CityReads│How Jogging Became A Habit?
Jogging developed as a counter to the ill-effects of habits entrained by the increasingly sedentary lifestyles of modern industrialized urban and suburban dwellers. The development of jogging as a defined exercise routine can be traced to the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon in the 1960s.
Latham,A. 2015. The history of a habit: jogging as a palliative to sedentariness in 1960s America, Cultural Geographies, 22(1): 103-126.
Source: http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/22/1/103
Cover picture source: http://www.travelthruhistory.tv/quick-history-olympic-games/
These days the jogger has become a ubiquitous urban figure. Women and men joggers of all ages and shapes populate city walkways, parks and sidewalks such that their presence goes largely unnoted.
It is easy to forget that as simple a practice as jogging had to be invented. In the post WWII decades it was rare for American men or women over the age of 30 – outside of work – to partake in any physical activity more strenuous than yard work, bowling, golf, or light calisthenics. Why did millions of such people suddenly take up vigorous exercise? And why jogging?
The following pages offer a short account of the emergence of jogging as a mass physical fitness practice in America. In particular, they focus on how the prosaic act of ‘jogging’ was put together as a routine habit.
As it developed in the 1960s, jogging was configured by medical experts and its layperson practitioners as an everyday palliative to the sedentary nature of much of modern American urban and suburban life. An increasing weight of medical evidence suggested that the corporeal inactivity associated with sedentary lifestyles had significant short- and long-term health impacts. As such, jogging was designed to counter the systematic diminution of necessary corporeal effort occurring throughout the urban environment.
The following sections will trace out the development of jogging as a structured ‘regulated’ fitness program at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. Led by William J. Bowerman, working with the cardiologist Waldo Harris, the project also enrolled a diverse range of other experts from the University of Oregon and elsewhere, along with hundreds of ordinary men and women, participants in a series of controlled trials exploring what effects the development of a regular jogging habit had on previously sedentary bodies. This was a process that culminated in an article outlining the benefits of jogging in the influential Journal of the American Medical Association, along with the publication of a book, Jogging: A Physical Fitness Program for All Age. This book eventually went on to sell over a million copies, which was credited with igniting the jogging phenomenon in the United States.
While there was a growing body of medical opinion in America during the early 1960s concerned with the ill effects of the physically sedentary habits of western societies in general and America in particular, there was little systematic knowledge about the capacity of physically aging bodies to respond to training stimulus. No one really knew what effect inculcating a habit of daily cardio-vascular exercise would have on a middle-aged population.
The lack of knowledge was also the product of the widespread belief that upon entering middle-age the body embarked on a slow and inevitable journey into physical decrepitude; a decline that one could do little if anything to ameliorate or prevent. In the popular imagination, and that of much of the medical profession, the danger for the exercising middle-aged and older person was that through over exertion they would wear their body out. Or worse bring it to collapse.
This fear of collapse marked a profound division between exercise physiologists’ and mainstream cardiologists’ understandings of the effects of routine training on the body. For exercise physiologists the heart was a muscle like any other. The habitually un-extended heart would over time weaken and lose its capacity to function. Repeated exercise – if done at the proper intensity and for long enough –would cause the heart, and all the various systems that supported it, to adapt to the stress placed upon it, strengthening it and improving its efficiency. Through an on-going habit of physical exercise the weak or sedentary heart could be transformed.
Cardiologists were doubtful of this. Those at danger were the habitually physically inactive who then attempted to undertake physically strenuous exercise; that is exactly the people jogging was targeted at.
The medical literature was littered with reports of heart attacks brought on by over exertion. Thus, Aldo Luisada, Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago in his 1954 textbook Heart: A Physiological and Clinical Study of Cardio-Vascular Diseases, advised that a key dimension in preventing a coronary occlusion involved the ‘avoidance of severe exertion or excessive excitement.’
During a trip to New Zealand in 1962, Bowerman was introduced to the concept of jogging as a fitness routine, including people of an advanced age, through a jogging club organized by his friend and coaching colleague Arthur Lydiard.
Bowerman had travelled to New Zealand to see the techniques through which Arthur Lydiard – a self-educated, amateur track coach, who trained a host of Olympic middle and long distance champions – had produced so many exceptional athletes. Early Sunday morning on the second week of his stay Lydiard took Bowerman to a meeting of the ‘Auckland Joggers Club.’ The club had settled into a routine of Sunday morning ‘pack jogs’ in the south east of the city. These pack jogs were stripped of any competitive element. The point was to complete the ‘jog’ not to beat one’s fellow joggers to the finish.
Bowerman was shocked by the fact that a 74-year-old man with no athletic history – who it turned out had previously suffered three heart attacks – had slowed down for the 51-year-old track coach. He decided to do something. Drawing on his own physiological expertise in training athletes, and borrowing from some of Lydiard’s ideas on jogging, Bowerman devised an exercise schedule. Sticking to this regime for four weeks, Bowerman left New Zealand with his waist reduced by three inches and able to partner Lydiard on a 20 mile run.
Figure Auckland joggers, Cornwall Park, 1963
In January 1963 Bowerman brought this concept of jogging back to the United States, and launched Eugene’s own joggers club.
Bowerman was confronted with the question was jogging really helping people? Or was it simply setting them up for a heart attack? If too much strenuous exercise too quickly could induce a heart attack, what levels of physical exertion could safely be demanded of sedentary bodies seeking a return to fitness. What was the most effective way to develop the capacity to jog in the formerly sedentary individual? And, once fitness had been restored, how could the exercises through which this transformation had been achieved be turned into a long-term physical fitness habit? Lastly, having claimed that jogging was beneficial, what exactly were the measurable benefits that people could expect from nurturing a regular habit of cardiovascular exercise?
