Former vice president Dick Cheney has made some negative remarks on President Obama’s handling of the war in Afghanistan. Referring to President Obama as ‘dithering’ Dick Cheney delivered a speech titled, “Concerns about America’s Foreign Policy Drift” at the Center for Security Policy on October 21, 2009. The remarks were delivered as Dick Cheney received the Keeper of the Flame Award. Here is the transcript of the speech as well as the full video.
The remarks have received great attention and focus as President Obama determines whether or not to commit an additional 40,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan.
Thank you all very much. It’s a pleasure to be here, and especially to receive the Keeper of the Flame Award in the company of so many good friends.
I’m told that among those you’ve recognized before me was my friend Don Rumsfeld. I don’t mind that a bit. It fits something of a pattern. In a career that includes being chief of staff, congressman, and secretary of defense, I haven’t had much that Don didn’t get first. But truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such a distinguished list.
To Frank Gaffney and all the supporters of Center for Security Policy, I thank you for this honor. And I thank you for the great energy and high intelligence you bring to as vital a cause as there is – the advance of freedom and the uncompromising defense of the United States.
Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors. You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier. With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.
So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith.
It is certainly not a model of diplomacy when the leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic are informed of such a decision at the last minute in midnight phone calls. It took a long time and lot of political courage in those countries to arrange for our interceptor system in Poland and the radar system in the Czech Republic. Our Polish and Czech friends are entitled to wonder how strategic plans and promises years in the making could be dissolved, just like that – with apparently little, if any, consultation. Seventy years to the day after the Soviets invaded Poland, it was an odd way to mark the occasion.
You hardly have to go back to 1939 to understand why these countries desire – and thought they had – a close and trusting relationship with the United States. Only last year, the Russian Army moved into Georgia, under the orders of a man who regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. Anybody who has spent much time in that part of the world knows what Vladimir Putin is up to. And those who try placating him, by conceding ground and accommodating his wishes, will get nothing in return but more trouble.
What did the Obama Administration get from Russia for its abandonment of Poland and the Czech Republic, and for its famous “Reset” button? Another deeply flawed election and continued Russian opposition to sanctioning Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
In the short of it, President Obama’s cancellation of America’s agreements with the Polish and Czech governments was a serious blow to the hopes and aspirations of millions of Europeans. For twenty years, these peoples have done nothing but strive to move closer to us, and to gain the opportunities and security that America offered. These are faithful friends and NATO allies, and they deserve better. The impact of making two NATO allies walk the plank won’t be felt only in Europe. Our friends throughout the world are watching and wondering whether America will abandon them as well.
Big events turn on the credibility of the United States – doing what we said we would do, and always defending our fundamental security interests. In that category belong the ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need to counter the nuclear ambitions of the current regime in Iran.
Candidate Obama declared last year that he would be willing to sit down with Iran's leader without preconditions. As President, he has committed America to an Iran strategy that seems to treat engagement as an objective rather than a tactic. Time and time again, he has outstretched his hand to the Islamic Republic's authoritarian leaders, and all the while Iran has continued to provide lethal support to extremists and terrorists who are killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Islamic Republic continues to provide support to extremists in Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, the regime continues to spin centrifuges and test missiles. And these are just the activities we know about.
I have long been skeptical of engagement with the current regime in Tehran, but even Iran experts who previously advocated for engagement have changed their tune since the rigged elections this past June and the brutal suppression of Iran's democratic protestors. The administration clearly missed an opportunity to stand with Iran's emocrats, whose popular protests represent the greatest challenge to the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979. Instead, the resident has been largely silent about the violent crackdown on Iran's protestors, and has moved blindly forward to engage Iran's authoritarian regime. Unless the Islamic Republic fears real consequences from the United States and the international community, it is hard to see how diplomacy will work.
Next door in Iraq, it is vitally important that President Obama, in his rush to withdraw troops, not undermine the progress we’ve made in recent years. Prime Minister Maliki met yesterday with President Obama, who began his press availability with an extended comment about Afghanistan. When he finally got around to talking bout Iraq, he told the media that he reiterated to Maliki his intention to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq. Former President Bush's bold decision to change strategy in Iraq and surge U.S. forces there set the stage for success in that country. Iraq has the potential to be a strong, democratic ally in the war on terrorism, and an example of economic and democratic reform in the heart of the Middle East. The Obama Administration has an obligation to protect this young democracy and build on the strategic success we have achieved in Iraq.
We should all be concerned as well with the direction of policy on Afghanistan. For quite a while, the cause of our military in that country went pretty much unquestioned, even on the left. The effort was routinely praised by way of contrast to Iraq, which many wrote off as a failure until the surge proved them wrong. Now suddenly – and despite our success in Iraq – we’re hearing a drumbeat of defeatism over Afghanistan. These criticisms carry the same air of hopelessness, they offer the same short-sighted arguments for walking away, and they should be summarily rejected for the same reasons of national security.
Having announced his Afghanistan strategy last March, President Obama now seems afraid to make a decision, and unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to complete his mission.
President Obama has said he understands the stakes for America. When he announced his new strategy he couched the need to succeed in the starkest possible terms, saying, quote, “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.” End quote.
Five months later, in August of this year, speaking at the VFW, the President made a promise to America’s armed forces. “I will give you a clear mission,” he said, “defined goals, and the equipment and support you need to get the job done. That’s my commitment to you.”
It’s time for President Obama to make good on his promise. The White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.
Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.
Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.
In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision – a good one, I think – and sent a commander into the field to implement it.
Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced. It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.
It’s worth recalling that we were engaged in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, supporting the Mujahadeen against the Soviets. That was a successful policy, but then we pretty much put Afghanistan out of our minds. While no one was watching, what followed was a civil war, the takeover by the Taliban, and the rise of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. All of that set in motion the events of 9/11. When we deployed forces eight years ago this month, it was to make sure Afghanistan would never again be a training ground for the killing of Americans. Saving untold thousands of lives is still the business at hand in this fight. And the success of our mission in Afghanistan is not only essential, it is entirely achievable with enough troops and enough political courage.
Then there’s the matter of how to handle the terrorists we capture in this ongoing war. Some of them know things that, if shared, can save a good many innocent lives. When we faced that problem in the days and years after 9/11, we made some basic decisions. We understood that organized terrorism is not just a law-enforcement issue, but a strategic threat to the United States.
At every turn, we understood as well that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. We had a lot of blind spots – and that’s an awful thing, especially in wartime. With many thousands of lives potentially in the balance, we didn’t think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all.
The intelligence professionals who got the answers we needed from terrorists had limited time, limited options, and careful legal guidance. They got the baddest actors we picked up to reveal things they really didn’t want to share. In the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, by the time it was over he was not was not only talking, he was practically conducting a seminar, complete with chalkboards and charts. It turned out he had a professorial side, and our guys didn’t mind at all if classes ran long. At some point, the mastermind of 9/11 became an expansive briefer on the operations and plans of al-Qaeda. It happened in the course of enhanced interrogations. All the evidence, and common sense as well, tells us why he started to talk.
