I started to leaf furtively through running books in sport sections and to scroll through athletics websites. It was all very well to turn up at the pub, drink four beers and call myself a runner, but I needed practical advice. I’d taught myself how to read the Cyrillic alphabet, and I’d watched YouTube videos to figure out how to take apart an iPod or peel an artichoke. I had become proficient in living as an orphan and now I was going to teach myself how to run a half marathon. There are guides for running marathons, and there are guides to enduring grief. On the whole, the running ones are more helpful, even though I needed to duck answers to questions that I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking: can I wear mascara when I run, what’s the best footwear for running in the snow, what sort of heart monitor do I need?
Eventually I managed to put together a perfunctory plan. Firstly, I’d undertake one long run each weekend – outdoors. This would gradually get longer week by week, and I’d hope to have run 18 or 19 kilometres at a stretch two weekends before starting the race. Secondly, I would aim for two or three additional, shorter runs during the week. The pundits all insisted that these involve sprints, but I had no intention of adding such indignities to my regime. Finally, I would take my long runs and at least one weekday run outside of the gym.
I was operating on the certainty that if I stuck to my training plan, I would be able to finish this half marathon. Mostly, I did stick to it, without needing to remodel entirely the architecture of my daily life. I worked mainly as a freelancer and taught undergraduates part-time so my weeks were flexible. I would make a fuss about staying home the night before a long run; the following night, I would celebrate with wine. I told my peers that I was going to run a half marathon, hoping that the prospect of failing to make good on that promise would keep me rising early.
Really, though, I didn’t need a fear of public humiliation to motivate me. Running was becoming its own quiet reward, and I found the suspense it produced quite compelling. Would I be able to finish the race? Would I get there? I found myself talking a lot about running to my close friends: not just about the strange joy I’d discovered and the unexpected changes to the rhythms of my weeks, but also about the weariness and the strains, about my frequent doubt that I could make the distance. I found myself talking more about the pain of running than I can ever remember talking about grief. Each run could have represented a stage in an allegory about recovery, endurance or change – but it didn’t have to, and as I learned to speak the language of the body, I let the metaphors sort themselves out.
Running races are linear: starting line; finish line. Fitness may be cumulative, but training isn’t. The runner begins anew every time she puts on her shoes. To run at the gym had been simple: I dropped my bag beside the treadmill, draped a towel over a rail, popped a bottle of water in the designated holder, pressed a few buttons and got going. How, then, to start running outside? I was frightened of cars, bicycles, dogs, broken footpaths and other people. A new set of routines emerged. Instead of running with my keys in my pocket, I’d leave them in my letterbox. I purchased a tiny mp3 player that clipped to my shorts, and I asked my friend Ben to make me a playlist. He delivered the goods: a 300-song epic that was heavy on running puns (Run DMC and Bruce Springsteen), indie 90s femme acoustic heartbreak, and dizzy early 2000s electro. I hid under a scrubby green hat, behind a pair of sunglasses, in between my headphones.
Quitting the controlled climate of the gym, I had to submit to the weather: wind, sun, clouds, and all varieties of rain between a drizzle and a downpour. Runners are supposed to train in rain, hail or snow, but if it was bucketing down, I’d hold out for meteorological clemency. Every now and then, I’d return to the gym.
As I ran, my knowledge of the geography of Sydney was transformed. Hills are hard to avoid in the Emerald City, and their inclinations are rarely regular. These undulations took on new meaning for me. Instead of tracking with my eyes the land that rises from the bays on the eastern side of the harbour up to the spine of Oxford Street, I described a lifting path with my feet. I became a moving part of the tightly controlled curves that ricochet from Woolloomooloo to the Botanical Gardens, around to the Opera House and into the lopped oblong of Circular Quay. New categories for trees presented themselves: kind trees with broad shade; trees with treacherous flowers that turn the pavement into a bright slippery hazard; trees with bothersome hard fruits that roll underfoot like ball bearings. I kept track of the brick fences colonised by cats as snoozing spots and the gates through which friendly dogs wedged their wet noses. My own nose I stuck into other people’s gardens – magnolias, waxy gardenias, all the stelliferous jasmines, lilacs, daphnes: it was winter, and I wished it were spring so that the heavy fragrant flowers might start to bloom. I stopped once to chat to a man high on a ladder, harvesting a lilli pilli to make jam; I remember him every time I run through a windfall of the pink fruit.
