U.S. politics is an endurance test not only for presidential candidates but for those who report on them. The pace in this year's race for the Democratic nomination has been especially grueling, as we show in our Nation story. The sort of 18-hour day, for example, in which Candidate Gary Hart made nine stops in seven cities in four states has not been uncommon. For correspondents, the problems seem to stretch unendingly: the usually mediocre, sometimes terrible food; fitful and minimal sleep; the struggle for clean clothes (allnight laundromats are indispensable); and the tedium of long waits.

Says Sam Allis, who has been following Walter Mondale for TIME: "When I look back on this year, it will almost certainly be a blur. I have eaten every known kind of Danish and tasted coffee that was clearly brewed from petroleum byproducts. I have watched my

waistline spread steadily since last October, when I started this strange game. It was no fun watching Walter Mondale shake hands at a factory gate in freezing rain in Rock Island, Ill., at 6:30 a.m. But covering his big comeback victory in that state repaid with interest all the days of journalistic slogging."

Jack White has been with Jesse Jackson's campaign much of the time since last summer, even before it officially began. Following Jackson can be particularly demanding, notes White: "Jackson keeps 16-hour days, delivering up to seven 30-minute speeches. Most are extemporaneous, requiring careful attention to his every word. He seldom uses a prepared text, and then never sticks to it."

David Beckwith, who has been accompanying Gary Hart in recent weeks, has devised his own survival " rules: 1) Get your shirts done at every

opportunity, even if you seem to have enough clean ones. 2) Eat often because you never know when you will get another meal. 3) File your reports as early as possible to avoid end-of-the-day exhaustion. 4) Have faith; your body can and will adapt to the tortures of constant travel. The rigors of the campaign may be partly responsible for a major change that Beckwith has lately observed in the press corps. "It's more professional and far more serious than it used to be," he explains. "It's possible now for a flight attendant on the campaign plane to go down the aisle with the drink cart and fail to find a single taker."