The debate over intelligence gathering in the seven years after 9/11 involves much more than historical accuracy. What we’re really debating are the means and resolve to protect this country over the next few years, and long after that. Terrorists and their state sponsors must be held accountable, and America must remain on the offensive against them. We got it right after 9/11. And our government needs to keep getting it right, year after year, president after president, until the danger is finally overcome.
Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after 9/11 was a fading memory. Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America … and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse.
Eight years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive – and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed. So you would think that our successors would be going to the intelligence community saying, “How did you did you do it? What were the keys to preventing another attack over that period of time?”
Instead, they’ve chosen a different path entirely – giving in to the angry left, slandering people who did a hard job well, and demagoguing an issue more serious than any other they’ll face in these four years. No one knows just where that path will lead, but I can promise you this: There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for the policies and the people that have kept this country safe.
On the political left, it will still be asserted that tough interrogations did no good, because this is an article of faith for them, and actual evidence is unwelcome and disregarded. President Obama himself has ruled these methods out, and when he last addressed the subject he filled the air with vague and useless platitudes. His preferred device is to suggest that we could have gotten the same information by other means. We’re invited to think so. But this ignores the hard, inconvenient truth that we did try other means and techniques to elicit information from Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and other al-Qaeda operatives, only turning to enhanced techniques when we failed to produce the actionable intelligence we knew they were withholding. In fact, our intelligence professionals, in urgent circumstances with the highest of stakes, obtained specific information, prevented specific attacks, and saved American lives.
In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program’s legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed.
For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings – and least of all can that be said of our armed forces and intelligence personnel. They have done right, they have made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.
Last January 20th, our successors in office were given the highest honors that the voters of this country can give any two citizens. Along with that, George W. Bush and I handed the new president and vice president both a record of success in the war on terror, and the policies to continue that record and ultimately prevail. We had been the decision makers, but those seven years, four months, and nine days without another 9/11 or worse, were a combined achievement: a credit to all who serve in the defense of America, including some of the finest people I’ve ever met.
What the present administration does with those policies is their call to make, and will become a measure of their own record. But I will tell you straight that I am not encouraged when intelligence officers who acted in the service of this country find themselves hounded with a zeal that should be reserved for America’s enemies. And it certainly is not a good sign when the Justice Department is set on a political mission to discredit, disbar, or otherwise persecute the very people who helped protect our nation in the years after 9/11.
There are policy differences, and then there are affronts that have to be answered every time without equivocation, and this is one of them. We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys.
We cannot hope to win a war by talking down our country and those who do its hardest work – the men and women of our military and intelligence services. They are, after all, the true keepers of the flame.
Thank you very much.
Friday, October 23, 2009
For Obama, The Fall Below 50% Looms
The chief issue of the day was whether to escalate the war further or de-escalate. There were economic concerns. And there was a president "too intent on a search for consensus," as historian Robert Dallek wrote in his biography of Lyndon Johnson.
It was early May 1966. The first time Johnson's public approval rating fell below 50 percent in the Gallup Poll. A month later, on June 9, Press Secretary Bill Moyers informed Johnson that, "Conversations with Gallup, Harris, and other professionals in the poll business confirm only one thing: Our standing is down and likely to drop further."
It will not, of course, take this president an entire month to digest the same bad news. And that bad news will likely come sooner for Barack Obama than most previous presidents.
If Obama falls below 50 percent before mid-November, it will mark the third-fastest rate since World War II.
Obama is on the edge. The new Gallup/USA Today poll has Obama's approval at 50 percent. He first saw 50 in the Gallup tracking poll in late August. He has since returned to that precipice on several occasions, as he did Wednesday, only to slightly recover.
The Afghan war now weighs down Obama. He too is a man who has long sought consensus. The defining trait of Obama now dogs him. In health care, progressives sense momentum on the public option. They want Obama to personally take up their fight.
Obama may soon choose sides. He recently took a firmer hand to Wall Street. He is talking in more partisan tones. He may still take up the public option on health care. A fall below 50 can spur those choices. It did for Johnson. But the middle way is also a choice.
Below 50, Johnson distanced himself from the most vulnerable Democratic congressmen. He wanted to appear less partisan. He went to the Midwest for big speeches. He met on background with reporters. And he bombed, escalating the campaign in North Vietnam. Johnson briefly recovered, only to soon fall again.
Johnson had his problems with inflation. Obama's has it far worse economically. And for this president, it will still get worse before it gets better. Unemployment will likely soon reach double digits.
The cause of the fall is not, at first, the news. It's the majority lost. Fifty percent means mandate. It's symbolic, not unlike the Dow Jones 10,000 mark. Insignificant but for what it captures. And in a republic, it captures power. Public approval is the currency of political capital. It's how platforms become policy.
Below 50, the framing of Obama's presidency will be altered. A majority lost, even once recovered, can be lost again. After a heavyweight champion is first knocked down, his opponent knows the champ can go down. It will be like that for Obama.
Political opponents will pounce. National stories will tell of a president who has lost the people. Even at 49, the president is in charge of the same divided nation. But the view has changed. Below 50, the bully pulpit loses its bully. Legislative battles become more difficult.
In the age of tracking polls, a president can fall below 50 and come back the next day. But once the fall is sustained, it sticks. And in this manic news environment, sustained means only a matter of days.
Gerald Ford (after three months) and Bill Clinton (after four months) were the first presidents to lose the majority. But unlike Clinton, Obama won with a majority. It's his to lose. So the loss would mean more.
Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman are the other two presidents to lose the majority during their first year. Reagan first fell below 50 in mid November 1981. It took Truman 11 months.
John F. Kennedy is the only modern president never to fall below 50. His approval rating was in the high 70s at this point in office.
Early on, Obama proved unable to emulate Kennedy's appeal. His problem is now more ordinary. Even excluding Kennedy, Obama's modern predecessors lost the majority on average after 23 months in office; the median was 13 months. Obama has served nine.
Nothing is written. Obama might hold the majority far longer. The bulk of his decline came over the summer, largely due to the health care debate. His polling has since stabilized. But the extent he has already fallen is striking.
On Wednesday, Gallup reminded Obama of what was lost. Obama had the worst third quarter decline in public approval of any elected president in the post-war era.
Still, it's the fall below 50 that hits hardest. Some presidents never do recover. Like Johnson, George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter could not.
But Reagan reminds us that a public can be won back. Reagan, like Obama, faced the worst recession to date. He languished for two years below 50 and went on to win an historic landslide.
Obama is his own man, in his own Washington. No analogy is perfect. But all successful presidents need the public at their back. And Obama remains a most ambitous president.
White House Tactics Go Too Far
WASHINGTON -- Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he's put a horse's head in Roger Ailes' bed.
Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn't scare easily.
The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox "not really a news station." And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to "be led (by) and following Fox."
Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration -- from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 "truther" to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation -- the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.
The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry -- finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.
At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House "pool" news organizations -- except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.
This was an important defeat because there's a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.
Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand "the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties." They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other -- and an otherwise imperious government.
Factions should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.
But didn't Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical -- and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.
Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN's and MSNBC's combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN -- which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a "Saturday Night Live" skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?
Defend Fox from whom? Fox's flagship 6 o'clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I'm not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She's been attacked for extolling Mao's political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one's own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?
The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?
Obama vs. The President He Said He'd Be
During the campaign Barack Obama vowed he would be a different kind of leader who would move America beyond the "smallness of our politics." That inspired promise was not an insignificant part of why he was elected last November.
In his inaugural address Obama told us that "the time has come to set aside childish things." He promised to bring "an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
Not only has President Obama failed to live up to those promises so far, it appears that on more than a number of occasions he’s made a conscious decision to break them.
In the first nine months in office President Obama and/or members of his administration have accused doctors of performing unnecessary medical procedures for profit; demonized bond holders as "speculators;" produced a report suggesting military veterans are prone to becoming right wing extremists; attacked insurance companies and threatened them with legislative retribution; ridiculed talk show hosts and political commentators by name from the White House podium; dismissed and demeaned protesters and town hall attendees as either unauthentic or fringe characters; maligned a white police officer for arresting a black man without knowing the facts of the case; launched an orchestrated campaign to marginalize the country's biggest pro-business group; and publicly declared war on a news organization.
Twice in the last week, perhaps carried away by the campaign atmosphere, President Obama ramped up the use of the kind of partisan rhetoric that will drive Americans further apart; once in San Francisco at a DNC fundraiser and once last night at a rally for Jon Corzine.
As a result of this strategy, President Obama’s approval rating has fallen consistently since taking office while Americans' disapproval of the way he’s handled his job has more than doubled and is now at an all time high of 44 percent. On Wednesday Gallup reported that the 9-point drop in Obama’s approval rating between July and September was the third most precipitous decline in Presidential history and the worst since 1953.
Americans understand it's not easy governing a country as divided as ours. It takes hard work to find common ground in a system that’s been increasingly polarized, and it takes political courage for a President to buck the interests of the base of his party when necessary. More than anything else, achieving real bipartisanship requires a good faith effort led by the President that genuinely seeks compromise with the opposition without demonizing, dismissing, or demeaning them.
In fact, that’s exactly how then candidate Obama described his vision of “genuine bipartisanship” in his book, The Audacity of Hope. Obama wrote on page 131:
Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained - by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate - to negotiate in good faith. If these conditions do not hold - if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs of the tax cut are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so - the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100 percent of what it wants, go on to concede 10 percent, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this "compromise" of being "obstructionist."
Though Obama wrote that as a member of the minority and a critique of past policies, it sounds eerily familiar to what's going on in Washington right now.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings are promised - savings that we’re told cannot occur without voting for a total overhaul of the health care system. Hundreds of billions more have been offloaded in a budget gimmick to make the bill appear less costly than it really is so it will comply with the President’s promise not to add a dime to the federal deficit. Substantive measures proposed by the opposition that would seem to be common sense to include in a "comprehensive" effort - like medical malpractice reform - have been given short shrift.
Lastly, promises of transparency have fallen by the wayside. The reform the President promised would be fully open to the public is now being written by a tiny cadre behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, and Democrats in Congress are resisting a rules change that would allow the bill to be posted online 72 hours before a vote so the public might have a chance to see exactly what it is their elected representatives are voting on.
Voters expect politicians to say one thing and do another. But Obama took the public’s cynicism and turned it to his advantage by vowing he would be a different kind of leader. So far, however, he is falling well short of his promises, using tactics and rhetoric that not only drive Americans apart but hurt him politically. It's time for Obama to start acting like the President he told us he’d be.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Riding is My Ritalin
By Bruce Barcott
One evening in the late autumn of 1997, Jeff and Lori Leibovitz arrived at Skiles Test Elementary School in Indianapolis for a meeting with their son Adam's first-grade teacher. The Leibovitzes were upbeat. First-grade conferences are typically full of wonderful reports about children's wonderful progress in learning to read and write. But the Leibovitzes walked into Adam's classroom that night to find the assistant principal sitting with Adam's teacher. The assistant principal did most of the talking. She told them their son showed classic signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD: He had trouble sitting still in class; his focus pinballed around the room; his hands were a whirl of perpetual motion. Adam's teacher had taken to giving him rubber bands to occupy his busy fingers.
Jeff and Lori listened in shock. Adam was a rambunctious kid, but his behavior didn't strike them as unusual. Adam's ADHD wasn't extreme or debilitating, the assistant principal told the Leibovitzes. But that wasn't necessarily a good thing. The boy's condition was acute enough to cause learning problems but mild enough that he'd likely slip through the system's safety net for special-needs students.
"It was a horror story," Lori recalls. "Here was our oldest child, just starting school, and we're told that he's always going to struggle with this. They said he'd fall through the cracks and would never amount to anything. It was earthshaking."
At the time, ADHD diagnoses were exploding across the United States. From 1990 to 1998 the number of children and adults identified as having the disorder shot up from 900,000 to nearly five million. Jeff and Lori came home that night and plunged into the research. Lori read everything she could find and attended local support-group meetings. Most of the advice pointed in one direction: a prescription for amphetamines such as Ritalin. The powerful stimulants (the Food and Drug Administration labels them as Schedule II drugs, the same category as morphine and methamphetamine) have a paradoxical calming effect on the minds of ADHD patients. They're convenient, effective and popular—90 percent of ADHD patients who take them see improvement. Pop a pill; problem solved. Many parents swore by them. Teachers praised them for bringing calm to unruly classrooms.
But the Leibovitzes were reluctant to go that route. They were leery of the side effects, which can include heart palpitations, sleeplessness, dizziness, irritability, headaches and nausea. For the next three years, they opted instead to give Adam and his younger brother plenty of exercise. "We always had a lot of running-around time," Lori says.
Adam became a high-energy kid who was also very bright. By fourth grade, though, the demands of schoolwork began to outrun his ability to keep his ADHD in check. The experience was like having a motion detector wired into his brain. "Every little movement or sound would catch my attention," he says. "If I caught a glimpse of somebody walking past the classroom door, my mind would latch onto that: 'Who's out in the hall? What are they doing out there?'"
His parents worried that he wouldn't keep up. "As he grew older, every year he'd be expected to concentrate a little harder and sit a little longer in his seat," his mother says. "When it came time to do his homework, he'd be rolling around under the table or running into the next room. He'd shout out the answers to us. He always knew the answers. He just couldn't sit still to write them down."
Jeff and Lori listened in shock. Adam was a rambunctious kid, but his behavior didn't strike them as unusual. Adam's ADHD wasn't extreme or debilitating, the assistant principal told the Leibovitzes. But that wasn't necessarily a good thing. The boy's condition was acute enough to cause learning problems but mild enough that he'd likely slip through the system's safety net for special-needs students.