If I’d anticipated a dull backdrop of concrete, asphalt and steel, this encounter with the urban biosphere, the built environment and its human inhabitants was absorbing. I lost myself and became part of the scene. Perhaps, waiting at the traffic lights alongside a sequinned posse heading to a cocktail party – me, a study in sweat and facial flush, them, a study in fashionable zeal – I’d return to awkwardness, stare at my shoes wishing I could tap my heels together and be across the road, at the entrance to another park, and then the lights would change, and I would find myself somewhere else.
I did fret about dehydration. I ignored all the dire warnings about the effect this running might have on my knees, about overtraining, about beginner’s zeal and burnout – but what if fluid shortage knocked me out? Mental images of desiccated muscles interrupted my runs; they were stripped of skin, all fluid squeezed out of them. A parched zombie runner tottered on a loop in my mind, never able to slake her thirst. This paranoia explains why my first mental running map included references to all possible drinking-water sources on my route.
To reach Rushcutters Bay Park, where I first ran, I jogged down one hill and then another to reach a narrow mossy staircase that leads into the park. Boot-camp groups use the stairs for training drills. Moss grows along the side walls here too, and it’s very damp; unlike the boot-campers, I always walk down them, afraid of slipping. I knew that not far from the bottom of these stairs was a bubbler. The precious dogs of the neighbourhood lapped from the dripping joint at its base. If I crossed the park, ran up a hill, turned left and ran down a road lined with massive old fig trees and then down the other side of the hill, I’d reach another park. This one had two bubblers in the far corner. If I ran up another short, easy gradient hill and along the waterfront, I’d reach the amenities block for a tennis court and sports grounds. Inside: water.
*
Fitness enthusiasts started running to improve their health and wellbeing in the 1960s, but recreational running really took off around the world in the 70s. ‘Recreational running’ is a bit of a mouthful: the correct term is definitely ‘jogging’.
You do not stop a jogger who is jogging. Foaming at the mouth, his mind riveted on the inner countdown to the moment when he will achieve a higher plane of consciousness, he is not to be stopped. If you stopped him to ask the time, he would bite your head off.
This is how French philosopher Jean Baudrillard characterises joggers in his book America. At some point, I had underlined that quote in my copy and added an exclamation mark in the margin. ‘Jogging’ isn’t a word that’s so fashionable these days: it signifies a wholesomeness that lacks adventure, a dagginess without eccentricity. As I contemplated quitting the gym, I found that I too was contemptuous of jogging. I thought it spoke to a certain earnest vapidity, one that I earnestly sought to avoid – if I was going to disgrace myself by running in the park, at least I’d call myself a runner, and not a jogger.
The vocabulary of recreational running was honed and popularised in the 70s: intervals, sprints, tempo runs, fartleks, long slow distance training, and so on. All those exasperating slogans
about changing your life and feeling fabulous also have their roots in the euphoric jogging revolution. Try this: ‘Not long ago, Dr Kostrubala was a fat, anxious, discontented psychiatrist. Then he discovered running. He’s still a psychiatrist, but everything else in his life has been wonderfully changed.’ So reads the blurb to my paperback edition of the exuberant Joy of Running, authored by Thaddeus Kostrubala, one of the many best-selling 70s jogging guides. The cover features a smiling middle-aged couple running on grass – she’s wearing a bright yellow tracksuit, he’s in velvety maroon, and the zip on his jacket is open far enough for us to see a few rogue tufts of chest hair. This couple don’t look ferociously fit, they just look happy.
