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Like the Marathon Monks in Japan he’d just been reading about; they ran an ultramarathon every day for seven years, covering some twenty-five thousand miles on nothing but miso soup, tofu, and vegetables.
Cerutty believed food shouldn’t even be cooked, let alone slaughtered; he put his athletes through triple sessions on a diet of raw oats, fruit, nuts, and cheese.
downhill can trash your quads, not to mention snap your ankle, so the trick is to pretend you’re running uphill: keep your feet spinning under your body like you’re a lumberjack rolling a log, and control your speed by leaning back and shortening your stride.
loose as wave-washed seaweed, with just a hint of ferocity ready to explode.
After two months, I’d built up to six miles a day with a ten-miler on the weekend. My form hadn’t graduated to Smooth yet, but I was keeping the needle wavering pretty steadily between Easy and Light.
two and a half million acres of the most untouched wilderness in the continental U.S.
Once PF sinks its fangs into your heels, you’re in danger of being infected for life. Check any running-related message board, and you’re guaranteed to find a batch of beseeching threads from PF sufferers begging for a cure.
And Mensen was just cracking his knuckles before getting down to serious business: he then ran from Constantinople to Calcutta, trotting ninety miles a day for two straight months.
while Jack Kirk—a.k.a. “the Dipsea Demon”—was still running the hellacious Dipsea Trail Race at age ninety-six.
“You don’t stop running because you get old,” said the Demon. “You get old because you stop running.”
“You’re like everyone else,” Eric Orton told me. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Everyone thinks they know how to run, but it’s really as nuanced as any other activity,” Eric told me. “Ask most people and they’ll say, ‘People just run the way they run.’ That’s ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?” For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don’t go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable.
“Running is the same way,” Eric explained. “Learn it wrong, and you’ll never know how good it can feel.”
“Everyone is built for running,”
“Forget yoga. Every runner I know who does yoga gets hurt.”
“Whenever you run, remember that feeling of straining against the rope. It’ll keep your feet under your body, your hips driving straight ahead, and your heels out of the picture.”
After hours of viewing, he was struck by a revelation: the greatest marathoners in the world run like kindergartners. “Watch kids at a playground running around. Their feet land right under them, and they push back,”
“Kenyans have superquick foot turnover,” Ken said. “Quick, light leg contractions are more economical than
The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold—your hard-breathing point—during your endurance runs.
I was tempted to go the Full Caballo and chuck my running shoes for a pair of sandals, but Eric warned me that I was cruising for a stress fracture if I tried to suddenly go naked after keeping my feet immobilized for forty years.
By week two, Eric was sending me off for two hours at a stretch, his only advice being to focus on form and keep the pace relaxed enough to occasionally breathe with my mouth shut.
“The faster you can run comfortably,” he taught me, “the less energy you’ll need. Speed means less time on your feet.”
The first step toward going cancer-free the Tarahumara way, consequently, is simple enough: Eat less. The second step is just as simple on paper, though tougher in practice: Eat better. Along with getting more exercise, says Dr. Weinberg, we need to build our diets around fruit and vegetables instead of red meat and processed carbs.
Eat like a poor person, as Coach Joe Vigil likes to say, and you’ll only see your doctor on the golf course.
“Anything the Tarahumara eat, you can get very easily,” Tony told me. “It’s mostly pinto beans, squash, chili peppers, wild greens, pinole, and lots of chia. And pinole isn’t as hard to get as you think.” Nativeseeds.org sells it online, along with heritage seeds in case you want to grow your own corn and whiz up some homemade pinole in a coffee grinder.
As for bone-strengthening calcium, that gets worked into tortillas and pinole with the limestone the Tarahumara women use to soften the corn.
“Tarahumara tesgüino is very lightly fermented, so it’s low in alcohol and high in nutrients.” That makes Tarahumara beer a rich food source—like a whole-grain smoothie— while ours is just sugar water.
Under her Tarahumara-style eating plan, lunch and dinner were built around fruit, beans, yams, whole grains, and vegetables, and breakfast was often salad.
“You get leafy greens in your body first thing in the morning and you’ll lose a lot of weight,”
Before the Tarahumara run long, they get strong. And if I wanted to stay healthy, Eric warned me, I’d better do likewise. So instead of stretching before a run, I got right to work. Lunges, pushups, jump squats, crunches; Eric had me powering through a half hour of raw strength drills every other day, with nearly all of them on a fitness ball to sharpen my balance and fire those supportive ancillary muscles.
