Wierd

[C'est Si Bon]

It's not about changing your fitness level. Jogging in place as oppose to standing keeps your heart rate up and makes it easier to keep going.

[Sco Bro]

Joggers are nothing but targets, and standing in place jogging just makes them sitting ducks.

[pigsteak]

I subscribe to the Jeff Galloway regime...the last marathon I ran, I never ran more than 1 mile without a walk during training....on long runs, we would walk for 1 minute every half mile..our long runs got up to 30 miles, and with the walking, it makes it easier to finish them, and less recovery time. In the actual race, it is all running if you so choose. Galloway was an Olympian as well, so it just shows there are many schools of thought on the issue.

And if standing at a stop light makes you want to stop, then you ain't no runner to start with...

[cassio598]

Jeff Galloway's program is great... if you just want to finish a marathon and be hyponatremic after 5 hours of drinking water. If you want to run a respectable marathon, go find a book by Jack Daniels, THE guru of distance running-specific exercise physiology, Arthur Lydiard, or someone else of similar stature.

And you jog at stop lights for the same reason you jog inbetween intervals on the track instead of lying down to die: if all you did during the recovery interval is not move, you're body hurts more and makes it more difficult to resume the proper level of effort.

[Meadows]

I'm with Ray...real runners know that a minute of rest won't do anything to your fitness level...and not jogging in place will guarantee that we'll quit talking about you.

And don't even get me started on those goof balls who run with head phones or run inside on a treadmill when it is 70 degrees outside...if it ain't raining or dark, then you should be outside getting your skin cancer for the day.

What's wrong with this whole scenario is that people run where there are traffic lights.

What's wrong with headphones? Studies show music boosts endorphins which will make you feel less pain and a lot happier and motivated to run. Try that and you may actually like running.

[cassio598]

Headphones are great, but they're dangerous outside. You can't hear cars, bikes or other traffic nearly as well (in my case my music is generally loud enough that I can't hear them till they're right on top of me). Plus, and this is aimed morely at the fairer sex, headphones make you a more attractive target for muggers, rapists etc. because you can't hear them sneaking up on you.

That said, they're great for those times when it's really dangerous to be outside and you have to suffer through a session on the treadmill, exercise bike, stair-master, etc. Book are good too.

[SCIN]

You can usually tell the real runners because they actually stop at stoplights. They know enough about their game to understand that two minutes of inactivity won't destroy their fitness level.

[Here comes some full-on geekdom] Actually, stopping activity for more than 12 seconds halts the production of new capilaries (or what ever the actual process is), a major reason for doing easy runs. This according to Arthur Lydiard, the great, recently departed, New Zeland coach of Murray Halberg, Peter Snell, Lasse Viren, and a whole bunch of other Olympic Gold-Medalist distance guys. So stopping for 2 minutes does, in fact, hurt your fitness level. On top of that, in my experience, if you've been running kinda hard, like faster than 6:30 miles, it's much for difficult to get up to speed if you've been standing around sucking your thumb instead of jogging in place, bouncing from foot to foot, or generally keeping our heart rate up.

As far as running as a solo sport, that only seems to be the opinion of folks who started by themselves as adults. I ran cross country and track for both my high school and college teams, and I can tell you running is more fun and easier with a bunch of guys than on your own. Besides making it more difficult to wimp out and sit on the couch, it's a lot easier to crank with a couple of other people to help you keep going, take over pace-making duties, etc. I can think of one hot, rolling, 9.5 mile, 60 min. 10 sec. (that's 6:20 pace lads) suffer fest in particular that would have been impossible on my own. Oh, and I'm pretty sure we hopped back and forth at stop lights.

I stand corrected. I'm going on a buddy run with Horatio tonight and we're going to hop around together at every stop light.

[meetVA]

make sure you explain to him too how to talk in parentheses.
enjoy your run!

[cassio598]

make sure you explain to him too how to talk in parentheses.
enjoy your run!

Yeah, I seem to do that a lot, huh? Not to mention pontificate. Ye asked and ye have received. But how full is your joy?

[Paul3eb]

i think pretty much any cardio exercise is dumb.

and scin, don't forget that cyclists still wear lycra, have holes in their seats for their balls, and wear a helmet the effectively makes them look like penises when they're standing.