Running a Good Thing into the Ground

By Frank Trippett

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.

Consider: Marathoner, one of a proliferation of periodicals, calls marathoning "the Holy Grail" that runners "exhaust themselves struggling for." Bob Anderson, editor of the semimonthly On the Run, goes further: "Someone once said, 'For humanity to survive, it will have to invent a new religion.' The religion has been invented. It is the religion of the runner." Such high-flying rhetoric is common among True Runners.

George Sheehan, a New Jersey cardiologist often called the "high priest" of running, is archetypical. In Dr. Sheehan on Running he promulgates the notion of the runner as a special subspecies of human, a person gifted not only with better lungs and heart but with superior spirituality. Alas, superiority carries penalties. Sheehan feels the runner is specially susceptible to the meanness of an envious society. "Why," he asks, "is the runner a lightning rod for the anger and aggression and violence of others?" And Sheehan answers himself: "The runner puts himself above the law, above society. And men in gangs and crowds and mobs know this and react accordingly." Sheehan intones: "The runner knows of man's inhumanity to man firsthand."

This sort of folderol should provoke more belly laughs than backlash. In the real world, the runner does not attract nearly as much popular aggression as, say, the elderly, subway riders, politicians, cops, solitary pedestrian women or even journalists. The reasons are not hard to find. Moving targets offer little appeal to vandals. People who appear to be carrying nothing more negotiable than vigorous health are hardly patsies for muggers. No matter what their charm in repose, few runners going at full grunt offer a vision apt to incite any but the most dedicated molester. Finally, running has yet to produce an idea worth the kind of attack that citizens regularly launch against politicians, economists or entertainers.

Granted, runners suffer some hurts from the world's random meanness along with the exotic injuries they inflict on themselves. And a few have been victimized by motorists and other malicious nonrunners. Yet nothing vindicates any image of runners as humanity's special victims --or the most exemplary form of human beings ever. At the rate they are going they may win, by more than a nose, the crown as smuggest.

Since True Runners run, as the high priest Sheehan puts it, "not because we feel better but because we don't care how we feel," it is surprising that such spartans have even felt the backlash. Yet the September issue of Runner's World gives over an entire page to an elaborate whine about those who have begun to "dump on running." And the premier October issue of The Runner similarly devotes a whole page to a feature column, "Biting the Backlash." In it, Runner-Writer Colman McCarthy mourns that his fellow treaders "are being knocked, mocked and socked." He prescribes a strategy for runners in the face of backlash. They should enjoy the derisive jokes, he says, and then more or less retreat metaphysically into their own misunderstood superiority. Toward that end he commends to them a line from T.S. Eliot: "In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away." Evidently True Runners are feeling the needle -- but without getting the point. It is, simply enough, that granted their direction, the theologians of this ancient activity are well on the way to running running right into the ground.

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