Why We Run: A Natural History

Prologue

The human experience is populated with dreams and aspirations. For me, the animal totem for these dreams is the antelope, swift, strong, and elusive. Most of us chase after antelopes, and sometimes we catch them. Often we don’t. But why do we bother to try? I think it is because without dream-antelopes to chase we become what a lapdog is to a wolf. And we are inherently more like wolves than lapdogs, because the communal chase is part of our biological makeup.

For me, the glimpse of a new antelope on the horizon came in early May 1981. I had seen a fresh sign, and I had to give chase. I had just run my first ultramarathon, a 50-kilometer race, a short race that barely qualifies as an ultramarathon. But in the final half mile I had passed the then-current U.S. National 100-kilometer record holder, which made me wonder if, just possibly, I had the potential to race well at long distances. The North American 100-kilometer championships were to be held on October 4 that year in Chicago. Although at that moment I could just barely have run another step further, I began to dream about the potential of racing the 100 km, twice as far as I had ever run before.

The problem was: how to prepare to run that far? As a zoologist by profession, it seemed only natural for me to look to other endurance athlete species to see why and how it’s done, and for tips on how to train. However, I did not write this book as a training manual, nor did I write it to highlight my running exploits, which are puny relative to those of others. I wrote to show what is involved in running an ultramarathon race, and to pull together the race experience with the insights I gained from my studies of animals. My intent is to amalgamate the race experience with human biology to explore what makes us different from other animals, and in what ways we are the same. In the process, I discovered some possibly new perspectives on human evolution.

ONE

Wind-in-the-Face Warm-Up

I love running cross-country. You come up a hill and see two deer going, What the hell is he doing? On a track I feel like a hamster.

—ROBIN WILLIAMS, film star

These days, my daily run is almost always in the mode of a wind-down after a long day of sedentary activity. I come home feeling a little restless, and eager to smell fresh air, and as I change into running shorts and a light pair of running shoes I start to feel new. I feel transformed and free, like a caterpillar molting into a butterfly. Seconds after tying my laces, I can trot down the driveway.

It is overcast this afternoon (September 21, 1999) and there is a fine, misty drizzle that feels fresh on my face. The still air amplifies the sound of water dripping on maple leaves. The leaves are still bright green, but they will transform into a kaleidoscope of yellow, orange, red, salmon, and purple in another week or two. The goldenrods along the dirt road are just starting to fade, and several species of wild asters are flowering instead. I note the splashes of their lavender, purple, and blue flowers. There are usually bumblebees on these flowers, but today these cold-hardy bees remain torpid in their underground nests deep in the woods.

Watching a large orange and black monarch butterfly feeding at an aster, I wonder how much sugar it is getting from the nectar to fuel on this stop on its migration from Canada to Mexico. The butterflies, like human ultramarathoners (those who race 50 or more miles), need regular refueling stations. While it was warm and sunny during the last couple of weeks, I’ve daily seen the monarchs floating by on lazy, soaring wing beats. These individuals are at least the third generation of those that left central Mexico last spring to come north to breed. All of them are now journeying to their communal wintering area in the cool mountains near Mexico City from where their ancestors had come. There they conserve their energy reserves through the winter by literally putting themselves in refrigeration that slows their metabolic fires. What incredibly long journeys these delicate creatures make just to avoid lethal freezing, while keeping themselves at a low-enough temperature to conserve their energy supplies during months of fasting! Monarch butterflies are long-distance travelers. It is in their makeup. It is their way of coping.

I turn left at the bottom of the driveway, just across from the beaver bog. It is quiet there today. In April I’d heard the cacophony of the snipes whinnying and the red-winged blackbirds yodeling, and all were gone already two months ago. Dragonflies emerged from their larvae in the cold water, seeking warmth. But today, all the dragonflies, their muscles cold, are grounded. Mist collects in droplets on their wings as they perch limply on the cattail foliage. I glance across the bog to the beaver lodge in the pond where the Canadian geese nested. One never knows, there could be a moose, a great blue heron, otters…. No moose and no geese today. Any day now, any hour, the geese’s haunting cries as they glide through the sky will signal the birds’ excitement as they, too, head south, arranged into long Vs. Like human runners following one another’s wind shadow, they take advantage of reduced air resistance to save energy.

