‘Your arms are doing the movement anyway. Most runners are just juggling without the balls.’ So claims Tim Butler, a computer scientist from Lincoln, who makes the sport of ‘joggling’ sound so easy that you wonder why there aren’t more people doing it.
The coin was termed by an American, Bill Giduz, back in the 1970s when he edited the International Jugglers Association newsletter. In the US there’s a longstanding track meet grandly called the World Joggling Championships, where events include the three-ball 4×200 metre relay and the dauntingly difficult five-ball 200 metres. Over here it’s a tiny online community with a 34-member Facebook group, but interest has grown since a BBC News TV appearance for Edinburgh jogglers Scott Jenkins and James McDiarmid in March this year, which led to articles in the Daily Mail and the Guardian.
They all know each other, but Scott still seems a little starstruck when he joins our Zoom call together with Tim, who Scott calls “a bit of an idol”. Tim will have completed his 100th joggling marathon or ultramarathon by this summer, including the 50-mile Snowdonia Ultra and the 12 Labours of Hercules, a balls-to-the-wall 78-mile epic. He always does them wearing a cap with a cuddly tiger on it, raising money for the Zoological Society of London.
Tim, 54, was more into football until he injured his cruciate ligament age 40 and started running for the rehab. He saw a website created by Perry Romanowski documenting a lengthy joggling run streak, and decided to try it himself. He first juggled sporadically during the Lincoln 10k, and got a huge cheer from the crowd at the finish line. ‘They were going bonkers! I got this big ego boost, which I quite liked,’ he says.
Data scientist Scott, at 27, is more interested in speed. As a conventional runner he was capable of a 17-minute 5k. ‘But I felt my running was plateauing a bit, and I didn’t have the time or inclination to push it further,’ he says. He now runs without juggling ‘only very rarely’, and says his three orange balls don’t even slow him down that much. His PB for a half marathon is around 1:22. While juggling? Still a very sprightly 1:27.
Even more impressively, Scott says that the day before we meet, he completed a half marathon without dropping once. He’s still a little way off goldenballs standard, however. He also maintains a website that lists all the joggling records, including the Canadian Michal Kapral’s three-ball marathon time of 2:50:12 and American Bob Evans’s three-ball 5k record from 2012: 16:34. Perhaps most extraordinarily, in 2010 Barry Goldmeier finished the Chicago Marathon in 5:51:41 while juggling five balls.
What are their dos and don’ts? Scott uses waterproof balls with a leather coating, filled with rubber pellets. Don’t waste your time with the cheap little stocking filler bean bags. You want something with a bit of weight, but not balls that roll off down the road when you drop them. They tend to start races at the side, near the front, so as not to interfere too much with other runners. ‘It’s easier for them to overtake us than us to overtake them,’ says Scott. And if some of your race is in the dark, use LED balls, not the fire ones, as you’ll have to carry too much paraffin to keep them going and you don’t want to mistake that stuff for your water supply.
If nothing else, it’s an excuse to add a silly word to your vocabulary. And if you get bored of joggling, try ‘drubbling’ – running while bouncing three basketballs – or ‘swuggling’ – juggling and swimming (backstroke, obviously). I recommend a YouTube search for all of these things.
Now the jogglers are getting even more ambitious. Look out for them at the 12-hour Manvers Dusk Til Dawn event near Doncaster in July, and spy their joggling relay team at the Loch Ness 24 in August. But if you see anyone trying to set a flaming clubs record, give them a wide berth.
Search Facebook for ‘Joggling UK’
