The writer of this week's cover story is no stranger to the pains and pleasures of athletic activity. Before joining TIME last March, Associate Editor J.D. Reed spent five years writing for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. But Reed, 41, is only a recent convert to participatory sports. A perpetual dieter, he estimates that he has lost almost 450 Ibs. over the past 15 years and gained back nearly all of them. He blames his exercise program, which he describes as "mostly TV-channel switching. My idea of aerobics was shaking the popcorn popper, and isometrics was pushing together the two halves of a sandwich." A year ago, however, he took up jogging, and the 30 Ibs. he then lost have stayed off. "I'm possibly the slowest jogger in rural New Jersey," Reed says. "People walking to the store regularly pass me by."

At the typewriter, though, Reed is a regular sprinter. A former professor of English, he had published three volumes of poetry by the time his first novel came out last year. Called Free Fall, it is based on the unsolved 1971 skyjacking of a commercial airliner by "D.B. Cooper," who parachuted into oblivion--and popular legend--with $200,000 in ransom money. Reed offers an exciting and altogether plausible account of what might have happened after the skyjacker did his Geronimo. A movie made from the novel, entitled The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, opens next month.

The TIME staffers who reported the cover story follow disparate fitness regimens. Says Boston Correspondent John Yang:

"Whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away." In Detroit, Correspondent Christopher Redman always thought all forms of public muscle building were unseemly. "I'm a closet exerciser," he says, "but "I'm seriously thinking about coming out." Senior Reporter-Researcher Sue Raffety resumed a running program she had stopped some years ago, and recently completed a 13.1-mile half-marathon in an eminently respectable 1 hr. 53 min. Raffety also swims a mile every morning before work. "Swimming and running," she says, are my total tranquilizer." Senior Editor Timothy Foote, who edited the cover, is a fitness veteran who started 20 years ago with the Royal Canadian Air Force routine, and now runs regularly, though briefly. Says he: "Running, in any sport, is unquestionably the best way to dispel free-floating angst."

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