Relentless Forward Progress_ A Guide to Running Ultramarathons - Bryon Powell [3]
People gravitate to campfires like moths. The flames mesmerize us, dancing in tune with images from our mind’s eye. Of course they do: Domesticating fire was likely a pivotal move for early humans and a vital tool for countless generations of our ancestors. The genetic instructions for building our minds were passed down from people who depended on fire for their survival. For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived in small nomadic groups. Hunting or gathering during the day, they likely assembled at night around temporary shelters and, of course, fires. Camping feels familiar because our minds are designed for environments like campgrounds.
This is another surprising similarity between camping and running: It fits with our inherited dispositions. The more we learn about early humans, the more apparent it becomes that they were good at walking and running. Their quirky two-legged locomotion combined with hairlessness, sweat glands, free hands (to carry water), and vertical stature helped them manage a major problem with constant exertion—getting too hot.
Although the running habits of early humans did not preserve well in the archaeological record, we see the vestiges of our running heritage in several ancient cultures. The Japanese revere distance running. Long-distance running relays, called Ekidens, command the kind of media attention that basketball, baseball, and football do in the United States. Monastic pilgrims to Enryaku Temple near Kyoto have been dubbed the marathon monks. They set out on spiritual quests requiring between 100 and 1,000 consecutive days of running about 31 miles each day. The Tarahumara of Mexico, the San of southern Africa, aboriginal Australians, and the Masai of Kenya all have well-documented running cultures.
The Tarahumara inhabitants of the Copper Canyons in Mexico were featured in Chris McDougall’s exuberant book Born to Run. The sense you get from the book is of a culture steeped in a run-forits-own-sake mentality. By contrast, a short but dramatic clip from one of David Attenborough’s Life documentaries allows you to feel the necessity of running to our early forebears. The clip shows three San tribesman of the Kalahari Desert chasing a kudu on foot—a hunt that lasts eight hours. The search term “persistence hunt” will turn up that video in many places. The same search will also turn up the hypothesis that early humans likely depended on just such hunting techniques for the tens of thousands of years that elapsed between the onset of meat eating among our ancestors and the invention of tools.
One danger of identifying people who routinely run long distances is that we will first notice the differences between them and us. They are smaller, or longer, or darker, or more ancient than us. Indeed, genetic studies of the San suggest they represent one of the most ancient African populations. And times have changed. Not even the San continue to secure food by running after kudu. While we find it easy to identify differences, commonalities often escape our notice. Like the marathon monks, many Americans run as a kind of meditation. We feel better after a stressful day of work if we spend an hour completely occupied with putting one foot in front of the other. Like the Tarahumara, we use running events as an excuse to gather. We meet in small groups for routine training runs and then we convene en masse for the occasional 5K. And some of us, like the San tribesman, set out on whole-day excursions through rough terrain. We run ultras.
Those who run long are not freaks of nature. We are not a handful of chosen ones blessed with indefatigable muscle and indestructible cartilage. Nor do we have indomitable willpower that others lack. If anything sets us apart it is a kind of sensitivity. We can hear a faint chord vibrating on old and brittle strings. It begins to resonate through us