The Big City

One of the things I enjoy while walking to work along the Embankment is the steady stream of joggers who jostle past. They often get stuck behind pedestrians and usually try to keep up a kind of jogging movement despite moving at a slow walking pace. One potential marathon champion I saw today was getting slower and slower as the bovine tourist in front of him took in the view. Too polite to ask her to move he finally had to admit defeat and become just a man taking a walk, in shorts, in January.
The number of joggers always increases drastically after the London Marathon. You can easily spot the newcomers. Apart from their having very red faces their trendy box-fresh jogging gear doesn’t have the gritty greyness that anything exposed to the London diesel fumes quickly acquires. They rapidly lose heart; the numbers are back to normal within just a few weeks.
I do sometimes wonder how much the joggers are costing the National Health Service with their inevitable sprains, strains and damaged knees. The Serpentine Running Club says that one in three runners suffer from some form of lower limb pain and injury. But then, they say, only one in ten of those injured people will need to be operated on in hospital. That still makes it quite an expensive hobby from my point of view.