She may not be able to work out a Middle East peace settlement (just yet), but she can tell you how to lose those extra kilos and keep them off. Condoleezza Rice has gone the Jane Fonda route and decided to share her dogged commitment to fitness with the rest of the nation.
Washingtonians who were up early enough last week could have seen the secretary of state on the pre-dawn news bulletins in a sky-blue T-shirt and black tracksuit bottoms, providing tips on how to stay in shape even when you spend much of your time circling the world helping President George W Bush to spread democracy.
The 51-year-old diplomatic dynamo gets up at 4.30 every morning and never misses a session in the gym, wherever she is in the world. She works out for 45 minutes on a treadmill or an elliptical trainer and lifts weights three times a week. It is as simple and brutal as that.
She has some advantages. When in Washington, she uses the State Department gym and its resident trainer, ex-marine Tommy Tomlo. In the course of three instalments of Fitness in the Fast Track aired on Washington’s WRC-TV, Tomlo put her through her paces with a few minutes’ warm up, then worked on her core stability with some nasty-looking stomach crunches, and finally lifted hefty free weights on her shoulders. She did not flinch.
Weight does not appear to be much of an issue with the secretary of state, an unrepresentative representative of a country that is struggling with an obesity epidemic. But apparently she was once drawn to the dark side. Her one shock revelation was that she carried around some extra baggage in her last year at college.
She joined a sorority and began having communal meals and midnight snacks. ”Before I knew it I had gained almost 13,5kg,” she recalls. But, as she rose in the academic world to become a star in foreign policy studies, she got a grip on her eating habits and has been far more careful ever since, even experimenting with the faddish end of the diet world.
”I find that what works for me is to eat a balanced meal,” she says. She shares the Bush family’s aversion to green vegetables and admits having to force broccoli down.
That would seem to be a small feat for a woman who appears to wake up long before the rest of official Washington. The early starts, she warns, do not get less painful with time. It is just a question of will power.
For any foreign secretaries aspiring to punch above their weight and go 15 rounds with Rice, she has some tips:
l If you are over 50, ”speed walk and walk hills instead of running”.
l Do not break your exercise pattern, even on the go.
l Do not give up. Rice tells Washington viewers about her father, who had been an athlete but gave up exercise and afterwards ”encountered all kinds of health problems”. She concludes: ”It was a real lesson to me, and it said to me you have to exercise all your life.”
The Condi fitness plan is not for the faint of heart. This is no everywoman. On top of her day job, she is also a concert pianist, a former competitive figure skater and enthusiastic tennis player. Do not try all of that at home, especially while mediating global conflict.
There is no doubt about Rice’s value as a role model. If she can make time on her work schedule, perhaps anyone can. It is less clear what the secretary of state will get out of baring her biceps unless, of course, it is for the same reason politicians do anything.
She has claimed, insistently and repeatedly, that she has no interest in running for the presidency in 2008, and privately hints that she cannot wait to get back to the academic life in California. She says she cannot bear Washington. But that raises the question of why her press aides are thinking up such unconventional stunts to raise her profile. There is a ”draft Condi” movement gathering steam, to make her the Republican presidential nominee. Putting forward a black woman who is ”mildly pro-choice” on abortion may not suit the Republican right, but the party’s tacticians see her as a potential vice-presidential candidate at least, the perfect foil to a Democratic challenge from Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s exercise regime, unlike her husband’s, is little-known.
As for what all this exertion will mean for the rest of us, the State Department spokesperson claimed, with a little deadpan menace, that it would make US diplomacy ”muscular and agile”. Is that a good thing? — Â