According to Christopher McDougall:
We evolved to run. When quadrupeds run they are stuck in one-breath-per locomotion cycle. Humans can pick between a number of different breathing ratios. Humans stood up to access more air in their lungs and to run. We stood up to breathe.
We are the only mammals that shed most of our heat by sweating. Pelt-covered creatures cool off primarily by breathing which locks their heat regulation system to their lungs.
Our ancestors existed at the same time as the mighty Neanderthals. The Neanderthal were fierce hunters. They only ate big meat.....bears, bison, elk, rhinos, mammoths. They had to outfight and outsmart them. The Neanderthals would lure them into ambushes. They were fierce and brave, standing shoulder to shoulder in battle. They were clever warriors armored with muscle but refined enough to slow cook their meat in earth ovens and keep their women and children away from danger. They ruled the world until the world started heating up. They were bigger, braver, and had larger brains than our ancestors.
The forests shrank with the global warming. Our ancestors, the skinny running men, flourished as the antelope herds and feasts of plump roots pushed up all over the savannas. The Neanderthal didn't have it as easy....their long spears and canyon ambushes were useless against fleet prairie creatures, and their big game was retreating into the retreating forests. Neanderthals were much larger and heavier than running men so could not compete in the heat. Smothered in muscle, the Neanderthal followed the mastodons into the dying forest, and into oblivion.
Humans ran, and they ran together as families. Our sole defense was our solidarity. The reason people race today is to be with each other. They run marathons because running is rooted in our collective imagination.
What a simple, elegant description of our running past and present. Thank you Christopher McDougall. We are all running people. We run for joy, for community, and to live; and just maybe.... it makes us better and smarter people.
Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everything else we love--everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires' it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
“Perhaps all our troubles - all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome - began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.” ― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