"It was a horror story," Lori recalls. "Here was our oldest child, just starting school, and we're told that he's always going to struggle with this. They said he'd fall through the cracks and would never amount to anything. It was earthshaking."
At the time, ADHD diagnoses were exploding across the United States. From 1990 to 1998 the number of children and adults identified as having the disorder shot up from 900,000 to nearly five million. Jeff and Lori came home that night and plunged into the research. Lori read everything she could find and attended local support-group meetings. Most of the advice pointed in one direction: a prescription for amphetamines such as Ritalin. The powerful stimulants (the Food and Drug Administration labels them as Schedule II drugs, the same category as morphine and methamphetamine) have a paradoxical calming effect on the minds of ADHD patients. They're convenient, effective and popular—90 percent of ADHD patients who take them see improvement. Pop a pill; problem solved. Many parents swore by them. Teachers praised them for bringing calm to unruly classrooms.
But the Leibovitzes were reluctant to go that route. They were leery of the side effects, which can include heart palpitations, sleeplessness, dizziness, irritability, headaches and nausea. For the next three years, they opted instead to give Adam and his younger brother plenty of exercise. "We always had a lot of running-around time," Lori says.
Adam became a high-energy kid who was also very bright. By fourth grade, though, the demands of schoolwork began to outrun his ability to keep his ADHD in check. The experience was like having a motion detector wired into his brain. "Every little movement or sound would catch my attention," he says. "If I caught a glimpse of somebody walking past the classroom door, my mind would latch onto that: 'Who's out in the hall? What are they doing out there?'"
His parents worried that he wouldn't keep up. "As he grew older, every year he'd be expected to concentrate a little harder and sit a little longer in his seat," his mother says. "When it came time to do his homework, he'd be rolling around under the table or running into the next room. He'd shout out the answers to us. He always knew the answers. He just couldn't sit still to write them down."
When Adam turned 10, his parents decided to try the medication. On Adam's first day on Ritalin, he came home from school and declared it a success. "I felt clearer," he told his parents. "I could sit in class and pay attention." The drug wasn't perfect, though. It was tough to get the dosage right. Sometimes it kept him up at night. Sometimes it made him lose weight, which was worrisome for a skinny kid like Adam. His doctor prescribed Ritalin, then Adderall (a different mixture of amphetamine salts), then some others, then back to Ritalin. "There's a little parental guilt involved in giving your child a Schedule II stimulant," says Jeff Leibovitz. "But the bottom line was: Does the medicine work or not?"
Around the same time, Adam began going on bike rides with his father. Jeff is a Category 2 masters racer. He'd attach a trailer cycle to his bike and tempt Adam to come along on Saturday-morning training rides. "I'd lure him with the promise of fresh doughnuts," Leibovitz remembers. The boy took to riding quickly, almost preternaturally.
There was no way Jeff Leibovitz could have known it then, but that simple weekend ritual would eventually change the boy's life.
For the past 30 years, athletes, coaches, sports psychologists and medical researchers have probed and debated one of the most complex mysteries of the human body: How does exercise affect the brain? Common sense and our own experience tell us it does something. Every parent knows the best way to settle down a hopped-up kid is to take him out to the playground and run the bug juice out of him. A generation ago, teachers and coaches frequently used this approach as well.
This seemed a homespun, intuitive remedy, but in fact there was a scientific basis for it. In 1978, two years before the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) recognized ADHD as a condition, W. Mark Shipman, MD, conducted a simple test. Shipman was medical director of the San Diego Center for Children, an institute for psychologically troubled children. Back then, kids at the center were among the few in the United States taking psychostimulants such as Ritalin to calm what was then called hyperactivity. Kids can be naturally impulsive, inattentive and overactive, but those with ADHD are more so, all the time. (ADHD is an umbrella term that also includes ADD, attention deficit disorder.)
Shipman sent a group of hyperactive kids running for as much as 45 minutes a day, four days a week. An amazing thing happened: The running kids started acting as if they were getting extra doses of medication. After a while, the doctors who monitored the behavior of each child began lowering drug doses for most of the runners. Very few nonrunning participants had their doses reduced. The doctors who were administering the doses didn't know which students were running; the changes in behavior were that clear.
Shipman's study might have led to a boom in physical fitness programs for ADHD-identified kids. It didn't. Instead, just the opposite occurred: Doctors began writing more prescriptions.
At the time of Shipman's study, few parents had heard of Ritalin. By 1988, half a million kids were taking the drug. By 1995 that figure had quadrupled. The United States was using five times as much Ritalin as the rest of the planet combined. "An increase of this magnitude in the use of a single medication," observed pediatrician and Running on Ritalin author Lawrence Diller, MD, "is unprecedented for a drug that is treated as a controlled substance."
It wasn't that Shipman's research was discredited. In fact, at least two other studies conducted in the 1980s confirmed his findings. What happened instead was a societal shift away from time-consuming natural remedies such as exercise and in favor of quick-fix solutions—part of the same cultural sea change that has resulted in the nation's worsening obesity problem.
Around the same time, Adam began going on bike rides with his father. Jeff is a Category 2 masters racer. He'd attach a trailer cycle to his bike and tempt Adam to come along on Saturday-morning training rides. "I'd lure him with the promise of fresh doughnuts," Leibovitz remembers. The boy took to riding quickly, almost preternaturally.
There was no way Jeff Leibovitz could have known it then, but that simple weekend ritual would eventually change the boy's life.
For the past 30 years, athletes, coaches, sports psychologists and medical researchers have probed and debated one of the most complex mysteries of the human body: How does exercise affect the brain? Common sense and our own experience tell us it does something. Every parent knows the best way to settle down a hopped-up kid is to take him out to the playground and run the bug juice out of him. A generation ago, teachers and coaches frequently used this approach as well.
This seemed a homespun, intuitive remedy, but in fact there was a scientific basis for it. In 1978, two years before the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) recognized ADHD as a condition, W. Mark Shipman, MD, conducted a simple test. Shipman was medical director of the San Diego Center for Children, an institute for psychologically troubled children. Back then, kids at the center were among the few in the United States taking psychostimulants such as Ritalin to calm what was then called hyperactivity. Kids can be naturally impulsive, inattentive and overactive, but those with ADHD are more so, all the time. (ADHD is an umbrella term that also includes ADD, attention deficit disorder.)
Shipman sent a group of hyperactive kids running for as much as 45 minutes a day, four days a week. An amazing thing happened: The running kids started acting as if they were getting extra doses of medication. After a while, the doctors who monitored the behavior of each child began lowering drug doses for most of the runners. Very few nonrunning participants had their doses reduced. The doctors who were administering the doses didn't know which students were running; the changes in behavior were that clear.
Shipman's study might have led to a boom in physical fitness programs for ADHD-identified kids. It didn't. Instead, just the opposite occurred: Doctors began writing more prescriptions.
At the time of Shipman's study, few parents had heard of Ritalin. By 1988, half a million kids were taking the drug. By 1995 that figure had quadrupled. The United States was using five times as much Ritalin as the rest of the planet combined. "An increase of this magnitude in the use of a single medication," observed pediatrician and Running on Ritalin author Lawrence Diller, MD, "is unprecedented for a drug that is treated as a controlled substance."
