Jogging: The Book That Changed How America Moved
Near Eugene, Oregon
In nineteen sixty-two, Bill Bowerman traveled to New Zealand to observe the training methods of Arthur Lydiard, a coach who had guided two of his athletes to gold medals at the Rome Olympics two years earlier. What surprised Bowerman most was not what the elite athletes were doing. It was what everyone else in Auckland was doing.
Lydiard had started a running club that welcomed ordinary people, many of them middle-aged, many of them not athletes in any conventional sense. They were running for fitness, for social connection, and because Lydiard had told them the cardiovascular benefits were real. Bowerman had never seen anything quite like it.
He came home to Eugene and started a running club of his own. He began holding public jogging events in the city. He recruited a cardiologist named Waldo Harris to help him document the health benefits, and together they wrote a short book called Jogging, published in nineteen sixty-six. The book was practical, accessible, and free of jargon. It described how to begin running, how to pace yourself, how to build up gradually, and why it was worth doing.
The timing was right. Americans were beginning to think seriously about sedentary lifestyles and chronic disease. Jogging sold more than one million copies. It is widely credited with helping ignite the national running boom of the late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, the same boom that would eventually put running shoes on millions of feet and make the company Bowerman had co-founded with Phil Knight into a global enterprise.
The book was short and plainspoken. The running boom it helped start made Nike worth billions.
