Time Essay: Running a Good Thing into the Ground

The face is familiar—eyes bobbing, mouth agape, puffing like a locomotive. There are so many of them in the U.S., maybe 25 million. They may seem like more, since they turn up everywhere: on walkways and city plazas, along bridges and expressways, even in the once hushed corridors of office buildings. America, in short, has become overrun with runners running every which way, including off at the mouth. Not surprisingly, running is now running into a snippy backlash.

Generally Americans have been as hospitable to running as to previous fads. Runners have been cursed less than skateboarders, derided less than Hula-Hoopers and never thought as silly as some of their forefadders—flagpole sitters, for instance, or danceathoners. To this day runners are cordially tolerated, except where they generate traffic problems or preachy conversations about running. Even when they do their little ritual exercises in public—trying to push down trees or walls and stretching their legs into disagreeable shapes—even then they are looked upon not as often with aversion as with amazement.

Still, every craze sooner or later begins to bloat with selfimportance; then it incites, along with ennui, a certain peevishness and skepticism among outsiders. Running is no exception. Superannuated as a fad, running is beginning to express itself more and more in the tongues of a subculture. Thus antirunning feeling, apart from that expressed by spouses and families of devout marathoners, has been turning up more and more in the public prints.

Recently Saturday Review flaunted a complaint titled "Jogging Mania—Enough Already!" Art Buchwald proposed a mileage tax on runners, and New York Daily News Humorist Gerald Nachman whimsically reviewed The Complete Book of Lollygagging—a title not precisely the same as that of Jim Fixx's bestselling rhapsody on running. Russell Baker, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor—all have joined in a spirited backlashathon.

Executive Editor Morton Kondracke of the New Republic ventilated his suspicion that the backlash is incited by "a few columnists and freelance writers trying to earn a bit." Yet even he confessed to being put off when a friend learned he was a runner and asked: "Have you experienced euphoria?" No, Kondracke replied. Indeed, he himself admits to complaints "against joggery profiteers"—authors, magazine publishers, dealers in running gear, even some doctors who treat running injuries. Thus, perhaps inadvertently, he joined the backlashers.

The critics take their main inspiration from a recently formed cadre of zealous upper-case runners. True Runners, these. They imagine that their activity sets them apart from and generally above the rest of humanity. Many come forth sounding as though they have been Zenned and Esalened and Rolfed and Primal Screamed into a state of exaltation hitherto achieved only by beings who talk to birds or turn miscreant wives into salt.