Who invented jogging

They developed a reconditioning schedule for runners affected by such injuries that allowed them to continue their training but at an altered intensity. Thirdly, Bowerman and Harris were training trial participants in a corporeal skill. This did not mean that running itself is not a skill. It was simply a skill that most people acquired very early in their physical development as a byproduct of normal childhood play.

Nonetheless, it was a skill that sedentary Americans had largely forgotten. Part of learning to jog involved simply remembering how to run. Bowerman and Harris did offer advice on the mechanics of jogging. What is notable about much of this skill acquisition is that it is largely non-conscious.

The jogger became better at jogging, more skilled, more proficient simply by jogging. They are people whose feel for jogging, for how their body works together as it moves itself forward, how it interacts with the ground it is crossing, has been honed through the endless repetition of one foot after the other. Fourthly, and finally, Bowerman and Harris were providing their joggers with a defined route through which the jogger could establish a reliable routine of exercise.

This was a routine that with time and repetition would sink into the background of personal habit. A large part of this was simply mapping a path from unconditioned adult to a conditioned one. By developing weekly schedules that set out day-by-day, week-by-week exactly what a jogger was going to do, the nascent jogger could not only see what she or he was doing this week. They could also anticipate exactly where the schedule should be taking them. Indeed, the schedules with their tedious, almost hypnotic, repetition of exercise tables and pace instructions took up neatly two-thirds of the pages in Jogging: A Physical Fitness Program for All Ages.

They tell you how far, how fast and how often to jog. They leave little to chance. The schedules assume that, unlike the runner, you may have to be your own coach and trainer.

If you follow the instructions, you do not over work. This was a neat way of insinuating exercise into the routine rhythms of everyday activity. Source : J. Bowerman and W. What does all this tell us about habit?

And, what does it tell us about the two questions with which this paper started. What does it tell us about why so many people started jogging across American in the s? And what does it tell us about why jogging was understood by large numbers of middle-aged Americans as a sensible solution to the problem of sedentarism? Well the first thing the previous sections point to is the degree to which social habits — that is to say settled and engrained ways of doing something — are deeply anchored within specific established capacities for action.

As such, the challenge of generating new habits is often the challenge of forging new capacities. Much of the focus of the jogging program — both as it was developed by Bowerman and Harris at the University of Oregon, and as codified in Jogging: A Physical Fitness Program for All Ages — was on working to equip the physically inactive sedentary body with the capacity to take on a habit of exercise.

The entrained habits of the past cannot simply be willed into submission. Entrenched habits must be worked against. New corporeal skills and routines must be carefully developed and cultivated to allow new alternative habits to take hold. Indeed, a great deal of the work involved in the jogging schedules is not strictly speaking about the establishment of a habit per se.

The point of jogging is not that one continues to run 55 yards at just above walking pace and then walk — as the neophyte jogger is instructed to do.

The point is through doing this exercise and developing the capacity to run faster and run further, the jogger gains the ability to take on and sustain a regular routine — a habit — of physical exercise.

In a sense, through following the routine of the schedules, joggers gain the capacity to will themselves into a habit of physical exercise. So, in part, the success of jogging is that it offered a straightforward, easy to follow, way into exercise. Which leads to a second point about habit: for new habits to get taken on they need to have a certain social intelligibility.

However, its popularity was also rooted in the recognizability to many Americans of the arguments Bowerman and Harris made for jogging. Jogging plugged into a long-standing current of concern in American culture about the effects of urbanization and affluence on individual and national health.

But jogging was also intelligible in a wide range of other senses. But they will. In broad daylight a woman walking along 81st street had been attacked, pulled into bushes, and slashed with a razorblade.

This, sadly, was an all too familiar story in early s New York. The second story, an account of a violent trauma, is also a story of how the jogging body has become part of the commonsensical, popular lexicon, of New York City.

From Eugene to New York City is a long way. Bowerman and Harris had worked hard to configure jogging not just as another fitness fad, but as a specific medical intervention into the lives of sedentary Americans.

In doing so they set out a careful reasoning of why and how the sedentary American should jog. This configuration of routine, reasoning, and practice would prove to be remarkably enduring. People should jog because jogging had the potential to improve cardio-vascular fitness and thus potentially hinder the development of a range of chronic coronary diseases. Jogging had to be part of a regular routine.

As such, a specific time during the day needed to be set apart during which the body could be exercised — during this time the damage from an otherwise physically sedentary life could be ameliorated. At the same time as they defined the need for a specific time for exercising the body, Bowerman and Harris sought to reanimate the environment within which those exercising bodies could inhabit. Pushing against the tendency to confine routines of physical exercise to evermore specialized and geometrically codified spaces of the gymnasium, health club, or running track, jogging pushed the physically active body back into the public environment — into parks and public reserves, onto sidewalks and city streets, onto beaches and golf courses.

This way of configuring routine physical exercises as a palliative to an otherwise sedentary society has had all sorts of surprising consequences. One was simply the degree to which it became a normal part of the urban landscape.

Another has been the proliferation in the way people use running as an exercise. Think of fun runs, running clinics, big-city marathons, the contemporary fad for barefoot running, to name just a few examples. They did not advocate walking or cycling instead of driving. Or taking stairs instead of lifts and escalators. Or getting rid of all the labor saving devices that Americans had invited into their homes and yards. In fact, with their success in promoting jogging Bowerman and Harris played a pivotal role in cementing a certain framing of the solution to the problem of the becoming sedentary middle-aged body.

And, if this has not necessarily proved to be a very effective way to deal with the health problems of sedentary living, it has proved to be a remarkably enduring way of framing solutions to the problems of sedentariness. I would especially like to thank Garth Gilmour for his hospitality and help whilst looking through archive material from the Auckland Joggers Club, and Bruce Tabb for all his help in navigating the William J.

