Name: Joggers.
Age: Joggers or jogging?
Joggers first: All ages, but the super-fit under-40s predominate.
And jogging? The word, a variant of shogging – meaning to move in a jerky manner, has been around since the 16th century. Shakespeare uses it in The Taming of the Shrew: “You may be jogging whiles your boots are green.”
That’s incredible. Was Shakespeare a jogger? Not as far as we know. The modern use of the term to mean running for exercise dates from the 1940s, and the idea really gathered speed after 1962 when the New Zealand athletics coach Arthur Lydiard set up the Auckland Joggers Club, which encouraged gentle long-distance running as a health benefit. The US author Jim Fixx’s 1977 book The Complete Book of Running gave the movement a huge boost, although he didn’t help the cause by dying of a heart attack while out jogging seven years later at the age of only 52.
Still, a wonderful thing, isn’t it? I think I might go out for a jog right now to ease the boredom and get some air into my lungs. Well, if you do, be careful. There is a war raging out there.
I thought that was just in the supermarkets. No, it’s in the nation’s parks and on its pavements and towpaths, too, where joggers – or runners, as many prefer to be called these days – and walkers are engaged in a do-or-die battle for space.
Why do joggers now prefer to be called runners? Because, as Stuart Heritage put it in a seminal Guardian article on the subject: “Runners run because they love running. Joggers jog because they love cake.” Running is about freedom; jogging is about guilt.
And the war? Ah yes, the war. Joggers, AKA runners, have become public enemy No 1 in the current crisis. “Public outrage is now chiefly focused on runners and joggers who have been panting along pavements and in parks, refusing to get out of the way for pedestrians in case they lose half a second off their ‘time,’” reports the London correspondent of the Irish Times. Relations between runners and dog walkers are becoming particularly fractious, and Michael Gove (definitely a jogger rather than a runner) has said no run should exceed 30 minutes.
Where will it all end? Almost certainly with one of the combatants being bitten.
Not to be confused with: Social isolation, good manners or the blitz spirit.
Do say: “Oi, don’t get so close! Who do you think you are? Mo Farah?”
Don’t say: “But what about my marathon training?”
