I hate jogging. Every dawn, as I thud along the straight blacktop, I am reminded of how much I hate it, it’s so tedious. Some claim jogging is thought-conductive, others insist the scenery relieves the monotony. For me, the pace is wrong for contemplation of either ideas or vistas. While jogging, all I can think about is jogging – or nothing. One advantage of jogging along the straight blacktop is that you must cover twice the distance you go forward.

  From the listless looks of some fellow trotters, I gather I am not alone in my unenthusiasm: Bill paying, it seems, would be about as divering. Nonetheless, we continue to jog; more, we continue to choose to jog. From a practically infinite array of opportunities, we select one that we don’t enjoy and can’t wait to have done with. Why?

  For any trend, there are as many reasons as there are participants. This person runs to lower his blood pressure. That person runs to escape the telephone or a cranky spouse or a filthy household. Another person runs to avoid doing anything else, to dodge a decision about how to lead his life or a realization that his life is leading nowhere. Each of us has his carrot and stick. In my case, the stick is my slackening physical condition, which loosen the immigration police for fat.  My carrot is to stay in shape.

  Beyond these disparate reasons, however, lies a deeper cause. It is no accident that now, since the last third of the 20th century, personal fitness and health have suddenly become a popular obsession. True, modern man likes to feel good, but that hardly distinguishes him from his predecessors.

  With zany myopia, economists like to claim that the deeper cause of every thing is economic. Delightfully, there seems no marketplace explanation for jogging. True, jogging is cheap, but then no jogging is cheaper. And the scant and skimpy equipment which jogging demands must make it a marketer’s least favored form of recreation.

  Some scout-masterish philosophers argue that the appeal of jogging and other body-maintenance programs are the discipline they afford. We live in a world in which individuals have fewer and fewer obligations. The workweek has shrunk. Weekend worship is less compulsory. Thechnology gives us more free time. Satisfactorily filling free time requires imagination and effort. Freedom is a wide and risky river, it can drown the person who does not know how to swim across it. The more obligations one takes on, the more time one occupies, the less threat freedom poses, Jogging can become an instant obligation. For a portion of his day, the jogger is not his own man, he is obedient to a regimen he accepted.

  Theologists may take the argument one step farther. It is our modern irreligion, our lack of confidence in any hereafter, that makes us anxious to stretch our mortal stay as long as possible. We run, as the saying goes, for our lives, hounded by the suspicion that these are the only lives we are likely to enjoy.

  All of these theorists seem to me more or less right. As the growth of cults and charismatic religions and the resurgence of enthusiasm for the military draft suggest, we do crave commitment. And who can doubt, watching so many middle-aged and older persons torturing themselves in the name of fitness, that we are unreconciled to death, more so perhaps than any generation in modern memory?