It wasn't that Shipman's research was discredited. In fact, at least two other studies conducted in the 1980s confirmed his findings. What happened instead was a societal shift away from time-consuming natural remedies such as exercise and in favor of quick-fix solutions—part of the same cultural sea change that has resulted in the nation's worsening obesity problem.
These changes have reverberated in competitive cycling, a sport filled with athletes whose behavioral traits trend toward the disorder's symptoms; at pro races and masters' events it's not uncommon to hear jokes about cyclists' ADHD-like characteristics. When I ask Jonathan Vaughters, director of the Garmin-Slipstream team, whether he's noticed ADHD-like behavior among any pro riders, he says: "Only the entire peloton."
He is partly serious. "I think a lot of elite cyclists, if properly diagnosed, would probably be shown to have some form of ADHD," he says. Vaughters, a top pro rider in the 1990s, says his son was recently diagnosed with ADHD. "I think he gets it mainly from me," he says. (Vaughters was undiagnosed, but ADHD is often passed from parent to child.)
One of the sport's retired champions, an Olympic gold medalist who asked not to be identified in this story, recently wondered aloud about the effects of Ritalin on the younger generation. In his day, he said, you cycled away your hyperactivity; that was partly how he got into the sport. "I wonder how many kids over the past decade got put on Ritalin instead," he said. "How many potential racers never discovered the sport?"
In other words: How many would-be greats never found cycling because they were medicated?
Adam Leibovitz took Ritalin through his early teens. By the time he entered Indianapolis's Lawrence Central High, though, he'd grown weary of the side effects. He especially disliked what Ritalin users call "robot mode," during which they feel emotionally flatlined.
"I'd take it during the week, go off it on weekends, and then back on again on Monday," Adam recalls. "On Monday I'd be droned out, kind of a zombie. I had no character, no personality. I hated that."
During his sophomore year, Adam asked his parents if he could go off his meds. They decided to let him try. He quit for a few months. He came out of robot mode, but his focus began to ricochet again. As his attention wandered in class, his grades crashed.
By the time school let out in June, Adam was back on Ritalin. During his junior year, he kept a low profile and improved his grades. He wasn't thrilled with the return of the side effects but put up with them for the payoff in the classroom. A shy kid, but not lacking in confidence, Leibovitz didn't hang with the jocks or play a popular team sport. "I didn't have a lot of connections in high school," he says.
What he did was ride his bike. A lot.
Jeff Leibovitz's doughnut lure worked better than he'd imagined. When he was 13, Adam talked his dad into letting him do the TRIRI, a group ride across 300 miles of Indiana countryside, on his own. Around the same time a bike-racing craze swept through the Leibovitzes community, propelled by Guy East, now a professional rider with the Trek-Livestrong team. East, then a teenager, lived nearby, and local kids spotted him whipping past on training rides. Adam and his best friend began entering races.
Adam got really good really fast. He announced himself to the cycling world three years ago, at 15, by finishing third in his first junior national time-trial championship, one place behind 16- year-old phenom Taylor Phinney. Long and lean, Leibovitz had grown into a confident racer with a body that could absorb an uncommon amount of suffering. With his jug ears and big-toothed grin, he could have passed as Michael Phelps's younger brother.
Adam kept racing and winning: the Quad Cities and Tour of St. Louis crits, time trials at St. Louis, Red River Gorge and the U.S. Junior National Championships. "At a certain point he grew beyond my ability to coach him," his father says. Jeff's friend Dean Peterson agreed to work with Adam on a training regimen. Peterson had recently taken over as head coach at Marian University, a small liberal arts school in Indianapolis with one of the nation's top cycling programs.
He is partly serious. "I think a lot of elite cyclists, if properly diagnosed, would probably be shown to have some form of ADHD," he says. Vaughters, a top pro rider in the 1990s, says his son was recently diagnosed with ADHD. "I think he gets it mainly from me," he says. (Vaughters was undiagnosed, but ADHD is often passed from parent to child.)
One of the sport's retired champions, an Olympic gold medalist who asked not to be identified in this story, recently wondered aloud about the effects of Ritalin on the younger generation. In his day, he said, you cycled away your hyperactivity; that was partly how he got into the sport. "I wonder how many kids over the past decade got put on Ritalin instead," he said. "How many potential racers never discovered the sport?"
In other words: How many would-be greats never found cycling because they were medicated?
Adam Leibovitz took Ritalin through his early teens. By the time he entered Indianapolis's Lawrence Central High, though, he'd grown weary of the side effects. He especially disliked what Ritalin users call "robot mode," during which they feel emotionally flatlined.
"I'd take it during the week, go off it on weekends, and then back on again on Monday," Adam recalls. "On Monday I'd be droned out, kind of a zombie. I had no character, no personality. I hated that."
During his sophomore year, Adam asked his parents if he could go off his meds. They decided to let him try. He quit for a few months. He came out of robot mode, but his focus began to ricochet again. As his attention wandered in class, his grades crashed.
By the time school let out in June, Adam was back on Ritalin. During his junior year, he kept a low profile and improved his grades. He wasn't thrilled with the return of the side effects but put up with them for the payoff in the classroom. A shy kid, but not lacking in confidence, Leibovitz didn't hang with the jocks or play a popular team sport. "I didn't have a lot of connections in high school," he says.
What he did was ride his bike. A lot.
Jeff Leibovitz's doughnut lure worked better than he'd imagined. When he was 13, Adam talked his dad into letting him do the TRIRI, a group ride across 300 miles of Indiana countryside, on his own. Around the same time a bike-racing craze swept through the Leibovitzes community, propelled by Guy East, now a professional rider with the Trek-Livestrong team. East, then a teenager, lived nearby, and local kids spotted him whipping past on training rides. Adam and his best friend began entering races.
Adam got really good really fast. He announced himself to the cycling world three years ago, at 15, by finishing third in his first junior national time-trial championship, one place behind 16- year-old phenom Taylor Phinney. Long and lean, Leibovitz had grown into a confident racer with a body that could absorb an uncommon amount of suffering. With his jug ears and big-toothed grin, he could have passed as Michael Phelps's younger brother.
Adam kept racing and winning: the Quad Cities and Tour of St. Louis crits, time trials at St. Louis, Red River Gorge and the U.S. Junior National Championships. "At a certain point he grew beyond my ability to coach him," his father says. Jeff's friend Dean Peterson agreed to work with Adam on a training regimen. Peterson had recently taken over as head coach at Marian University, a small liberal arts school in Indianapolis with one of the nation's top cycling programs.
Peterson's workout schedule introduced concepts like rest weeks and peaking into the young athlete's life. As Adam adapted to the ramped-up program, he began to notice something unusual. He was taking Ritalin on weekdays, but when he trained hard on weekends there seemed to be a carryover effect. On Mondays his mind was calm even before he popped a Ritalin. "I'd experiment with it," he says. "When I was off the meds and rode a lot, I'd feel great. I could concentrate. When I'd take rest weeks I'd be bouncing off the walls."