Almost everything we know about ourselves has been built on knowledge learned from other organisms: Gregor Mendel’s peas, George Beadle and Edward Tatum’s bread mold, Barbara McClintock’s corn, and Thomas Hunt Morgan’s fruit flies have taught us the basics of inheritance. Mice, rats, dogs, and monkeys have been the subject of studies that provide us with an endless knowledge of practically all our physiological functions. From studies of rats and mice we learned how to fight viruses, battle bacteria, and guard against debilitating diseases. Without insights gleaned from other animals in their natural environment in the field, knowledge of our behavior, our psychology, and our origins would be superficial and rudimentary. As Koyukon elder Grandpa William told anthropologist Robert Nelson (in The Island Within, Vintage Books, 1991), Every animal knows more than you do. So I too believe that animals can teach us much about running. They’ve been doing it for many millions of years before there were recognizable humans.

We can find animals who are far superior to us in practicing what we preach in terms of industry, fidelity, loyalty, bravery, monogamy, patience, and tolerance, but looking to other animals in order to justify our own moral codes is dangerous. Their example can be used just as easily to justify hate, violence, torture, cannibalism, infanticide, deception, rape, murder, and even war and genocide. They can show us how we became what we are, but not what we should try to become. We can learn from them about running the way we want to run.

Given the grand diversity of animals on this planet, we are hardly more unique or even special than most others. We are the product of a vast evolutionary grandeur being created under the same interplay of innumerable constraints and possibilities. Only through them can we see ourselves objectively through an otherwise vapid haze of wishful thinking and unbridled assumptions.

Past the pond, in the five-foot-thick, half-dead sugar maple, a hairy woodpecker hammers on the thick, dry branches, ignoring the jogger. Nearby, a flock of robins swiftly scatters from the young maple trees overgrown with wild grapes. The birds are doing last-day fattening up for their migration, feasting on the berries that conveniently ripen at this time. A grouse feeding on the grapes the robins have knocked to the ground explodes in a loud whir of wings. Its powerful, swift flight startles me. If flushed repeatedly, the grouse would tire and become unable to fly. Like most migrants, the robins can fly nonstop for hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles. They can show us the many specializations required for endurance. Grouse have what it takes for explosive power. I presume they have fast-twitch fibers, like champion human sprinters.

Less than a quarter mile farther down the road, I come to another beaver habitation, this one only a year and a half old. The new dam has flooded the woods, and this summer the flooded trees are dying. The beavers are felling large poplars along the edge of the pond to make underwater food caches of twigs to sustain them through the coming winter. As I jog by the pond, wood ducks quickly paddle through the new surface covering of green duckweed, to hide in the flooded winterberry shrubs. The berries are already red, signaling their ripeness to migrant birds. The wood ducks had nested nearby in a cavity carved out by a pileated woodpecker, and within hours after hatching out of the egg, the ducklings jumped like Ping-Pong balls straight up to the entrance and out. They are natural-born high jumpers. The family of wood duck youngsters grew up in this pond last spring. In May, they were tiny downy chicks; now the whole family looks like adults.

Every few steps, I notice caterpillar feeding damage on the leaves of the trees’ branches over the road. Earlier I had seen caterpillar droppings on the smooth road surface, and I’d look up to find big green cecropia and other moth larvae that have now pupated to pass the winter in torpor. Few caterpillars are visible now, but soon the nests of robins and vireos that were hidden all summer will be exposed as the leaves start to fall from the trees. In the beaver bog, the dying maples already have brilliant yellow and orange leaves. These dying trees have peaked sooner than the others and invite admiring glances.

I’m getting warmed up now. My stride is lengthening and becoming looser. I’m feeling better, thinking clearer, and remembering things I had long forgotten. Just past the beaver pond I pass the steep overhanging bank along the road where I’d found a veery nest in the spring. I saw the bird’s dark eyes as she hunched down, watching me pass. The nest is deserted now—but it conjures up images of bright blue eggs, pink, naked young sporting a light white fuzz, and clumsy spotted youngsters who later hopped in front of me on the road.

A few more steps—the beech tree. There are no capsule fragments on the road to indicate that squirrels had been feasting, so there is likely no beechnut crop this year. On the other side of the road are the old-growth hardwoods, where I’ve often seen a barred owl.

Another few steps to the turn in the road by the apple tree, where some deer jumped over the road, and where I once saw two young beavers doddering along.

