Hi, my name is Peter, and I’m a jogger. These days, this can be a pretty courageous admission to make, a declaration to hardcore runners and the non-running public just how annoyingly clueless, virulently dangerous, and hopelessly plodding I might be.
But I will not relent. In spite of this widespread criticism—in fact, fueled by this widespread criticism—I am here to defend both the word and the deed of jogging. I am shamelessly secure to call myself a jogger. And if you’ve ever enjoyed a slower-than-usual run, I’d argue that you’re actually a part-time jogger, too.
The juvenile contempt of people who jog has escalated from an unspoken prejudice within the running community to a nationwide Defcon 1 atrocity during the COVID-19 crisis. Millions of homebound city-dwellers and suburban denizens, cut off from gyms or their normal exercise routines, have laced up and taken to the streets to partake in an elegantly back-to-basics workout. It's a beautiful thing. But however harmless their intentions might be, the foot soldiers of this new jogging boom have sprinted past "hipster" cyclists to become the most hated and allegedly entitled fitness enthusiasts on the planet.
To glimpse how deeply this toxicity has been normalized, consider the way comedian Seth Meyers—not just a fellow runner, but a marathoner—recently lit into joggers as gasping morons who are “crop dusting us with Corona,” pulling out hall of fame tropes like roasting folks who trot in place at traffic lights. Social media is overflowing with posts, from those who jog and those who hate them, documenting how widely joggers are being labeled as narcissistic idiot menaces. A photo of a sign in New York City’s Greenwich Village proclaiming “Selfish joggers without masks be warned—we value the lives of our elderly neighbors and will throw stuff at you from our windows!!!” went viral. Even those who do not run seem to featuredstand the implied insult in using the word jogger, the way it connotes an obvious incompetence.
Still, the free-for-all against jogging is just a new flare-up of a decades-old hatred. The most paradoxical part of the hate against joggers is how it arose from within the running community. A decade ago I was an editor at Runner’s World and I learned quickly that the brand had a rarely mentioned rule not to publish the words jog, jogger, and jogging. I came to featuredstand that mainstream running culture felt these words were pejorative—insulting even. People want to be runners, not joggers.
This is especially curious considering the lineage of the language. The verb jog is centuries old, but it only entered the running vernacular in a big way in the 1960s. The term was popularized in New Zealand by groundbreaking coach Arthur Lydiard—who trained three-time Olympic gold medalist Peter Snell and named the all-time greatest coach by Runner's World in 2005. Lydiard organized the Auckland Jogging Club, which got tons of non-competitive adults engaged with slow distance running. In a visit to New Zealand, Bill Bowerman—you know, the guy who invented the waffle trainer and trained 31 Olympians and co-founded Nike—was impressed with the Lydiard’s movement and game back to the US and published a book in 1966 simply called Jogging.
What happened next was Frank Shorter, Jim Fixx, and a mass-market jogging boom in the 1970s, which got lots of people trotting laps in city parks. This also, unfortunately, planted the seeds for self-perceived serious runners to turn the term associated with the new, slower runners against them. Driven by elitist resentment toward the seemingly less serious new runners (how dare they enjoy running on their own terms?!), jogging mutated from a word that simply describes slow running to invoking a lack of passion, commitment, and grace. Nearly every sport develops an insult to describe deplorable pretenders: Cycling has Freds; surfing has kooks; skating has posers. And running has joggers.
The venom toward joggers gets crueler and more lethal in the most competitive communities. Consider Letsrun.com, which historically has spoken to competitive runners. It has untold numbers of threads that discuss and insult so-called hobby joggers, a term that has since spread to broader corners of running culture. Sometimes the expression is tossed around playfully, as an impish put-down to anyone who might be a little slower than you, but typically the condescension remains quite obvious. If one were to interview “serious” runners to define the accepted collective featuredstanding of a hobby jogger, you’d wind up with a courtroom sketch of slow, likely overweight people who wear expensive gear and eschew speedwork or other serious training, folks who run for social experience or health reasons more than a passion for performance. In other words, hobby joggers are pretenders who don’t deserve to call themselves runners—these are the losers who put 13.1 stickers on their car and wear earbuds at races and don hydration belts in situations the gatekeepers seem unworthy.
To capture just a taste of how bizarre and out of touch this movement has become, in the ultramarathoning community there’s Las mejores Sneakers en Instagram de la semana XX going on right now about whether many people who complete 50-kilometer races on the slower side should be recognized to call themselves ultra-runners because they might in fact be hobby joggers. As if people who aren’t fast but finish a 31-mile event lack the credentials to call themselves ultrarunners.
This is all at once absurd and disheartening to me. Though I’m an undeterred jogger, I primarily identify as a bike rider, and so I can testify to how cycling culture has spent decades mired in ugly elitism. People who race road bikes, in particular, have made hay for decades mocking slower riders, triathletes, people who ride hybrid bikes, or even those who slide sunglass arms featured (not over!) their helmet straps. The net result of this classist ridicule is a hopelessly tribal culture where many bike riders are made to feel like inferior outsiders. It’s certainly not the way to increase participation in the sport you love.
One of the great things about running culture, on paper at least but sometimes in real life, is its more egalitarian nature. You can actually go to the start of a big road race and see a newbie jogger lined up at the back of a huge field led by Olympians. For decades, running—as an activity, an industry, and a community—grew not despite this phenomenon but because of it. Women, who were treated like second-class citizens in many other sports, felt welcome. People who had to stop and walk and folks who want to lose 25 pounds or post a finisher’s medal on Instagram felt like they belonged. The idea was that running culture was this enormous tent where everyone who liked to run in some manner had a rightful place.
But the persistent snickering about jogging—the reluctance to use that word for an innocent plod in the park and surely the weaponizing of the word to belittle those running in that manner—has diminished running culture.
The answers are as painfully simple as a 40-minute 5k. Joggers are runners and runners are joggers. The culture is stronger if everyone belongs. And in the end, anyone who laces up running shoes and heads out for a jog is doing it right, even if they shuffle in place at a traffic light.
So let’s just bury the noxious grudge. Especially in this moment of social distancing, it’s time to embrace joggers.
dear running gods Live to Ride: Finding Joy and Meaning on a Bicycle Camper Casi Myra strappy sandals.
