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A Joggling Act

Chris Essick isn’t your average runner. Read how one Branson native is breaking world records in joggling.

Photo by Edward Biamonte

Chris Essick can run 400 meters in 56.9 seconds—while juggling. Essick is a champion athlete, but his skills lie in a sport most people have never heard of: joggling. Despite the goofy name, running while juggling isn’t a sideshow act. It’s a serious sport, and Essick is striving to bring joggling back into Olympic fame. And he’s breaking world records while he’s act it.

Essick didn’t have a clue how to juggle until 1999. Essick was busy teaching art history at Ozarks Technical College while working on his master’s degree in educational technology. It wasn’t until world-famous juggler Albert Lucas visited Branson that Essick even considered learning. Lucas was looking for a track star to train as a joggler, and Essick, an athlete and track coach for nearly 15 years, fit the bill. Essick started by learning to juggle. He practiced with scarves, then moved onto soft, heavier objects and throwing them against the wall. Essick says the challenge in juggling is throwing the balls consistently, and while running, there’s always the threat of someone throwing you off. To practice, Lucas would bump into Essick while juggling. Eventually, Essick was able to walk and juggle, and he kept practicing a faster pace until he was finally able to run.

“The toughest part is the physics of it,” says Essick. “I found that you want to use your arms to propel yourself, but you can’t.” It only took one dedicated year of juggling heavy objects, running with his hands behind his back and finally mastering joggling for Essick to break his first world record, the 400 meter sprint. In 2001, Essick broke the 200 meter sprint, with a time of 24.19 seconds.

Yet despite his accomplishments, Essick has certainly experienced drawbacks. One of the most difficult feats when joggling is to keep the balls in the air. “I’ve dropped [a ball] before,” says Essick. “It’s heartbreaking.” Professional jogglers are allowed to pick up their balls and continue the race, but there’s almost no chance of recovery. Essick must calculate his leg movements with the rotation pattern of the juggling balls, a feat that’s difficult to master. “It’s frustrating,” says Essick. “When Olympic athletes can’t [joggle], it seems unbeatable.”
Essick, after earning his record-breaking fame in joggling, was in high demand to perform all over the world. One of his favorite trips was his appearance on a late-night show in Japan, where he raced a former baseball player. Essick joggled and jumped hurdles—something he had never practiced before—while the baseball player ran alongside him. Essick won.

Essick’s ultimate goal is to see joggling become an Olympic sport again. Joggling was brought into the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and Essick and Lucas made a bid for the sport to return at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They were denied. But with support from the International Sport Joggling Federation, along with performing at track meets and other events, Essick hopes to bring the sport to the world’s attention.

Now, despite international joggling fame and meeting star athletes such as Marion Jones and Maurice Green, Essick is at home in Branson, where he divides his time between his ticket reservation company, 1-800-Branson.com, teaching art at Conway High School and public speaking engagements to keep kids on track to a healthy lifestyle while giving advice to future jogglers. “Be patient,” says Essick. “Anyone can juggle. Anyone can run. But when you put them together, you have an exceptional athlete.”

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