Bowerman Papers. Mike Roche generously provided back copies of New Zealand Athletics. Tim Cresswell and two anonymous referees also offered helpful advice on revising the paper for publication. Lastly, Hugh Prince offered detailed and enthusiastic comments on the paper. The paper is dedicated to his memory. Alan Latham is a senior lecturer at University College London.

He is currently writing a history of contemporary regimes of physical fitness. He also writes about urban sociality, mobility, and public space. Certainly there is a diverse literature that looks at the evolution of cultures of physical health and fitness within America, see for example J.

Norton and Company, , C. Within geography see E. But there is a dearth of literature that focuses on specifically on the urban manifestations of these trends with reference to the mature adult population. Looking beyond America see M. Levy and S. Reed et al. Today there are more than 10 million joggers.

Shove , F. Trentmann and R. Three sets of literature inform the approach to habit and with that routine in this essay. Of particular interest is the insight that habits have taken on a certain shape they are often carried along by practice, see E. Shove and M. The second, is the work of social-psychologists such as Wendy Wood on how individual habits form and are broken, see W. Wood, J. Quinn and D. Verplanken and W. Neal, W. Wood and J.

See F. This third strand of thinking is closely related to much contemporary geographical writing grouped under the banner of non-representational theory.

Non-representational work that has been directly focused on habit includes P. Harris et al. Raab is credited as the first medical scientist to suggest a direct relationship between the prevalence of atherosclerosis and heart disease in a population and the level of fat within their diet.

See W. Kraus and W. It is worth pointing out that the physical sendentariness that Kraus and Raab are concerned about is paradoxical; whilst the individual gestures of the physical body become increasingly contained, its total movement through space is amplified through the very machines that have brought it physically to rest.

For many then, America of the late s and s was a hyper-mobile sedentary society. Kraus and Raab, Hypokinetic Disease , p. For further examples see, J. Currens and P. Keys and P. Blumgart ed. Eugene Register Guard 20 June , p. Throughout the s Lydiard had coached athletes such as Murray Halberg, Barry McGee and Peter Snell while working full time as a foreman in a shoe factory and — toward the end of the decade — running a milk delivery round in the Auckland suburb of Remuera.

In after the success of his runners at the Rome Olympics he was offered a job as promotions manager for the cigarette company Rothmans. This allowed Lydiard to work full time training coaches and promoting athletics around the county. Indeed, Bowerman had tried to arrange a coaching job for Lydiard in America. Lydiard and G. Gilmore, Run to the Top Wellington: A. Reed, ; G. It was not a club as such. It had no membership list, no subscription to join, and it was not incorporated as an association.

It is worth pointing out that this non-bureaucratic approach to organizing the club was itself a quite radical idea. New Zealand had a notable enthusiasm for organizational formality. This formality reasserted itself in the Jogging Club in the late s after Lydiard had left New Zealand to coach in Finland. The club became an officially incorporated association and introduced a uniform to be worn on all club jogs. The club was specifically aimed at men over In the early years participation was largely restricted to men.

This reflected in part the fact that the problems jogging were directed at — the side effects of a sedentary lifestyle, heart disease, and excessive weight — were understood as a being those of middle-aged men not women.

It also reflected the pattern of homo-sociality that defined New Zealand society — and especially New Zealand sports — at the time. See J. The first harrier clubs were established in Auckland in the late s. By-and-large, harrier cross country was practiced by men in their teens and 20s. It was unusual but not unheard of for a runner to continue into their 30s. Wellington Methodist Harriers Club Scapbooks, ref. This was pretty much exactly the method recommended by Lydiard.

Lydiard and Gilmour, Run to the Top , pp. Gilmour and Lydiard, Run to the Top. Nonetheless, the council largely focused on the issue of fitness for those under We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.

Kraus and Raab, Hypokinetic Disease ; T. The most high profile exemplar of this point of view was the prolific Peter Steincrohn M.

For example, W. Sodeman and G. Burch, American Heart Journal , 15 22 , ; E. Boas, JAMA , , , pp. Fitzhugh and B. Hamilton, JAMA , , , p. French and W. Dock, JAMA , , , p. He talked like one and he acted like one. My first impression of him was of a guy who didn't go halfway. You either did what he told you to do or you didn't. There were no short-cuts and he had no intention of wasting his time or yours on doing anything but what he said.

But neither did he turn anyone away who was prepared to follow, even if they had no prospect of doing anything significant. Not that Lydiard claimed every success for himself. Of Viren, who won the 5,,m Olympic double in and , Lydiard wrote,.

He still sends me a card every Christmas and gives me the credit for his great successes, but I never trained him. I coached his coach to do that. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Already subscribed? Log in. Forgotten your password? Morris would later look at the bus workers' waistbands —Transport for London provided the data from records of pants provided to its workers—and found that, even though drivers were plumper 'round the middle, that correlated less strongly with their heart health than how much they moved.

The same pattern showed up in a different group of workers, too: Sedentary government clerks were more likely to have heart attacks than mobile postal workers.

The answer, he had found, was "Yes. He looked, too, at the movements that 18, men made outside the jobs that kept them sitting down. Here, too, there was a striking trend: Those who did some reasonably serious exercise—biking, swimming, playing soccer—ended up with healthier hearts than men who spent their time puttering about.

So, Morris started to jog, and to tell the rest of the increasingly desk-bound world to try it out. In the years before he died, just a few months shy of turning , he spent 30 minutes of almost every day swimming or jogging. By then, he had plenty of company.