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Braden's notion of the miserable, duty-whipped jogger is hard to support by talking to the runners themselves. In farm country near Aurora, Ill., a couple of weeks ago, 17 souls who could have been sitting in front of the tube with six-packs smeared Vaseline on their feet, to ward off blisters, and loped off for a 50-mile foot race. The temperature was close to 90°. By the 20-mile mark, 35-year-old Romance Language Teacher Alberto Meza gave up and rolled under a faucet in the Johnson's Mound Forest Preserve. Water streamed over his head and down over his red fishnet shirt with its Boston Marathon patch.
Meza was cheerful. Five years ago, he said, he was overweight and out of shape. "I picked running because I'm not athletic at all. I couldn't do anything else. In Chile I got kicked out of soccer class." Now, down from 180 Ibs. to 145 Ibs., he covers at least 15 miles a day. "It's great," he said.
Richard Guse, a 42-year-old Mayville, Wis., businessman, finished the Aurora race in a little over seven hours, coming in third. He wore a red, white and blue bathing suit, down the front of which he poured ice cubes periodically. He said he runs a marathon each month. He started running a number of years ago when he was plagued by insomnia and drowsy spells. The exercise pulled him out of his physical slump. "I owe my whole life to it," he says now. Like Meza (and enough other middle-aged runners to suggest a personality pattern), Guse says that he was not much of an athlete as a boy. Now he takes faintly malicious pleasure in seeing his old classmates who played on the first string. "Most of them are all fat and flabby now."
BULLETIN: Actress and Fitness Enthusiast Farrah Fawcett-Majors has disappeared, under circumstances not yet explained, while warming up for her nude jog around the Central Park Reservoir. Details will follow when available.
Women came to running more slowly and shyly than men. They were even less accustomed than men to the pain of exercise. Breasts jounced and drew hoots from male motorists. The all-important running one-handed noseblow, a maneuver performed without Kleenex, was unladylike. When Judy Sanford, 33, a Houston housewife, began jogging a few years ago, she did it inside her house. She reckoned 73 laps to the mile, and says that she changed direction every ten laps to keep from getting dizzy. Now she runs three miles a day through the streets, wearing a headset radio to keep from getting bored.
Six months ago, Lucy King, 35, a New Orleans housewife, began getting up at 5 a.m. to jog with her husband. "The first two weeks, my body thought I was going to die and my mind was convinced. I didn't want to do it. I hated it." Now, she says, she feels buoyant after her mile-and-a-half run, and the feeling lasts for most of the day. 'Tm pleased with myself."
Joggers become runners, and women, who until five years ago were not allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon, have now lowered the sex gap at the marathon distance of 26 miles 385 yards to less than half an hour (Derek Clayton holds the male record at 2:08:33, and Chantal Langlace is the female record holder at 2:35:15).