Word: runner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
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...
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...