I always said I wouldn’t. There is something quite unsettling about the site of the middle aged pounding the pavements. If you do it you have to have those thighs like ship’s cables and the regulation pony tail. Everyone who is serious has the pony tail, even the men with no hair have a pony tail. It’s so, if you’re doing it right, the pony tail will beat you on the back with each jog. It saves you having to employ a personal trainer to follow and hit you with a stick.
Also, of course, it’s awfully bad for the knees. Dedicated joggers, who start in their thirties or forties are easily picked out of a crowd in their sixties by the distinctive crouching hobble adopted by those who have turned the gristle in their knees into little bits of grit.
And the arm postures. Why do joggers hold their arms in the pose of a boxer about to hit his opponent for six? Is it many years of ridicule from passers by that has put them on the defensive? Is it the constant following by hopefully leaping dogs with sticks? Is it to ward off small smeary children with ice creams?
Merely a fortnight ago I would have had to end there with a thoughtful ‘We shall never know.’ That would have been your lot, aside from a few sneary paragraphs about chafing underwear and bottles of water. I’d have finished off with a quick homily about the bloke who invented jogging and conked out, jogging (which was more of a gift than a headline, really.) Finish. End. Finishing line etc.
Now, however, I am become one. Me too. Hand up. I jog.
As dedicated readers may recall, I am attempting, family circumstances being such, to live in Cheltenham, 50 miles away, with my mother and here, 50 miles in the other direction with my husband and son, simultaneously. At first I had some work-out equipment in Cheltenham. I really do have to keep my hips going and I find my twist stepper and some other bits do the trick with a little heavy rock on my CD player and there I am lost to the world for an hour each day.
At first my mother was interested and then irritated. Cheltenham is the sort of place where it is perfectly possible to live in the past by sitting in a twinset and pearls waiting for callers. Some of the residents would like their house guests to do so and would prefer them not to be working out in the kitchen in shorts and a vest to the point where they would pull the earphones from their ears to inquire if they had finished or not.
So I took the workout stuff home and started jogging in the park.
Next time I’m home near a computer I’ll tell you about it. I haven’t run all the way round yet mainly because of the length of my jogging bottoms. They are perfect for walking round the house in, providing you lift your knees up well, or absolutely fine with a two inch heel, which is how I had been wearing them, because no one wears joggers for jogging. For jogging at two inches too long they were lethal. So I took them up last night and now there’s nothing to stop me.
Though I don’t ever plan to carry a bottle of water. No one ever died of thirst in the half hour between cups of tea and I don’t aim to set myself up for the Paula Radcliffe Speedy Relief Roadside Whizz either.
Otherwise, I am jogging.
Never say never because you never know.
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