Rob Rattenbury: Remembering when we were all joggers

Jogging was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Remember jogging?

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, everyone jogged. The streets were filled with people running here, there and everywhere. Little people, big people, slim people, sturdy people.

Women in proper running gear, men mostly in footie shorts, socks, sandshoes or cheap-as-chips running shoes and an old T-shirt in the early days.

We hit the streets with abandon, pushing our bodies to ever-expanding distances, half-marathons, marathons, fun runs, runs for charity.

For three years in the early 1980s, I actually ran with a team around the North Island, raising money for our local hospice; three-kilometre legs, an annual relay run that went for up to 2000 kilometres, night and day. There were 25 of us, all absolutely barking mad, when I think back.

The mere memories of nipple and thigh chafing, sweat in one’s eyes, headbands to stop that sweat, sore feet, and eventually expensive running shoes that never seemed to stop the jarring.

We all had our own brands of running shoes, usually faithful to them, buying the latest model on the market, raving about them to our jogger friends as we pounded the pavements on training runs. Well, others did, I was too busy trying to breathe to bother talking.

Coming to Whanganui, I was spoiled for choice with running routes and the traffic was a lot lighter, so life was a little bit less dangerous.

Now, I was never a natural runner, I’m more your bum-shuffler breed of jogger, lots of motivation and good intentions but with a body that is more suited to sitting down writing articles and other stuff.

I just liked the good things in life too much to take all that jogging stuff too seriously - eating, drinking and watching telly were more my style, even back then.

Lying on the couch working out in my head how far it would be if I ran from home, around the Kaimatira circuit and home again. Actually, about 20 kilometres, if you are interested.

Of course, weight loss followed the jogging regime, it just happened no matter how much one ate. If you were cranking out more than 40 kilometres per week of jogging or running, your body rebels by shedding weight to cope.

It prefers to be cuddly and squishy but it will revert to its long-forgotten past when man chased his food and starved if he didn’t catch it. When we were all skinny.

We are born to run, long legs, biggish lungs. We cannot run fast, not fast enough to outrun a predator, so we had long arms for climbing nearby trees very quickly.

I used to laugh to myself when my real runner mates would tell me that story. I was never born to run unless it was to catch the bus or train, then collapse in a seat in mild respiratory failure for about 20 minutes.

I must admit to reaching a level of fitness and distance that I almost enjoyed in a slightly masochistic way. I’d slowly reach the jogging ultimate of seven-minute miles or, in today’s money, about four minute, 20 second kilometres. I would often pound out 16 or 18 kilometres twice a week with shorter runs in between.

I prepared for two marathons. One in Hokitika, where the day before I managed to get the flu. So I spent the day watching my friends run from the back seat of our car, whilst drinking water and downing Panadol.

The other, the Rotorua Marathon, where the body gave out going past the airport. I decided to stop for a while to watch the aeroplanes land and take off. I quite liked that so decided the last 10 kilometres or so didn’t need doing.

That’s it, my efforts at marathons. I was destined to listen to my mates tell me all about their sub-three-hour marathon efforts while I was busy trying to breathe running beside them. I was a popular running companion.

I could do the miles and even a good pace on a good day but I never spoke, so my running companions could tell me stories as they ran along, knowing that I was a very good listener. If only they knew.

I look at photographs from those days and hardly recognise myself and other friends. We have all grown up and outwards. Burnt our running shoes. Recovered from all that chafing. Settled into comfortable times of reminiscing about the old days.

Reminders of those days include sometimes knee and hips problems as we age.

Those guys telling me about how we were designed to run never said the really important part. Most of us never lived past 35 or so back then. So our bodies were not really designed to run into the late middle-age years we enjoy nowadays.