1966 — The Year Jogging Arrived in the Mainstream
On the workout routine through the ages — Part 8 of 8
The Background
The reduction of physical effort at work, at home, on the go, and in human life in general along with man’s perpetual aspiration for more progress, wealth and well-being is said to represent the success of our society, not a failure. Yet after the Second World War, a great epidemic of coronary heart disease was sweeping through developed nations, and medicine at that time could do little to immediately curtail it.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? No doubt, correlation sometimes appears to suggest causality where there is none. But today we know that modern comforts indeed had become pathogenic. The tedious job was to isolate all etiological factors as they — what in this case was not clear right from the start — are likely to operate over years or even decades.
At the beginning of the 1960s, there was already sound physiological evidence available that regular physical exercise — if done right in terms of intensity and duration — would cause the cardiovascular system to adapt to the stress placed upon it, thereby strengthening the entire system and improving its repair. However, anything more than that was guesswork or research in progress. Cardiologists were doubtful of this interrelation. No one of them knew with any certainty what was the true effect of cardiovascular exercise on middle-aged people among which the epidemic of heart disease was observed.
The widespread belief — not only in the general population but also across medical professions — was that upon passing midlife the human body embarked on a slow and inevitable journey into physical decrepitude. If we would browse the medical literature circulating back then we would find out that it was littered with reports of cardiac infarctions that were attributed to physical overexertion of people in their forties, fifties, and older. We would also be eager to conclude that the main direction of scientific inquiry was about diet and its etiological impact on the development of heart disease.
A Watershed Moment
This is the context and point in time when William J. Bowerman (1911–1999) got onto the stage. He was a track and field coach, professor of physical education at the University of Oregon, and co-founder of Nike (in 1964). In 1962, Bowerman traveled to Auckland in New Zealand to meet Arthur Lydiard (1917–2004) who developed an impressive line-up of exceptional athletes. One Sunday morning he joined a pack of Lydiard’s joggers. Many of them were recovering heart patients and Bowerman conjectured that jogging improved the physical health of middle-aged sedentary people.
Back home he devised a jogging routine for himself and established a local jogger’s club with almost no advice besides an empty six-week schedule to let all rookies log their daily workouts and progress. But Bowerman had no evidence to justify his belief. Was jogging helping anybody? What intensity was needed to produce health benefits and could safely be demanded? How quickly should the workout routine progress? What level was the limit? And what was required to make jogging a long-term habit to ameliorate degeneration caused by an otherwise chronic sedentary lifestyle?
Systematic Teamwork
To answer these questions, Bowerman teamed up with the cardiologist Waldo E. Harris (1907–1972) to collect scientifically rigorous data on the effects — beneficial or otherwise — of a regular jogging practice. They designed a 12-week workout routine based on steady, interval, and fartlek training units. Duration and intensity increased incrementally until week seven. Then the training continued at this level for five more weeks.
Bowerman and Harris conducted three studies between 1965 and 1966. They monitored all progress of their trial groups and reworked the routine on the fly to ensure that strain corresponded to the physical potential of all participants involved and that nobody exercised with maximum effort. And they could show that sedentary people can be systematically transformed into competent joggers. The last problem Bowerman and Harris were faced with was how to embed a regular jogging practice into the daily routines of those caught within a sedentary lifestyle.
The Tipping Point
In 1966, Bowerman and Harris self-published a 90-page booklet which is seen as the ignition spark for the jogging phenomenon in the United States. One year later followed an extended book edition entitled ‘Jogging: A physical fitness program for all ages’ which sold over one million copies. Both authors presented in a structured way and all details how to run, how far, how fast, how long, when, and where. However, the main point was not about the tables and the schedules.
The main point was to help the jogger develop the physical capacity to run faster and run further. And progress was considered a key factor to let the jogger sustain the routine. In addition, by mapping out the workout for the next day, week and month the plan pushed the jogger to find a way of scheduling jogging — and therefore future progress — into her or his existing daily routines. In other words, the approach was expected to provide the neophyte jogger with a defined route through which basically anybody could establish a reliable workout routine that with time, repetition and progress would sink into the background of a personal habit.
The Key Success Factors
The most remarkable thing is that Bowerman and Harris were able to frame the problem of physical inactivity in a different way to arrive at a solution that was different from what was there before even if the single ingredients were anything but new.
First, they offered the average Jane and Joe a straightforward and easy-to-follow way into physical exercise.
Second, jogging came with a medical narrative to suggest it was a clinically grounded antidote to health issues of the sedentary lifestyle.
Third, it was not conceived to antagonize anybody or criticize the many other daily behaviors that caused the problem.
Fourth, the structured workout routine rested on a widely held utilitarian belief that time is a scarce resource and for this reason must be managed and controlled to ensure the expected return on health investment.
And fifth, jogging pushed people back into the public outdoor environment like parks and sidewalks that were available almost anywhere and at any time.
If this all combined has not necessarily proved to be a panacea for everybody, jogging has shown to be an enduring way for many people who seek to compensate for the consequences of an otherwise sedentary lifestyle. And the approach taken by Bowerman and Harris established a new paradigm for all novel fitness recipes that were to follow.
Main source: Alan Latham (2015) The history of a habit: Jogging as a palliative to sedentariness in 1960s America. Cultural Geographies, 22(1), pp. 103–126.
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