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Lieberman kept looking, and found an even more telling comparison: the top galloping speed for most horses is 7.7 meters a second. They can hold that pace for about ten minutes, then have to slow to 5.8 meters a second. But an elite marathoner can jog for hours at 6 meters a second. The horse will erupt away from the starting line, as Dennis Poolheco had discovered in the Man Against Horse Race, but with enough patience and distance, you can slowly close the gap.
You don’t even have to go fast, Lieberman realized. All you have to do is keep the animal in sight, and within ten minutes, you’re reeling him in.
To run an antelope to death, Lieberman determined, all you have to do is scare it into a gallop on a hot day. “If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers’ worth of running, it will go into hyperthermia and collapse.” Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day, then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they gallop.
Smothered in muscle, the Neanderthals followed the mastodons into the dying forest, and oblivion. The new world was made for runners, and running just wasn’t their thing.
How did we leap from basic survival thinking, like that of other animals, to wildly complicated concepts like logic, humor, deduction, abstract reasoning, and creative imagination?
He learned that if you stumble upon an angry lioness and her cubs, you stand tall and make her back down, but in the same situation with a rhino, you run like hell.
With speculative hunting, early human hunters had gone beyond connecting the dots; they were now connecting dots that existed only in their minds.
After a while, Louis began to look at running the way other people look at walking; he learned to settle back and let his legs spin in a quick, easy trot, a sort of baseline motion
that could last all day and leave him enough reserves to accelerate when necessary.
As a hunter-gatherer, you’re never off the clock; you can be walking home after an exhausting day of collecting yams, but if fresh game scuttles into view, you drop everything and go. So Louis had to learn to graze, eating lightly throughout the day rather than filling up on big meals, never letting himself ...
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Running was the superpower that made us human—which means it’s a superpower all humans possess.
“Name any other field of athletic endeavor where sixty-four-year-olds are competing with nineteen-year-olds. Swimming? Boxing? Not even close. There’s something really weird about us humans; we’re not only really good at endurance running, we’re really good at it for a remarkably long time. We’re a machine built to run—and the machine never wears out.”
You don’t stop running because you get old, the Dipsea Demon always said. You get old because you stop running…
As we evolved, we shucked our beef and became more sinuous, more cooperative … essentially, more female.
Humans are among the most communal and cooperative of all primates;
“We live in a culture that sees extreme exercise as crazy,” Dr. Bramble says, “because that’s what our brain tells us: why fire up the machine if you don’t have to?”
To be fair, our brain knew what it was talking about for 99 percent of our history; sitting around was a luxury, so when you had the chance to rest and recover, you grabbed it. Only
“Just move your legs. Because if you don’t think you were born to run, you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.”
Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude—they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.
It wasn’t Arnulfo’s and Scott’s matching form so much as their matching smiles; they were both grinning with sheer muscular pleasure, like dolphins rocketing through the waves.
Scott had a simpler method: it’s easy to get outside yourself when you’re thinking about someone else.
Arnulfo wasn’t going up against a fast American. He was about to race the world’s only twenty-first-century Tarahumara.
Often I visualize a quicker, like almost a ghost runner, ahead of me with a quicker stride.
Keep this in mind—if it feels like work, you’re working too hard.”
Scott leaped and screamed, Jenn howled, Caballo hooted. The Tarahumara just ran.
The worst mistake I could make would be getting lulled into someone else’s race.
Ultra-runners rely on “handhelds,” water bottles with straps that wrap around your hand for easy carrying.
Jenn watched him go, and noticed he was running on the very edge of the trail and sticking tight to the turns. That was an old Marshall Ulrich trick: it made it harder for the guy in the lead to glance back and see you sneak up from behind. Scott hadn’t been surprised by Arnulfo’s big move after all. The Deer was hunting the hunters.
The reason I was feeling so much stronger today than I had on the long haul over from Batopilas, I realized, was because I was running like the Kalahari Bushmen. I wasn’t trying to overtake the antelope; I was just keeping it in sight.
What causes you to tense up is the unexpected; but as long as you know what you’re in for, you can relax and chip away at the job.
On her second pass through Urique, Jenn had dropped into a chair to drink a Coke, but Mamá Tita grabbed her under the arms and hauled her to her feet. “¡Puedes, cariño, puedes! ” Tita cried. You can do it, sweetie!
Silvino was in second, but Scott was closing fast. With a mile to go, Scott ran Silvino down. But instead of blowing past, Scott slapped him on the back. “C’mon!” Scott shouted, waving for Silvino to come with him. Startled, Silvino reached deep and managed to match Scott stride for stride. Together, they bore down on Arnulfo.
Scott drove on. He’d been in this spot before, and he’d always found something left. Arnulfo glanced back and saw the man who’d beaten the best in the world coming after him with everything he had. Arnulfo blazed through the heart of Urique, the screams building as he got closer and closer to the tape. When he snapped it, Tita was in tears. The crowd had already swallowed Arnulfo by the time Scott crossed the line in second. Caballo rushed over to congratulate him, but Scott pushed past him without a word. Scott wasn’t used to losing, especially not to some no-name guy in a pickup race in the
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It had taken me over twelve hours, meaning that Scott and Arnulfo could have run the course all over again and still beaten me.
He wasn’t stupid; he could connect the dots between the nervous boy with the Great Santini dad and the lonely, love-hungry drifter he’d become. Was he a great fighter, in other words, or just a needy one?
For a guy looking to beat himself into numbness, extreme running could be an awfully attractive sport.
Ever since second grade, he’d idolized Geronimo, the Apache brave who used to escape the U.S. cavalry by running through the Arizona badlands on foot. But how did Geronimo end up? As a prisoner, dying drunk in a ditch on a dusty reservation.
“When I get too old to work, I’ll do what Geronimo would’ve if they’d left him alone,” Caballo said. “I’ll walk off into the deep canyons and find a quiet place to lie down.” There was no melodrama or self-pity in the way Caballo said this, just the understanding that someday, the life he’d chosen would require one last disappearing act.
But I’m especially grateful to Men’s Health magazine. If you don’t read it, you’re missing one of the best and most consistently credible magazines in the country, bar none.
“Ultras are just eating and drinking contests, with a little exercise and scenery thrown in.”
“No, thanks,” he decided. “I don’t want anyone to do anything except come run, party, dance, eat, and hang with us. Running isn’t about making people buy stuff. Running should be free, man.”