The grouchiness and temper I’d considered part of my Irish-Italian DNA had ebbed so much that my wife remarked, “Hey, if this comes from ultrarunning, I’ll tie your shoes for you.” I knew aerobic exercise was a powerful antidepressant, but I hadn’t realized it could be so profoundly mood stabilizing and—I hate to use the word—meditative. If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.
Because if David was right, he’d just solved the greatest mystery in human evolution. No one had ever figured out why early humans had separated themselves from all creation by taking their knuckles off the ground and standing up. It was to breathe! To open their throats, swell out their chests, and suck in air better than any other creature on the planet.
But that was just the beginning. Because the better you are at breathing, David quickly realized, the better you are at— “Running? You’re saying humans evolved to go running?”
the Handy Hammer Syndrome, in which the hammer in your hand makes everything look like a nail.
“Species evolve according to what they’re good at, not what they’re bad at. And as runners, humans aren’t just bad—we’re awful.” You didn’t even need to get into the biology; you could just look at cars and motorcycles. Four wheels are faster than two, because as soon as you go upright, you lose thrust, stability, and aerodynamics. Now transfer that design to animals.
A tiger is ten feet long and shaped like a cruise missile. It’s the drag racer of the jungle, while humans have to putter along with their skinny legs, tiny strides, and piss-poor wind resistance.
A gorilla, on the other hand, is strong enough to lift a four-thousand-pound SUV, but with a gorilla’s land speed of twenty miles per hour, that same SUV could run it over in first gear.
“In the whole history of vertebrates on Earth—the whole history— humans are the only running biped that’s tailless,”
Bramble noted, is an Achilles tendon, which connects the calf to the heel: we’ve got one, chimps don’t. We have very different feet: ours are arched, chimps’ are flat. Our toes are short and straight, which helps running, while chimps’ are long and splayed, much better for walking. And check out our butts: we’ve got a hefty gluteus maximus, chimps have virtually none. Dr. Bramble then focused on a little-known tendon behind the head known as the nuchal ligament. Chimps don’t have a nuchal ligament. Neither do pigs. Know who does? Dogs. Horses. And humans. Now this was perplexing. The nuchal
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Likewise, the Achilles tendon serves no purpose at all in walking, which is why chimps don’t have one. Neither did Australopithecus, our semi-simian four-million-year-old ancestor; evidence of an Achilles tendon only began to appear two million years later, in Homo erectus.
A mystifying but unmistakable time line was taking shape: as the human body changed over time, it adopted key features of a running animal.
But there are two kinds of great runners: sprinters and marathoners. Maybe human running was about going far, not fast.
And if I were going to design a long-distance running machine, Dr. Bramble thought, that’s exactly what I’d load it with—lots of rubber bands to maximize endurance. Running is really just jumping, springing from one foot to another. Tendons are irrelevant to walking, but great for energy-efficient jumping. So forget speed; maybe we were born to be the world’s greatest marathoners.
“And you’ve got to ask yourself why only one species in the world has the urge to gather by the tens of thousands to run twenty-six miles in the heat for fun,” Dr. Bramble mused. “Recreation has its reasons.”
When they played back the tape, something seemed strange, although Bramble couldn’t figure out what it was. He had to rewind a few times before it hit him: even though David and the horse were moving at the same speed, David’s legs were moving more slowly.
“It was astonishing,” Dr. Bramble explains. “Even though the horse has long legs and four of them, David had a longer stride.”
average. That left only one explanation: as bizarre as it may seem, the average human has a longer stride than a horse. The horse looks like it’s taking giant lunges forward, but its hooves swing back before touching the ground. The result: even though biomechanically smooth human runners have short strides, they still cover more distance per step than a horse, making them more efficient. With equal amounts of gas in the tank, in other words, a human can theoretically run farther than a horse.
Fantastic! Springy legs, twiggy torsos, sweat glands, hairless skin, vertical bodies that retain less sun heat—no wonder we’re the world’s greatest marathoners. But so what? Natural selection is all about two things—eating and not getting eaten—and being able to run twenty miles ain’t worth a damn if the deer disappears in the first twenty seconds and a tiger can catch you in ten. What good is endurance on a battlefield built on speed?
Our heads didn’t just expand because we got better at running, Lieberman believed; we got better at running because our heads were expanding, thereby providing more ballast.
So how long would it take to actually run an animal to death? he asked himself.