Halfway through his junior year, with his grades back up, Adam sat down with his parents. Again he said: I've had it. I want to quit the Ritalin. But this time he had a plan. He'd use cycling to manage his ADHD.
Almost immediately, the drug-free experiment was a remarkable success. Adam cruised through the first half of his senior year. He rode nearly every day. During recovery days he'd find other ways to exercise and soothe his brain. Adam's progress was so impressive—and his desire to move up to the next level of cycling so great—that he cut a deal with school administrators to graduate a semester early. When Peterson offered him a place on the Marian University team, he accepted immediately. This past January, Lori and Jeff Leibovitz helped Adam load up the family car and moved him into the teenage glory of a cinderblock dorm room.
Eventually Adam reached a point where he didn't think much about his condition anymore. When I meet him in Indiana in the spring, he prefers to discuss his goals—like getting to the Olympics, maybe in the time trial or individual pursuit. Or getting a contract with a pro team. Who knows how far he'll make it? Two summers ago he fought off the stomach flu, turned in a sluggish ride, and still won the national junior time-trial championship by more than seven seconds.
He doesn't know how the cycling clears his head, allows him to focus. All he knows is that it works. "Riding," he says, "is my Ritalin."
What is really going on inside Adam Leibovitz's brain?
It probably isn't the endorphins, which mainly affect pain suppression and mood elevation. Researchers now understand that the clearing effect more likely has to do with a different, but similarly mysterious, process centered in the basal ganglia, a part of the brain that plays an important role in movement, coordination, attention and learning. The most accepted theory about ADHD is that it's largely caused by a deficit of neurotransmitters, which relay signals to and from the basal ganglia. Ritalin works by boosting the concentration of two neurotransmitters in particular: dopamine and norepinephrine. Adam's rigorous race training most likely caused his body to produce the same effect.
"A bout of exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin," says John Ratey, MD, a Harvard Medical School professor who has treated and studied ADHD for more than 20 years. His most recent research is chronicled in his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. The Prozac effect comes from endorphins. The Ritalin effect, Ratey says, has to do with boosting the concentration of neurotransmitters in the basal ganglia. "Regular exercise can raise the baseline levels of both norepinephrine and dopamine," he says, "which are the same neurotransmitters that Ritalin and Adderall go after."
ADHD drugs don't suffer from a lack of critics, but Ratey isn't among them. "I use them for my patients all the time," he says. "They're very useful drugs. But in some cases, if a person does enough exercise then Ritalin becomes a little less vital in the treatment of their condition."
Halfway through his junior year, with his grades back up, Adam sat down with his parents. Again he said: I've had it. I want to quit the Ritalin. But this time he had a plan. He'd use cycling to manage his ADHD.
Almost immediately, the drug-free experiment was a remarkable success. Adam cruised through the first half of his senior year. He rode nearly every day. During recovery days he'd find other ways to exercise and soothe his brain. Adam's progress was so impressive—and his desire to move up to the next level of cycling so great—that he cut a deal with school administrators to graduate a semester early. When Peterson offered him a place on the Marian University team, he accepted immediately. This past January, Lori and Jeff Leibovitz helped Adam load up the family car and moved him into the teenage glory of a cinderblock dorm room.
Eventually Adam reached a point where he didn't think much about his condition anymore. When I meet him in Indiana in the spring, he prefers to discuss his goals—like getting to the Olympics, maybe in the time trial or individual pursuit. Or getting a contract with a pro team. Who knows how far he'll make it? Two summers ago he fought off the stomach flu, turned in a sluggish ride, and still won the national junior time-trial championship by more than seven seconds.
He doesn't know how the cycling clears his head, allows him to focus. All he knows is that it works. "Riding," he says, "is my Ritalin."
What is really going on inside Adam Leibovitz's brain?
It probably isn't the endorphins, which mainly affect pain suppression and mood elevation. Researchers now understand that the clearing effect more likely has to do with a different, but similarly mysterious, process centered in the basal ganglia, a part of the brain that plays an important role in movement, coordination, attention and learning. The most accepted theory about ADHD is that it's largely caused by a deficit of neurotransmitters, which relay signals to and from the basal ganglia. Ritalin works by boosting the concentration of two neurotransmitters in particular: dopamine and norepinephrine. Adam's rigorous race training most likely caused his body to produce the same effect.
"A bout of exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin," says John Ratey, MD, a Harvard Medical School professor who has treated and studied ADHD for more than 20 years. His most recent research is chronicled in his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. The Prozac effect comes from endorphins. The Ritalin effect, Ratey says, has to do with boosting the concentration of neurotransmitters in the basal ganglia. "Regular exercise can raise the baseline levels of both norepinephrine and dopamine," he says, "which are the same neurotransmitters that Ritalin and Adderall go after."
ADHD drugs don't suffer from a lack of critics, but Ratey isn't among them. "I use them for my patients all the time," he says. "They're very useful drugs. But in some cases, if a person does enough exercise then Ritalin becomes a little less vital in the treatment of their condition."
And it's not just any exercise. Some activities are better brain boosters, and cycling is one of the best. David Conant-Norville, MD, a psychiatrist in Beaverton, Oregon, who specializes in adolescents and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, recently surveyed his colleagues about the best and worst sports for athletes with ADHD. Cycling, swimming and running are tops. At the bottom are soccer, hockey and baseball. The best sports demanded constant physical exertion and a suite of technical movements that engaged brain functions dealing with balance, timing, error correction, decision-making and focus.
"ADHD is imperfectly named," says Conant-Norville. "People with the condition don't have a deficit of attention. They have a problem with attention control during boring or mundane tasks. Which is why the intense focus of cycling is great for someone with ADHD. If you're moving in the pack in a cycling race, you're highly focused on other riders around you as well as the road ahead. And you're constantly thinking about strategy, whether to attack or hang back."
John Ratey agrees. "Challenging the brain and body has a greater positive impact than aerobic exercise alone," he says. "We're just starting to see the effects of movement complexity in recent research."
One study in particular caught Ratey's eye. Researchers at a German university last year asked 115 teenage students at an elite sports academy to take a baseline test that measured attention and concentration. Then they were split. One group performed 10 minutes of exercise that required complex, highly coordinated movements. The other did simpler movements at the same level of aerobic activity. The kids took another attention and concentration test. Both groups improved their original results, but the students who performed the complex movements significantly outscored the others. The complex coordination, the researchers concluded, "might lead to a preactivation of parts of the brain which are responsible for mediating functions like attention."
There's another aspect to it as well. Call it gallows focus. "The prospect of the gallows doth wonderfully concentrate the mind," Samuel Johnson once famously wrote, and something similar can be said for exercise that involves a touch of risk. Let your attention drift in the peloton, and you might crash into the rider in front of you. Distraction in the dojo is rewarded with a painful body blow. By contrast, a soccer player who loses his concentration is just a guy standing in a field of grass.
