Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

Morphology is basically the science of reverse engineering; it looks at how a body is assembled and tries to figure out how it’s supposed to function.

humans are the only running biped that’s tailless,”

Running is just a controlled fall,

He began by splitting the animal kingdom into two categories: runners and walkers. Runners include horses and dogs; walkers are pigs and chimps. If humans were designed to walk most of the time and run only in emergencies, our mechanical parts should match up pretty closely to those of other walkers.

as the human body changed over time, it adopted key features of a running animal.

human running was about going far, not fast.

springy tendons store and return energy,

the more you can stretch the tendons, the more free energy you get when that leg extends and swings back.

Running is really just jumping, springing from one foot to another.

the average human has a longer stride than a horse.

even though biomechanically smooth human runners have short strides, they still cover more distance per step than a horse, making them more efficient.

50-mile Man Against Horse Race

evolution seemed to be all about air; the more highly evolved the species, the better its carburetor.

all running mammals are restricted to the same cycle of take-a-step, take-a-breath. In the entire world, he and David could only find one exception: You.

even though our brains account for only 2 percent of our body weight, they demand 20 percent of our energy, compared with just 9 percent for chimps.

“No other creature has been found with a neck like ours.”

fables of a golden age of heroes who’d never really existed.

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 run in conditions that no other animal can run in,”

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.

Throw a dart at the map, and chances are you’ll bull’s-eye the site of a persistence-hunting tale. The Goshutes and Papago tribes of the American West told them; so did the Kalahari Bushmen in Botswana, the Aborigines in Australia, Masai warriors in Kenya, the Seri and Tarahumara Indians in Mexico.

With speculative hunting, early human hunters had gone beyond connecting the dots; they were now connecting dots that existed only in their minds.

a persistence hunt was like showing up at the starting line without knowing if you were running a half marathon, marathon, or ultra.

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.

learn to graze, eating lightly throughout the day rather than filling up on big meals,

The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science,

running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running.

Running was the superpower that made us human—which means it’s a superpower all humans possess.

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….

Humans are among the most communal and cooperative of all primates; our sole defense in a fang-filled world was our solidarity, and there’s no reason to think we suddenly disbanded during our most crucial challenge, the hunt for food.

“Unlike any other organism in history, humans have a mind-body conflict: we have a body built for performance, but a brain that’s always looking for efficiency.” We live or die by our endurance, but remember: endurance is all about conserving energy, and that’s the brain’s department. “The reason some people use their genetic gift for running and others don’t is because the brain is a bargain shopper.”

“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?”

Nearly every top killer in the Western world—heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, hypertension, and a dozen forms of cancer—was unknown to our ancestors.

“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.”

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Not the same blood, but the same heart.

As a mining village whose best days were over more than a century ago, Urique had two things left to be proud of: its brutally tough landscape and its Tarahumara neighbors.

“But it’s very hot down here,” the shopkeeper retorted. “The Tarahumara, they eat heat.”

somehow these two men separated by two thousand years of culture had developed the same running style.

The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other.

He was no good and had no reason to believe he ever would be, but the joy he got from running was the joy of adding his power to the pack.

the Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their strength with some of his own.

three types of muscle-twitch fiber (not two, as most runners believe).

Urique has only one restaurant, but when it’s run by Mamá Tita, one is plenty.

one thing about crazy people—they see things other people don’t.

Tita’s secret (it’s okay, she won’t mind): she whips boiled rice, overripe bananas, a little cornmeal, and fresh goat milk into her batter. Perfection.

pozole—a rich beef broth with tomatoes and fat corn kernels—and

Keep this in mind—if it feels like work, you’re working too hard.”

I decided to get outside my head and stop obsessing