The Joy of Running sits on my bookshelf alongside a number of similarly buoyant volumes: Aerobics, by Kenneth H. Cooper (‘2 million copies in print! The world’s most popular physical fitness program!’); Dr Sheehan on Running, by the inimitable George Sheehan (‘The one book every runner must have; America’s expert shows the way to total fitness and joy’); Jogging, by William J. Bowerman and W.E. Harris (‘The simple way to physical fitness by a heart specialist and a famous track coach’); the Van Aaken Method, by Ernst van Aaken (‘Finding the endurance to run faster and live healthier’); Jogging with Lydiard, by Arthur Lydiard and Garth Gilmour (the note in the flyleaf of my copy reads, ‘To Alison, Hope this provides the motivation – you’ve got the rest already there’).
Most of the second-hand running manuals in my collection take the form of low-cost paperbacks. They were written at a time when forty was well into middle-age, and people worked jobs for life – or rather, male breadwinners did. They appeal to the bibliophile in me: loopy kitsch fonts, tiny text crammed to the margins of yellowing pages, awkward tables and charts, fab photos of retro running gear. Jogging became an extraordinarily popular activity extraordinarily quickly, and these books sold millions.
Whereas women were discouraged from competing in distance running events at the elite level, the jogging revolutionaries – all male, mostly doctors – made at least a little room for women. Those who competed in the women-only events organised by Avon and Bonne Bell could access a bit of training advice. It’s a good example of the market rushing to meet changing social mores and the needs of a consumer group as regulations lagged.
This isn’t to say that comprehensive guidance for women runners is on offer; rather, there are side observations on female physiognomy and advice about training loads. Very occasionally, a euphemistic nod to the menstrual cycle, sports bras and pregnancy. The authors don’t tend to dwell on the difficulties – childcare and divorce, harassment in the workplace, everyday domestic tedium – that might have encouraged women to start running in the first place. Small concessions aside, it’s assumed that the primary reader is a middle-class man with a set of manly stresses: a nagging wife at home, a bunch of kids to escape, an important job, the burden of civic responsibility. If I’d picked up one of these books when I started running, I wouldn’t have recognised myself in it.
It’s possible to pinpoint the year and the city that people started jogging: Auckland, 1961. Twenty or so men gathered in a park and started running to improve their health under the supervision of a coach, Arthur Lydiard, and a cardiologist, Noel Roydhouse. For larks, they adopted the slightly archaic verb ‘to jog’ – which was more often applied to the gait of animals – as their own, and started to run. Thus was the Auckland Jogging Club convened.
Lydiard had trained three New Zealand runners – Peter Snell, Murray Halberg and Barry Magee – to win long- and middle-distance medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Now his jogging students undertook slow, steady runs and gradually increased their distances, just as I was doing. Most of them were middle-aged professional men who’d seen Lydiard speak at a local Lions Club function. They weren’t interested in the peak performance rubbish that dominates the contemporary running scene: what they wanted was to avoid a trip to the cardio ward. There’s an Australian running magazine titled Run for Your Life. Riffs on the words ‘run for your life’ are beloved by race organisers and the people who design t-shirts for running groups. I wrote it off as an irresistible play on words. Turns out the origins of recreational running lie with a bunch of men who were, literally, running to save their lives.
Prior to the second world war, a heart attack was understood to be a death sentence. People who survived one were told to avoid exercise and adjust their future prospects. New knowledge about the heart changed this. Suddenly, sedentary jobs didn’t represent a reprieve from manual labour: they were a dangerous lifestyle. It wasn’t invisible viruses that would kill you – all those glorious bad habits would. If it’s too much to claim that joggers strive for immortality, it’s at least true that many of their first generation were renegotiating the boundaries of their own mortality.
Today, we take for granted that running is good for us. The language of heart health is built into the design of gyms: cardio sessions and heart-rate monitors are commonplace. When Lydiard was first putting his joggers through their paces, none of this was certain. Happily, the Auckland joggers became fitter and their hearts grew stronger. They told their friends in other cities about their successes, and jogging spread around New Zealand. On the strength of this experiment, Lydiard published his first book, Run to the Top, in 1962. His second book, Run for Your Life, published in 1965, became a global bestseller.
