Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

by Scott Jurek

Dealing with physical uncertainty used to be part of life. So did training. We ran toward food and away from predators. We feasted and fasted according to the season. We spent a lot of time walking and napping. Now we sit. We drive and surf on the Internet and watch television. And, naturally, we suffer. A recent study in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed 123,216 subjects over fourteen years and found that men who spent more than 6 hours a day sitting were 17 percent more likely to die during that time than men who sat for less than 3 hours. For women, the increased risk of death was 34 percent. This increased mortality persisted regardless of whether the participants smoked, were overweight, and—this shocked me—regardless of how much they exercised. Humans aren’t built to sit all day. Nor are we built for the kinds of repetitive, small movements that so much of today’s specialized work demands. Our bodies crave big, varied movements that originate at the core of our body. Imbalance comes when we spend all day doing small, repetitive actions like typing, scanning groceries, flipping burgers, or operating a computer mouse. Much of the purpose of structured training, therefore, is compensatory. It’s not so much that we need to learn to run per se, as we need to unlearn bad habits and correct imbalances wrought by the modern lifestyle.