxiety,” he said. These words can probably be addressed to everyone who, due to the Covid-19 epidemic, today is faced with self-isolation in cramped conditions.
1 Translated from the Zulu language – “spear of the nation.”