Stairway to the Serpies

The big cultural event of the week has been the Led Zeppelin concert. So how can I link that to running? Well actually quite easily. I don't need the full six degrees of separation just a memory from 40 years ago.

The first thing is that a huge part of my imaginative identity at that time was bound up with music. It was not only a matter of listening there were a whole range of meanings and social signifiers. Authenticity, invention, attitude, edge, were the things that mattered and reading about them was an important way of augmenting knowledge of this (never mind Frank Zappa's jibe that writing about music is like dancing about architecture).

The second thing is that I have been reading the Guardian since the age of 16 and can remember any number of their writers. One of them was Geoffrey Cannon who, amongst other things, wrote about rock music. He reviewed the first big concert of Led Zeppelin at the Albert Hall (they were always a band that started at the top) and incidentally was not overly impressed, recognising the visceral power but concluding with the line that they were 'plastic fantastic'. I don't know why I remember that but I do.

He is the link with running because he moved from music to health and especially diet. He also ran and his lasting legacy is the founding of the Serpies. To me this is a huge thing.

The following is a quotation from a speech that was published in Public Health Nutrition: 6(4), June 2003, 326–328.

My best deed in those days was to found the Serpentine
Running Club, which celebrated its first 20 years with 700
members in May last year, whose details are on info@
serpentine.org.uk; its members include world champions,
but the club remains dedicated to the absolute beginner.
Every time I come to London and stagger round
Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, I look at the
unofficial paths parallel to the tarmac, made by the
incessant tread of countless thousands of runners. Those
paths did not exist before the days of the Serpies, and I feel
proud. However, jogging goes back to the 1960s, long
before anybody dreamed that most able-bodied citizens
could run a marathon. My own inspiration was Norman
Harris, founder of the Sunday Times National Fun Run in
the late 1970s. Here is the story of the first-ever jogging
club, and the invention of the word ‘jogger’.
Norman’s inspiration was his fellow New Zealander
Arthur Lydiard, the fabled coach of Murray Halberg and
Peter Snell16, who, as Norman explained to me (Harris N,
personal communication) in 1962, “decided to start an
informal club of former runners, who would amble a few
miles on a Sunday morning and then maybe have a picnic.
As the then New Zealand Herald athletics writer, I was
asked to put a piece in the paper. They said the guys
would just be jogging, and I remember saying: ‘So what
will you call it – the Auckland Joggers Club?’ There was a
bit of a giggle. But the name stuck. So I think I invented not
the verb ‘to jog’, but the noun ‘jogger’!”
Bear Arthur Lydiard and Norman Harris in mind next
time you go for a jog. Remember too, with due deference
to Gunnar Blix17, Per-Olof Astrand18 and the other Nordic
pioneers, that it was the citizens’ running movement of the
1970s and 1980s that supplied the cohorts of tens of
thousands of enthusiastic volunteers for the experiments
of exercise physiologists that have now proved beyond
reasonable doubt that regular physical activity prevents
chronic diseases. With no funding from USAID, too!
Before jogging there were two separated populations, of
elite athletes and the sedentary masses; so researchers
could not be sure of the meaning of moving from being fat
to being fit. Now we all know.
Arthur Lydiard and Norman Harris began the movement
that led to the launch of Agita Mundo onWorld Health Day
in Sa˜o Paulo in April 2002 and the new WHO global
strategy. They are the founders of a global grassroots
movement that has improved the quality of life of millions
of people. Salutations to them. Raise your glasses, please,
filled neither with Coca-Cola, nor cachac¸a nor calvados.
Sau´de! Good health!