Filed under: running | Tags: hampstead heath, health, heart disease, Jerry Morris, running
Many thanks to Highway Kind over at Running Matters, who flagged this article on the late Jerry Morris last week – an absolutely fascinating account of the first person to make a link between sedentary lifestyles and heart disease in 1949. Jerry studied postal workers and transport workers; some of whom were active and others relatively inactive at work.
Jerry became certainly one of the first people to take up running as a means of reducing the risk of contracting heart disease:
“I was the first person to run on Hampstead Heath, in the 1960s. Every Sunday morning, if the weather was at all possible, I took off my coat, and my little boy carried my coat, I took off my jacket and my little girl carried my jacket, and I ran for 20 minutes. People thought I was bananas.”
It’s amazing to look at how far our knowledge has developed in the two generations since. Few people in the developed world, at least, can be ignorant of the importance of exercise in promoting good health and long life.
What a shame, then, that the National Obesity Forum has seen fit to declare this “National Obesity Week“. Apparently one in two people do not have an accurate picture of their weight, and are being encouraged to calculate their Body Mass Index (BMI). For the record, at 5′4″ and 9 stone 12, my BMI is 23.7 (just about within the healthy bracket – the result, in part, of a sedentary lifestyle at work and a deep-rooted love of food).
Phil and I ran in Jerry’s footsteps around a bit of Hampstead Heath yesterday morning in torrential rain. Despite being really quite displeased at the thought of going out in the soaking wet, I really enjoyed it once I was out.
4.5(ish) miles
46 minutes
4 very soggy feet
