Designed to Run

I just finished Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen on my recent West Coast road trip. I listened to the audio download version and stayed riveted to the story whenever I could get a spare moment with my iPod. The author Christopher McDougall begins with the question most runners ask themselves at some point. If running is so good for me why does something always hurt? Not just muscle stiffness from tough work outs, but genuine overuse injuries from the low back down to the heels. While exploration of associations between over-engineered running shoes and the explosion of running injuries the past 4 decades was provocative, McDougall primarily derives the answer to his question from his interactions with the Tarahumara Indians and a group of oddball American ultra-marathoners.

The Tarahumara are a mysterious people from the rugged and largely inaccessible Copper Canyons of Mexico whose ancient culture revolves around a love of running, and not just foot races through the village, but extraordinary runs of unfathomable distances for young and old alike. Yet, as intriguing as the Tarahmara and the eccentric American ultra-runners (shoed and barefoot) were in this book the sections I enjoyed most involved the discussions of evidence accumulated by a small group of scientists indicating that humans were designed to run long distances. This unique ability within the animal kingdom may explain how our species survived and thrived before developing tools despite being slow and relatively underdeveloped in terms of musculature. This has been, and may still be, the minority opinion when it comes to the origins of human locomotion, with walking being the favored explanation for our upright posture. Nevertheless, the evidence for long distance running as the means by which humans out competed their pre-historical counterparts is persuasive and is based on evidence obtained from multiple fields including comparative anatomy, paleontology, anthropology, biomechanics and exercise physiology.

Considering that many people have not run for years or even decades is it any wonder why humans are now wracked with a variety of chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart failure and depression? We have increasingly separated ourselves from our genetic blueprint. We were designed to run.