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Tuesday 8 December 2020

Thing To Decide If You Are Today: cursorial.

 Many of us are, or have been, in lock-down of various kinds this year. Some people have loved it, some people have hated it, some people have lost fortunes and some people have made them.

And some have taken up jogging.


(This is former president of the USA Jimmy Carter. He's probably been jogging for ages, but it's curiously difficult to find a free-to-use photograph of someone jogging who doesn't look like an athlete.)

Anyway, I've become quite a connoisseur of joggers. I especially like the slow joggers - that is, the ones who progress at less than a normal walking pace. There's a lady I occasionally encounter who goes out with a man whom I assume to be her personal trainer. The trainer strolls, and she jogs along in an unbalanced plodding of painful limbs.

But that's only one style of unhappy jogger: there are the hand-flailers who subconsciously, I think, keep hoping they'll be able to hail a taxi; the dogged, desperate-looking people in black who run along narrow roads in the hope, one can only assume, that they'll get run over; and the people in fluorescent yellow who must be so afraid of being run over you'd think they'd exercise somewhere safer.

And then, of course, there are the athletes who are rugged and/or beautiful and are born to run.

I'm not one of those athletes. Everything about running is for me awkward and uncomfortable. So I walk. I get places slightly more slowly, but at least I'm not sweaty or offensively virtuous.

No. I'm not cursorial, me.

Thing To Decide If You Are Today: cursorial. Cursorial is a zoological term meaning adapted for running. The Latin word currere means to run. 



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