3 Mile Joggle

When I was a promising young runner in the seventies, I had a coach named Dimitri. He had defected to the US from Romania, where he had been a coach for the Romanian National Track and Field Team. So here he was in the good old USA coaching a rag tag bunch of teenage girls in Connecticut. He was forever promising me in his broken English, "you work hard, you can be champion!" The other thing he was always telling me in that same heavy Romanian accent was, "You are fat! You eat too much!" This when I was about 75 pounds and looked about 10 years old instead of my true age of 15. I took both those frequently repeated statements with a grain of salt.

After about two or three weeks of relentless day after day hard track workouts, better fit for Romanian Olympic athletes than amateur teenage runners, Dimi would notice us girls all kind of limping and dragging ourselves out to the track for the afternoon workout. On these days he would show a rare measure of common sense, (or pity?) and announce, "Today you just joggle a bit." He would put away his stop watch and his clip board and his whistle (yes, he used to whistle signals to us as we ran) and send us off for some easy meandering loops at no particular pace and for no particular distance. This was my introduction to the importance of recovery days after hard workouts. Sure, most people do a recovery day after EACH hard workout, but Dimitri was under the impression that one recovery day every two or three weeks of hard workouts was enough. I was 15, what did I know?

We always laughed about the "joggle" thing. (I know you remember this, Amy). No matter how many times we corrected Dimi, he would never say "jog" it was always "joggle." To this day whenever I do a short easy recovery run, I call it a joggle. So today, on sore tired legs from yesterday's long run, I had a nice joggle and thought about Dimi and found myself hoping he found that "champion" he always wanted.