I can see that a number of sceptical people are wondering when I’m finally going to come out with a campaign of some sort.

Here’s my answer: I do have a campaign tucked away and now it is unveiled, ta-ra-ta-ra-ta-ra—BOOM!, here and today. What’s more I expect - anyway I hope and trust - you’ll end up by sharing my interest in it and join up with the rest of us and start backing us up or even commenting, or even just saying YES on the response box that is a little further down in this blog. For it’s something that harms no one but could benefit millions of people, and it could bring millions of funds for athletics and billions for national budgets, perhaps even bringing down taxes for you and me.

Correction: It could harm some, and that’s the cigarette manufacturers. Because my campaign aims at getting massive millions of people to take up running, regular running (by giving up smoking). Hooray, what a day that’ll be. Oh, yes, you’ll interrupt, of course people should take up running, but how could it be such a universal panacea. Don’t exaggerate, you’ll tell me. And how could it harm the tobacco people and their intrusive lobby?

Ladies and gentlemen of the Weakhearted faith, just listen up. Yes, certainly, it’s well known that running is good for you, makes you fitter and that. Of course, of course. But it’s much more than that, much, much more, and when you add it all up and quantify it in financial terms, you’ll see why these other claims of mine become believable. There’s one particular link that does the trick. Running and smoking. Let’s say that again loud and clear:

RUNNING AND SMOKING.
Now this will need your care and attention if you’re going to understand it properly:

Stage ONE
There are many effects of regular running work-outs but there’s one that transcends them all and yet I’ve never seen anyone take it into account. Once people have begun training and stretched themselves fairly hard for a few weeks they usually experience The Runner’s High.

That’s the big one, the Runner’s High. It provides a feelgood sensation, a slightly euphoric mood, cpmbined with a recharging of one’s dynamo. At the end of a hard-run race it makes you cheer yourself, you’ve done it! It’s explained scientifically by the fact that the few miles of effort accomplished produces a surge of endorphins in the brain. You won’t expect me to explain what these little endorphin blighters are, but anyway they’re stimulating in effect. And Ah! - they have a marvellous on-going effect to all who run seriously and often, doing let’s say a couple of 5K runs in the week and a race at the weekend, where you’re trying to improve your position from 145th to 134th, if not from 2nd to 1st.

What special marvellous effect? (Sorry, but that aspect only applies to smokers.) Anyone who is or isn’t on the habit, does get that endorphin effect, but smokers benefit more, as it makes them almost automatically chuck the habit. They don’t have to try, it just happens. This we discovered for ourselves, those of us on Running Magazine. We were among those back in 1979 and the 80s who had inspired the original running boom, and we invited readers to join Geoffrey Cannon’s Fun Runner groups to train together with him as coach in Hyde Park or Wimbledon Common. Many in those days of course were young smokers. Geoffrey would say from their first run onwards: “Chaps (in those days it was mostly men, though not nowadays), chaps forget about trying to quit, just run your best, that’s all you should keep in mind.”

Magic! These chaps would duly tend to experience that runner’s high and after a while, without trying, they gave up smoking, it fell away from them like they’d been moulting. Cured, no lung cancer to come later in life, or heart disease, etc, more capacity in the lungs so they could run even better, money saved from every packet of 20. What was the magic? Enter again the endorphins. The high that cigarette-smoking gives people is from that same endorphin effect as they get from running. So, says the body, what the hell am I smoking for, nicotine on my fingers, ash on my clothes, smoke getting in my eyes...? And they don’t even finish their current pack of fags, just bin them.

Running Mag came in for great praise from Ash, the anti-smoking group, and as a result they invited me on to the Council of Ash, where I still sit 25 years later.

Let’s now go on to examine not just the health but the enormous financial effects of the campaign, which I would now like to restart here - and in a big way if you also join in, become supporters. And if we fend off counter-attacks from the tobacco men.

However, that’s sufficient talk on one blog, and the rest will have to feature in my next. Keep your eyes open and your finger on the keyboard.

Stage TWO follows soon. It shows how running is a permanent cure for smoking, not just the 20% as guaranteed by the other treatments. And why. And why this attracts all that money, and in the end will be of help to Lord Seb and his teams in promoting 2012.