Adam Leibovitz's use of riding as a natural form of Ritalin doesn't surprise Jonathan Vaughters, the Garmin-Slipstream team director. "His experience was my experience," Vaughters says. High school was difficult for him, but his ability to study improved when he started training 25 hours a week. "After a four-hour ride," he says, "I could sit there and concentrate on one topic for an extended amount of time. Without that exercise-induced euphoria, I had a hard time focusing."
Dean Peterson, head coach of the Marian University cycling program, takes a special interest in athletes with ADHD. His son has the disorder, and though Peterson himself was never diagnosed, "from what I've learned over the years I realized that the cycling and cross-country running I did in college helped me manage my own condition," he says.
Over the past year I've spoken with racers across the country, kids and adults, managing their ADHD with the help of cycling. Leibovitz was the only athlete who had quit the drug completely and replaced it with his daily ride. But a number told me they were able to ramp down their Ritalin dosage by mixing a regular cycling regimen into their schedules. It's possible that there is something far bigger going on here.
Peterson believes this to be true. "I think a lot of people are selfmedicating," he says, "and may not even know it."
If exercise is so effective, why isn't it more widely used as a treatment?
"ADHD is imperfectly named," says Conant-Norville. "People with the condition don't have a deficit of attention. They have a problem with attention control during boring or mundane tasks. Which is why the intense focus of cycling is great for someone with ADHD. If you're moving in the pack in a cycling race, you're highly focused on other riders around you as well as the road ahead. And you're constantly thinking about strategy, whether to attack or hang back."
John Ratey agrees. "Challenging the brain and body has a greater positive impact than aerobic exercise alone," he says. "We're just starting to see the effects of movement complexity in recent research."
One study in particular caught Ratey's eye. Researchers at a German university last year asked 115 teenage students at an elite sports academy to take a baseline test that measured attention and concentration. Then they were split. One group performed 10 minutes of exercise that required complex, highly coordinated movements. The other did simpler movements at the same level of aerobic activity. The kids took another attention and concentration test. Both groups improved their original results, but the students who performed the complex movements significantly outscored the others. The complex coordination, the researchers concluded, "might lead to a preactivation of parts of the brain which are responsible for mediating functions like attention."
There's another aspect to it as well. Call it gallows focus. "The prospect of the gallows doth wonderfully concentrate the mind," Samuel Johnson once famously wrote, and something similar can be said for exercise that involves a touch of risk. Let your attention drift in the peloton, and you might crash into the rider in front of you. Distraction in the dojo is rewarded with a painful body blow. By contrast, a soccer player who loses his concentration is just a guy standing in a field of grass.
Adam Leibovitz's use of riding as a natural form of Ritalin doesn't surprise Jonathan Vaughters, the Garmin-Slipstream team director. "His experience was my experience," Vaughters says. High school was difficult for him, but his ability to study improved when he started training 25 hours a week. "After a four-hour ride," he says, "I could sit there and concentrate on one topic for an extended amount of time. Without that exercise-induced euphoria, I had a hard time focusing."
Dean Peterson, head coach of the Marian University cycling program, takes a special interest in athletes with ADHD. His son has the disorder, and though Peterson himself was never diagnosed, "from what I've learned over the years I realized that the cycling and cross-country running I did in college helped me manage my own condition," he says.
Over the past year I've spoken with racers across the country, kids and adults, managing their ADHD with the help of cycling. Leibovitz was the only athlete who had quit the drug completely and replaced it with his daily ride. But a number told me they were able to ramp down their Ritalin dosage by mixing a regular cycling regimen into their schedules. It's possible that there is something far bigger going on here.
Peterson believes this to be true. "I think a lot of people are selfmedicating," he says, "and may not even know it."
If exercise is so effective, why isn't it more widely used as a treatment?
There's plenty of research to back up the neurotransmitter theory. In 1997, researchers found that treadmill running significantly increased the production of dopamine—that key neurotransmitter, along with norepinephrine, in the brain's attention center—in rats. In a later study, German scientists found that intense exercise boosted the human body's production of both dopamine and norepinephrine. In 1999, Michael Wendt, PhD, a researcher at the State University of New York at Buffalo, found marked improvement in ADHD kids who exercised for 40 minutes a day. In 2002, a University of Georgia study reported a promising correlation between exercise and improved focus in children with ADHD.
Each of these studies quietly died on the vine. Beyond a select few ADHD researchers and therapists, exercise is conspicuously absent from most programs and literature related to the disorder. The National Institute of Mental Health's 47-page guide to ADHD makes no mention of it.
Why? Many reasons.
"First, the answer is too simple," says Wendt, the author of the 1999 SUNY study. Exercise improves health: It's not exactly ground-breaking news. There's little incentive for scientists to prove such common wisdom, even if it might be critically helpful to parents and kids with ADHD. "Second, pharmaceutical companies fund a lot of medical research," Wendt says, "and you see no funding for research in this area."
Maybe that's the biggest reason no one has been loudly touting the benefits of exercise: There is no profit in it. Exercise has no drug reps. In 2007, the pharmaceutical industry invested $58.8 billion in research and development. Bike manufacturers don't sponsor medical studies. There's so little money for exercise research, in fact, that Michael Wendt had to finance his ADHD study. It cost him $15,000.
There's something else to consider. During the years when Ritalin prescriptions spread through the nation's classrooms, school districts across America were cutting back on physical education programs and coming under increasing pressure to boost standardized test scores. From 1991 to 1995—the very era when ADHD diagnoses were sky-rocketing— the percentage of high school students enrolled in daily PE classes dropped from 42 percent to 25 percent. For money-strapped school districts, cutting PE became an easy way to save money and devote more time and resources to "teaching to the test."
Given that history, the question posed by the former Olympic medalist seems disturbingly germane. Did we put a generation of potential Tour de France riders on Ritalin instead of giving them bikes?
There's a good chance we did.
That's why what we need now, a number of ADHD researchers say, isn't more research. It's a stronger message—one that bypasses physicians and psychologists and goes straight to kids, teachers and parents.
"There's enough evidence out there that indicates exercise improves focus in children with ADHD," says Spark author Ratey. "My passion now is to get that message into the schools. I want to change the whole concept of PE. Let's make it more based on a fitness model instead of something that revolves around competitive ball games. Make it relevant, get every child involved, and show the benefits to teachers, students and parents."
Ratey spends a lot of his time these days testifying before state legislatures that are considering bills that mandate new physical education programs. Exhibit A are innovative PE programs in Naperville, Illinois, and Titusville, Pennsylvania, where high school students put in an hour of intensive cardio work before class every day. Those programs not only turn out the fittest students in the country—but they're also among the smartest. The correlation between the unique PE programs and improved test scores, says Ratey, "are simply too intriguing to dismiss."
Each of these studies quietly died on the vine. Beyond a select few ADHD researchers and therapists, exercise is conspicuously absent from most programs and literature related to the disorder. The National Institute of Mental Health's 47-page guide to ADHD makes no mention of it.