In 1962, Lydiard was visited by Bill Bowerman, the head running coach at the University of Oregon. If at first he was interested in Lydiard’s crack international athletes, he became intrigued by the Kiwi joggers and surprised to find that he couldn’t keep up with them. He returned to the States and recruited a few friends to jog with him. In 1964, with his friend Phil Knight, he founded Blue Ribbon Sports, the company later rebadged ‘Nike’. There are surprisingly few steps between a bunch of unhealthy Kiwi businessmen and the establishment of what would become a global sports corporation. Bowerman’s Jogging, another bestseller, appeared in 1967 and lays out an exercise program that ‘will improve the level of physical fitness of nearly anyone from seven to 70’.
*
The idea that running is a way of life, a mystical path to enlightenment, is frequently expressed in the books of 70s running gurus – in particular those written by George Sheehan, arguably the most famous running writer of all. If Lydiard, Cooper and Bowerman provided the practical guidance joggers needed to get started, Sheehan gave them the wherewithal to tell a bigger story about running, one rich with allegorical resonance.
Sheehan’s concept of ‘total fitness’ encourages his readers to become that most mysterious entity, the person they want to be. He’s less concerned with remodelling the physical body than with the discovery of a metaphysical self. Begin with the body, he advises, to encounter a new reality: ‘become proficient at listening to your body and you will eventually hear from your essential totality – the complex, unique person you are’. He was hailed by Bill Clinton as the ‘philosopher king of running’; Baudrillard’s dig at joggers seeking higher states of consciousness is probably directed at Sheehan’s acolytes. Sheehan was a strong runner, but he presents himself as a kind of everyman. He was, in fact, a New Jersey cardiologist with twelve children, a midlife convert to running – which was, he discovered, an antidote to midlife melancholy. When he started to run, he writes, ‘I rewrote my life story. It has become a biography of pain. I have made a career out of suffering.’ This kind of high-minded masochism is a constant feature of Sheehan’s work, and so is the idea that running can drive a narrative of redemption.
Runner’s World magazine, founded in 1966, took Sheehan on in 1970 as a columnist and medical editor, and he wrote for them about running, yearning and suffering for twenty-five years. Books like Dr Sheehan on Running (1975), Running & Being (1978) and Personal Best (1989) are peppered with training advice, but the philosophy and psychology of running is their central concern. Sheehan’s runner is an existential figure, battling bleak inner and outer worlds on
the path to self-discovery. His prose is always self-deprecating, sometimes ecstatic and occasionally quite bonkers. To be a successful runner, he counsels, never forget that ‘you are your only friend, the only protector of your body and its beauty’. Although I concede that as I ran it became easier for me to think about other experiences of pain, loss and weariness, I would have failed all the tests Sheehan set for being a committed runner. This idea of being one’s only friend out there on the road speaks to a parched and lonely individualism that I find very unappealing. I enjoyed running alone, but not like this.
If Sheehan doesn’t express much confidence in social bonds generally, he’s also a little baffling when it comes to women runners. ‘When I see women running, I see a new world coming,’ he writes in Running & Being. Uh-oh. ‘The woman who comes to know herself to be truly a runner has discovered not only her body, but her soul as well.’ Sheehan is emphatically in favour of women running, not least because physical activity can dispel the ‘mystery’ of womankind and resolve the ‘eternal discord between what is masculine and what is feminine’. If more women ran, he concludes, the divorce rate might drop.
I imagine Sheehan’s attitude to my years of delayed grief and depressed inertia would have been scathing. There are no excuses for bad living and a weak will, agree Lydiard and Bowerman: if you’re fat, depressed and staring down the barrel of heart disease, you have only yourself to blame. Obviously this is out of step with contemporary thinking about the complex socioeconomic roots of what are sometimes termed ‘lifestyle diseases’. Lydiard quotes a portrait sketched by one of his cardiologist mates: ‘the average middle-aged Australian is a paunchy, soft individual, probably beery, who exercises by shouting abuse on Saturday afternoons’. This isn’t a medical assessment, it’s a moral judgement with a class slur on the side.
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