The real trouble with joggers —they want to be “runners” now, but joggers they shall continue to be—is that you can never for a moment forget about them. And the reason you can never forget about them is that they are never out of your sight. Early in the morning, of course, and at dusk; but they are also there at noontide as they are at midnight. No matter where you cast your eye in the city landscape, and ever more frequently in the country too, there is someone decked out in shorts and sweatshirt and headband and rhinoceros sneakers, or varying combinations of these, pounding along with eyes rolled back, mouth in contortion, breath coming in wheezing gulps, dragging himself ostentatiously along the pavement like one of the more gruesome penitents of the Spanish school.
Where were they five years ago, these doctors and lawyers and bankers and fashion designers and television courtiers? What angel has pointed out to them the path to the paradise of public fitness? “I feel sick when I think of all the time and money I wasted on skiing and tennis,” laments one of them, presumably because fewer people could then notice him. Jogging is the faddist exercise par excellence. The ordinary citizen takes one look and asks himself, “Why not me?” And so he jogs along with twenty million of his fellow Americans.
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