Jogging ‘arrived’ 25 years ago in Auckland

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 13

Jogging ‘arrived’ 25 years ago in Auckland

I By

ROBIN CHARTERIS,

London Correspondent ' * The birth in Auckland •25 years ago of jogging, w now one of the world’s most popular sporting pastimes, was recorded by ;“The Times” in London last week. ; A former New Zealand i journalist, Norman Harris, that the news that jogging “had arrived” was -reported by him in a mere six-paragraph item « in the “New Zealand Heraid” in February, 1962. His informant was “an , Auckland athletics official « named Colin Kay,” a former national triple jump champion who later became Mayor of Aucki- land. — "He and a few like--minded fellows were —forming a club to *com£bine fitness and sociability with weekly runs, pic—nic excursions and daily * exercises.’

“Kay they would just be ‘jogging,’ a common term among athletes to describe slow, relaxed running.

“So what would the name of this club be? The ‘Joggers’ Club?’ I suggested. “Kay laughed. The term sounded as odd then as if one hath called it the trotters’ club. But the term stuck.”

Harris said the original joggers included local athletics officials or former athletes, a cardiologist, a chiropodist “and, most important, a famous athletics coach in Arthur Lydiard.” In time, the Joggers’ Club went on to stage a running event that became the biggest in the world, the seven-mile Round-the-Bays run in Auckland which in 1982, drew 80,000 contestants. What turned jogging

into a phenomenon was its introduction to the United States, said Harris. The messenger was the chief track coach of Oregon State University, Bill Bowerman, who went to New Zealand with a team of runners in 1963 “and returned home a changed man.”

. When news spread of the medical testing and fitness training programme based on jogging that Bowerman began for the citizens of Eugene, Oregon, jogging took off. .. “Americans, stung by President Kennedy’s criticism of them as being unhealthy, turned the new form of exercise into a passion,” Harris said. From'there it spread to Britain and the rest of the world. .

"Call it jogging or running, the ‘fad’ seems to be going pretty steadily after 25 years,” he wrote.