John Casey - Room for Improvement: A Life in Sport

I wrote The Social Life of the Long-Distance Runner more than forty years ago. The title is a play on The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a grim story and a grim movie, one that only film buffs and older people remember. When I reread this piece I found it in several places very youngboth strainingly lyrical and wiseassbut it reminded me that in the late sixties there were few joggers, and those few attracted wiseass remarks. The essay was the first piece in a national magazine about what was to become a widespread pastime. On the canal towpath in Washington, D.C., there are now more joggers than walkers, and no one gives them a second glance. There are places in the world where the sight of bare legs and arms is still shocking. An old student of mine got run in by the moral police in Saudi Arabia for jogging in Bermuda shorts. There are lots of joggers in Rome but mainly in parks. Once when I was jogging back to my apartment through Testaccio, an older woman, in black from head to toe, called out to me, Coprati, coprati, giovanotto! (Cover yourself, cover yourself, young man!) I was fifty-one, pleased to be called giovanotto. She may have been offended by bare skin, or she may have been expressing the national cold phobia. Two generalizations about Italians are true: they love children and fear cold drafts. Old women and men often told me to put more clothes on my two small daughters. They said, Prenderanno un raffredore (Theyll catch cold) and then lovingly patted their cheeks. Che carina! (How darling!)

If you walk through any of the parks in Washington during the warmer months, you are likely to see apparently masochistic young men running by you, their faces sweaty, flushed, and tortured, their mouths gasping noisily for air, their motley outfits flapping wetly against their legs and backs as they heave along. Why do they do it? For future glory on the playing fields, you may imagine, for sport, for manly beauty, for Spartan well-being. But notunless something is awfully wrongfor pleasure.

I thought so as well. From my soccer-playing days I remembered running laps, wind sprints, and other devices of tedium and torture, designed, it seemed at the time, to weed out the unenthusiastic. It is true that friends of mine, usually longer-legged and somewhat reedy, had described attaining a certain pleasurable trance while running long distances, but I had put them in the same category as people who sat through two consecutive showings of Last Year at Marienbad.

However, on a day a spring or so ago that I was spending in the field with my Army Reserve unit, two sergeants appeared to give a lecture on physical fitness. They said that the Vietcong could travel, trotting stealthily along in their tennis shoes, forty miles a night. The sergeants invited us to run along with them for just a few miles. They set a brisk pace, littering their trail with us until they shed the last body before the three-mile mark. They still had enough breath to retrace their steps and insult each of us individually. I will not say it was cause and effect, but that summer I took up distance running through the parks near my house. First downhill.

Battery Kemble Park runs from Foxhall Road to MacArthur Boulevard for a distance of about a mile and a quarter, most of it parallel to Chain Bridge Road. The only disadvantage to running down through the park is that you have to climb back up. At that time, running