Why? Many reasons.
"First, the answer is too simple," says Wendt, the author of the 1999 SUNY study. Exercise improves health: It's not exactly ground-breaking news. There's little incentive for scientists to prove such common wisdom, even if it might be critically helpful to parents and kids with ADHD. "Second, pharmaceutical companies fund a lot of medical research," Wendt says, "and you see no funding for research in this area."
Maybe that's the biggest reason no one has been loudly touting the benefits of exercise: There is no profit in it. Exercise has no drug reps. In 2007, the pharmaceutical industry invested $58.8 billion in research and development. Bike manufacturers don't sponsor medical studies. There's so little money for exercise research, in fact, that Michael Wendt had to finance his ADHD study. It cost him $15,000.
There's something else to consider. During the years when Ritalin prescriptions spread through the nation's classrooms, school districts across America were cutting back on physical education programs and coming under increasing pressure to boost standardized test scores. From 1991 to 1995—the very era when ADHD diagnoses were sky-rocketing— the percentage of high school students enrolled in daily PE classes dropped from 42 percent to 25 percent. For money-strapped school districts, cutting PE became an easy way to save money and devote more time and resources to "teaching to the test."
Given that history, the question posed by the former Olympic medalist seems disturbingly germane. Did we put a generation of potential Tour de France riders on Ritalin instead of giving them bikes?
There's a good chance we did.
That's why what we need now, a number of ADHD researchers say, isn't more research. It's a stronger message—one that bypasses physicians and psychologists and goes straight to kids, teachers and parents.
"There's enough evidence out there that indicates exercise improves focus in children with ADHD," says Spark author Ratey. "My passion now is to get that message into the schools. I want to change the whole concept of PE. Let's make it more based on a fitness model instead of something that revolves around competitive ball games. Make it relevant, get every child involved, and show the benefits to teachers, students and parents."
Ratey spends a lot of his time these days testifying before state legislatures that are considering bills that mandate new physical education programs. Exhibit A are innovative PE programs in Naperville, Illinois, and Titusville, Pennsylvania, where high school students put in an hour of intensive cardio work before class every day. Those programs not only turn out the fittest students in the country—but they're also among the smartest. The correlation between the unique PE programs and improved test scores, says Ratey, "are simply too intriguing to dismiss."
Wendt has applied data from his 1999 study to students in the Wilson Central School District in western New York, where he now serves as superintendent (see "The Drug-Free Drug," page 59). These programs aren't new. Naperville's program has been going on since 1990 and Titusville's since 1999. But the program has yet to gain much traction in the mainstream. Wendt sends his SUNY study to educators who ask for it. And he's often in touch with peers in Naperville and Titusville, comparing new innovations and pushing the cutting edge.
Adam Leibovitz now represents that cutting edge. Without intending to, the young cyclist is conducting an ongoing experiment that measures the power of the body to improve the mind. When he moved into his dorm last January, Adam brought a quiver of racing bikes and no Ritalin. His intensive training schedule had kept his ADHD in check over the previous fall, but nobody knew whether he'd be able to handle his condition in the same way amid the stepped-up demands of college.
"It's tough enough getting freshmen to manage their classes, training, team meetings and competitions," says coach Peterson. "You throw the ADHD kid into that situation, it becomes more of a challenge."
Through his first semester, Adam kept up a routine: Hit the books, then the bike. His classes were done by noon—"I like to get stuff out of the way early," he says—and then he'd take a short nap.
When he woke up, it was time for his medication. On a typical day Adam would grab his helmet, pull on his jersey, and wheel his bike through the front doors of his dorm. He'd clip in and glide past the ponds and grassy fields on campus, then roll onto 30th Street, near the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500. He would ride past cell phone stores and Burger Kings, past auto body shops and tire stores. He'd get in a rhythm by the time he was whizzing past the beltline road where new houses are encroaching on cornfields, and he'd keep going farther still to the place where the city faded and farmland still held its own. This was John Mellencamp country, all corn stubble and mud.
After a bumpy start in his first collegiate races, he would learn to race on a team, and by season's end he would win the conference criterium. Heading into finals week in May, he would feel solidly in control of his life. The first-grader whose parents faced an impossible choice—let him flounder in the system or take a powerful, identity-altering drug— would find a far greater alternative. He would turn out to be a successful college student, a blossoming bicycle racer.
Somewhere out in the vast Indiana flatland, Adam would turn and head home, eventually pulling into the campus cycling center at a little past three in the afternoon. The center, known by team members as "the wattage cottage," is a former storage garage converted into a velo training center. Coach Peterson would usually be there, fixing somebody's brake cable. Adam would park his road bike and join a few teammates pedaling furiously on CompuTrainers.
His head was clear, the world calm. His daily dose had kicked in.
Adam Leibovitz now represents that cutting edge. Without intending to, the young cyclist is conducting an ongoing experiment that measures the power of the body to improve the mind. When he moved into his dorm last January, Adam brought a quiver of racing bikes and no Ritalin. His intensive training schedule had kept his ADHD in check over the previous fall, but nobody knew whether he'd be able to handle his condition in the same way amid the stepped-up demands of college.
"It's tough enough getting freshmen to manage their classes, training, team meetings and competitions," says coach Peterson. "You throw the ADHD kid into that situation, it becomes more of a challenge."
Through his first semester, Adam kept up a routine: Hit the books, then the bike. His classes were done by noon—"I like to get stuff out of the way early," he says—and then he'd take a short nap.
When he woke up, it was time for his medication. On a typical day Adam would grab his helmet, pull on his jersey, and wheel his bike through the front doors of his dorm. He'd clip in and glide past the ponds and grassy fields on campus, then roll onto 30th Street, near the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500. He would ride past cell phone stores and Burger Kings, past auto body shops and tire stores. He'd get in a rhythm by the time he was whizzing past the beltline road where new houses are encroaching on cornfields, and he'd keep going farther still to the place where the city faded and farmland still held its own. This was John Mellencamp country, all corn stubble and mud.
After a bumpy start in his first collegiate races, he would learn to race on a team, and by season's end he would win the conference criterium. Heading into finals week in May, he would feel solidly in control of his life. The first-grader whose parents faced an impossible choice—let him flounder in the system or take a powerful, identity-altering drug— would find a far greater alternative. He would turn out to be a successful college student, a blossoming bicycle racer.
Somewhere out in the vast Indiana flatland, Adam would turn and head home, eventually pulling into the campus cycling center at a little past three in the afternoon. The center, known by team members as "the wattage cottage," is a former storage garage converted into a velo training center. Coach Peterson would usually be there, fixing somebody's brake cable. Adam would park his road bike and join a few teammates pedaling furiously on CompuTrainers.
His head was clear, the world calm. His daily dose had kicked in.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Guides To Marrying Well
A Guy’s Guide To Marrying Well - http://www.focusonthefamily.com/downloads/boundless/GuysGuide.pdf
A Girl’s Guide To Marrying Well - http://www.boundless.org/girls/pages/GirlsGuide.pdf
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