Theodore Roosevelt's Response to Asthma

By age 12, Theodore Roosevelt had spent almost every day of a short life struggling with horrible asthma. At the gym that his father built on the second floor porch, young Roosevelt proceeded to work out feverishly every day for the next five years. By his early twenties, the battle against asthma was essentially over. That gym work prepared a physically weak but smart boy for the uniquely challenging course on which the nation and the world were about to embark.