Bill Bowerman is one of the most successful track coaches in the United States, but his role in bringing jogging to America is of even greater importance. In the winter of 1962, shortly after his University of Oregon four-mile relay team broke the world record, an invitation came for a match race with the team from New Zealand, the previous world recordholders. Bowerman and his team were the guests of Arthur Lydiard.

“The first Sunday I was down there,” Bowerman recalled in Bill Dellenger’s book, The Running Experience, “Lydiard asked me if I wanted to go out for a run with a local jogging club. I was used to going out and walking 55 yards, jogging 55 yards, going about a quarter of a mile and figuring I had done quite a bit … We went out and met a couple hundred people in a park - men, women, children, all ages and sizes. I was still full of breakfast as Lydiard pointed toward a hill in the distance and said we were going to run to Two Pine Knoll. It looked about 1½ miles away. We took off and I wasn’t too bad for about ½ mile, and then we started up this hill. God, the only thing that kept me alive was the hope that I’d die. I moved right to the back of the group and an old fellow, I suppose he was around 70 years old, moved back with me and said ‘I see you’re having trouble.’ I didn’t say anything … because I couldn’t. So we took off down the hill and got back about the same time the people did who had covered the whole distance.”

Bowerman, then 50, spent six weeks in New Zealand and ran every day. He lost nearly ten pounds and reduced his waistline by four inches. By the time he returned to Oregon, he had learned to jog - slowly and comfortably. As soon as he arrived home, he got a call from Jerry Uhrhammer, a sportswriter from the Eugene Register-Guard. Uhrhammer wanted to know how the team had run, but Bowerman was much more excited about what he’d learned about jogging. Uhrhammer, who later became a jogger after open-heart surgery, published several articles based on Bowerman’s revelations. Bowerman began staging Sunday morning runs and Uhrhammer publicised them.

Interest in the Sunday runs grew and Bowerman was asked to hold classes and clinics for neighborhood groups in Eugene. He did so, using some of his great Oregon distance runners as instructors. Before long Bowerman was overwhelmed with requests for information on this new phenomenon, so in 1966 he wrote a 20-page pamphlet - Jogging - with a Eugene cardiologist, Dr Waldo Harris. The following year he published an expanded version of Jogging, which eventually sold over a million copies. The seeds of the jogging movement had been firmly planted in American soil.

Excerpted from Galloway’s Book on Running, ©2002 by Jeff Galloway.