What was needed, Harris and Bowerman agreed, was a systematic controlled study of a cohort of sedentary middle-aged individuals (those aged 30 and over) undertaking a program of jogging. The study would facilitate the collection of scientifically rigorous data on the effects of a regular jogging routine. It would also provide a medically rigorous testing ground for devising a safe and effective jogging program.
Working with Harris, Bowerman worked up a 12-week conditioning schedule based upon principles used to train his competitive distance runners. The schedule employed the ‘hard-easy principle’ – days of hard effort were followed by easier days to allow the body to recover and adapt to the stress put on it the previous day. It involved steady, incremental, increases in duration and intensity as participants worked through the schedule and their physical fitness improved. It involved careful attention to the pace and intensity prescribed in the schedule; the jogger – like Bowerman’s university runners – should never train at maximum effort. Lastly, the schedule involved a weekly mix of interval, fartlek, and steady jogging at varying tempos.
Harris and Bowerman began recruiting sedentary men for an initial trial to start in April 1965. Arriving at the University of Oregon’s running track for their first jogging session participants were given an explanation of the paces involved in the exercise schedule they were going to work through, along with a demonstration of the basic mechanics of jogging.
Each week slightly more work was added. For some sessions the number of repetitions increased. In others the distance increased. In week three a New Zealand or constant fartlek was added to the weekly workout. Week six, the speed of the repetitions was increased from ‘4 to five miles per hour’ to a ‘pace of 5 to 6 mph . . . Or if you are feeling particularly full of jog and can handle it easily, 6 to 7 mph.’ In week seven a short hill run was introduced – a variant on the New Zealand fartlek. This variation continued up to the end of 12 weeks at which point the formerly sedentary participants should have been transformed into competent joggers.
As they reviewed the results of their first full trial program, Harris and Bowerman understood that they needed to do more than just tweak their original schedule; a range of schedules were needed for those starting from different levels of physical fitness. They also came to the realization that what had started as a single trial would need to evolve into a series of trials
The first and second trials (the second was held in the autumn of 1965) showed that sedentary individuals could be trained as joggers. By the third round of trials in spring of 1966 the major objectives of the trail had shifted from collating the benefits of jogging on participants, to finding out how best to ensure participants could complete the program. The central problem was how best to work on embedding the practice of jogging into the somatic routines of those caught within a sedentary lifestyle.
Figure Eugene Joggers University of Oregon, early 1963
Sitting for large chunks of the day, surrendering the body to the pleasures of powered locomotion of all different kinds, spending increasing amounts of leisure time in sedentary pursuits, leads the bodies enmeshed within these habits to forget their earlier capacities to generate movement.
Bowerman and Harris did not aim to uproot the ecology of somatic practices within which sedentariness was enmeshed. They sought to devise a more self-consciously somatically intelligent routine to counter the ill effects of a lifestyle defined by sedentary habits.
‘The purpose of the [jogging] program,’ Bowerman and Harris wrote in a short self-published booklet published in 1966 after completing their first three rounds of trials, ‘is to establish a habit of regular exercise.’ Crucially this was a routine or habit that was to be added to an individual’s existing daily schedule. It was not intended to replace existing ones.‘You can grow fit without greatly changing your personal habits. Within reason, you can still eat what you like . . . take a drink. Remember only that good sense is the best guide to healthful living.
How did such training work to establish jogging as a habit?
Well firstly, Bowerman and Harris were teaching their joggers how to train themselves. The principles were built into the very schedules that the aspirant joggers followed, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month. The physical effort of each session of jogging was followed by a day of rest to allow the body to recover for the next day’s effort. Each week the amount and intensity of effort gradually increased as the body adapted to the stresses put on it in training. As the jogger became more proficient he/she was taught techniques for varying their jogging – jogging faster, longer, in hills, cross-country. This not only varied the physiological impact of jogging, importantly it also created variety.
Secondly, they were teaching participants how to work with their bodies. Of course, one aspect of this involved the basic principles of training outlined above – changing bodies took time, the body should not be overloaded by exercise, rest was as important as exercise, that conditioning the body needed to done within a structured routine. But joggers were also learning to understand the ways practicing regular physical exercise could have a host of unexpected and temporarily unpleasant effects on the body.
These normal aches and pains corrected themselves as you kept exercising. They also offered techniques to deal with the most predictable of these problems. They suggested stretching routines. They outlined simple back strengthening exercises. 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. 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. But mostly joggers would become proficient in jogging simply through the routine act of practice. Through following Bowerman and Harris’s training schedules the joggers were habituating their body into interacting with their environment as runners.
Fourthly, 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.
Like so much activity in a modern, industrialized society – eating, working, sleeping, socializing − physical exercise would become a scheduled and temporally defined part of the day.
Jogging is based on the recognition that to develop the‘good’ habit of physical exercise, one must also overcome the very real corporeal grip of the habits of inactivity. 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. Through following the routine of the schedules, joggers gain the capacity to will themselves into a habit of physical exercise.
So, 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. The initial spread of jogging owed a great deal to the public profile of William Bowerman as coach of the University of Oregon Athletics Team. 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. The novelty of jogging to this current was its medical narrative of cardiovascular degeneration, along with the suggestion that jogging was a clinically grounded solution to this problem. But jogging was also intelligible in a wide range of other senses. It constructed a prudential link between an individual’s current activities and their future prospects.
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. 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. Once the habit of jogging become widely established it became generative of all sorts of novel practices that extended or built upon jogging’s basic architecture. Think of fun runs, running clinics, big-city marathons, the contemporary fad for barefoot running, to name just a few examples.