Super-keen January jogging man, clear off | Patrick Barkham
January jogging man stands by the side of the street fiddling with the new GPS watch he got for Christmas. He watches me like a hawk as I run past and I know what will happen next. Seventy yards on I hear the thump of footsteps behind me and January jogging man hurtles past at a pace that he will not sustain much further than the next corner.
The dark mornings of January are depressing enough but this year they have become intolerable. I’ve been jogging for 20 years and for the past four of them, whatever the weather, I have run into the office with my work clothes in a rucksack on my back. Usually I give a companionable grimace to the two or three fellow runners who cross my path. But on the first day back this week, I spotted 29 joggers on my run to work. There were more runners than cars on the road.
My morning run has been violated by these new-year-new-me sheep. There’s a man in a retina-searing fluorescent orange top. There’s a woman so wrapped up in her iPod she falls over the bonnet of a car creeping out of a driveway. There are insufferably smug jogging couples in matching his-and-hers tights.
Where were you the week before Christmas? Where were you in the snow and ice? Where were you on Christmas Day? I was out running.
And where will these jogging sheep be in mid-February? The shepherd of indolence and broken pledges will have rounded up this motley herd and they’ll be scoffing scotch eggs straight out of their fridges and hating themselves, their fancy gear collecting dust in the back of a drawer.
These joggers are not all the same. The women – and most are women – are all right because at least they tend to run their own race, oblivious to other joggers. The men, however, insist on overtaking whomever is around them. I’m pretty relaxed about people who run faster than me but I can’t bear the ones who speed up to overtake me, or increase their pace with desperate gasps when I, running at my normal pace, try to ease my way past them. Whenever I stop and wait for traffic at a junction, super-keen January jogging man will hurtle off at high speed before I invariably plod past him again at the next corner.
Of course I should be more generous. Running is a wonderful gift. All these new converts may be feeling a little sore but they will feel so much better in body and mind for their running. For some it will be the beginning of a lifelong passion for a simple, free activity which will take them around the world or at least get them out into the fresh air, away from the hamster-on-a-treadmill world of the gym.
But I just can’t smile at all these new joggers. My territory has been invaded. I now feel like just another sheep among many – or part of a rat race. My run to work was always a wonderfully solitary activity, even in a big city. Thousands of Londoners may have taken to their bikes but I was almost always the only runner I saw with a rucksack packed for work. I was proud to be the only individual mad enough to run in the snow and ice. I felt gloriously alone.
I could take consolation from the figures. Yesterday the 29 new joggers had dropped dramatically to 11. At this rate, by the start of next week, the streets will be blissfully clear of the new-year-new-me brigade.
But the fact that so many of these January joggers will fall by the wayside is a reminder that, while I may have mastered the modest discipline of running, there are plenty of other resolutions I have failed to keep. I too have eagerly tried to improve myself and fallen terribly short. Perhaps I hate these joggers so much because they are such plangent reminders of my own fallibility.
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