What is it that makes joggers think that they should acknowledge other joggers? I have been jogging - or as I prefer to call it, running - quite irregularly over the last year or so and I’ve noticed that about one in ten of the people who pass you running in the other direction either say “hello” or nod at you as if to say, “Yes, I am running too. I am one of you.”
In fact it is always a jogger, never a runner, who does this. Runners are too serious and fit and generally going too fast to tip you a nod. (Maybe they do too and they are just going so fast that they are well past you before the greeting registers) But joggers are usually short, overweight men in their late thirties who donÂ’t have any of the proper kit. Like I said, IÂ’m a runner.
It happened today as I ran through the little Hampshire village where my girlfriend lives. As I was approaching the end of my circuit through the streets I passed a pasty-faced, chubby jogger (who had clearly decided just to take up jogging for new year, probably only on Sundays and for whom this was the last occasion he would be out in 2003). As I approached he gave me a cheery “hullo”, and I grunted back out of politeness (not that it's polite to grunt, but I'd been running for 25 minutes and was too tired to articulate)
If we were walking passed each other we probably wouldn’t have said anything, so why does the fact that we were both going slightly above walking pace mean that we have to notice each other’s existence? Are these blokes (always blokes, the women sometimes smile at you, though in a slightly wary, rather than flirtatious manner, but maybe that's just me) trying to make themselves feel as if they belong to some kind of club. Because there is no dignity in being a jogger. All you are saying about yourself by jogging is that you are out of shape and like eating food too much to stop. It’s not something to be proud of. Maybe they understand this, maybe the “hullo” is more of a sardonic “you too, hey?” It’s a shared expression of the unbearable shiteness of being overweight. We are suffering together.
But I donÂ’t want the joggersÂ’ greeting. I am not the same as them. I am not suffering. I am a runner. This isnÂ’t a new yearÂ’s resolution. This is something I do. Three days a week, twenty-two weeks of the year. Unless I am too tired or not in the mood or hungover.
I've just had a horrible thought. Maybe the runners do acknowledge each other after all.