Next comes a level stretch of about half a mile. I speed up slightly, mentally trying to visualize every portion of my stride. I’m surprised how conscious visualization of my stride seems to affect it. Keep the movement smooth—keep track of exactly what the right side does as opposed to the left at the same moment. Thinking about what I’m doing, I feel it, then feed the information from mind into body and back again. Back and forth. OK—I’ve got it! Like most of our knowledge, such action is usually unconscious.

At the farm pond, I veer off the road and jump over a fence to check for frogs and see how the pond is refilling with the recent rains. I’d heard tree frogs here last month, and I’d seen mink and green frogs. Like some hunter exploring the veldt, I expect to see many treasures on my runs.

Jogging on again, I look up toward Camels Hump mountain, then descend a long slope down to the Huntington River. I’m feeling good, empowered by what’s around the bend, by memories of past runs, and sometimes also by the lure of a race in the future.

TWO

Ancient Runners and Us

Yet that man is happy and poets sing of him who conquers with hand and swift foot and strength.

—PINDAR, Greek poet, c. 500 B.C.

…The essential thing in life is not so much conquering as fighting well.

—BARON PIERRE DE COUBERTIN,

on reviving the Olympic Games in 1896

We are all natural-born runners, although many of us forget this fact. I will never forget when I first ran barefoot as a child on the warm sand of a lonely wooded road in Germany, where I smelled the pines, heard wood pigeons coo, and saw bright green tiger beetles running or flying ahead of me. I will never, never forget running on asphalt pavement on October 4, 1981, more than thirty years later. On that day I raced a 100-kilometer distance in Chicago with 261 other men and women. Each of them was in one way or another, like me, chasing a dream antelope. When I began to think about what running is all about for us humans, and why I raced, I was surprised at the vividness of my distant memories, and at my new revelations. There were many worlds between the small boy running barefoot on the sand and the forty-one-year-old biologist wearing Nikes on the Chicago pavement. But now these memories were intertwined in my mind with the larger scheme of human existence that relates to our kinship with animals and goes back to the dawn of humankind. Those thoughts gave new meaning to this race.

Movement is almost synonymous with life. With elongating stems and twirling tendrils, plants race one another toward light. Similarly, the seeds of many plants compete to be first on the right piece of ground. Some may travel hundreds of miles by ingenious and diverse mechanisms: being carried by wind or water, or being ferried by berry-eating birds or fur-bearing mammals.

Animals move primarily on their own power: they harness chemical energy by means of muscles. But like plants, we humans have recently harnessed the wind, water, and other animals to carry us. And increasingly, our species, unlike any other, is tapping the energy from coal, oil, and the atom for locomotion.

Throughout the hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution, there has been selective pressure on some species to be able to travel farther and quicker, and to do it more economically and under ever more adverse conditions than either their competitors or their predators. Both predators and prey have to move faster or die. An anonymous runner captured the notion in this now-famous aphorism: Every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or an antelope—when the sun comes up, you’d better be running. Of course, these animals don’t need to know—they must only be fast.

With the help of our infinite imagination and the technologies it has produced, we now travel faster, more economically, and well beyond the range of our muscle power. But for millions of years, our ultimate form of locomotion was running. We are, deep down, still runners, whether or not we declare it by our actions. And our minds, as much as our lungs and muscles, are a vital force that empowers our running. Whenever one of us jogs down a road or when we line up to race in a marathon, we are not only celebrating life in general and our individual aliveness but we are also exercising our fantasies while acknowledging reality. We are secure in the knowledge that there is no magic. Which is not to say the world is only of simple logic, because although it may be simple in its design, it is awesomely complex in its details.

I’ve run at varying distances and intensities almost all of my life, probably because the primal unadorned simplicity of running appeals to me. Various games incorporate running, but only running itself touches the pure and basic essence of the tension between speed and endurance, stripped bare of our everyday world of technology, beliefs, and hype. Nothing—nothing in the world, in terms of sheer performance—compares in my mind to the thrill of seeing a Lee Evans rounding the curve on the way to a 400-meter finish, or the electricity of a Peter Snell, a Cathy Freeman, a Billy Mills, or a Joan Benoit Samuelson on the home-stretch to an Olympic victory. Why? Because it is pure and powerful.

The Complete Book of Running by the late James F. Fixx concludes with the following lines:

My suspicion is that the effects of running are not extraordinary at all, but quite ordinary. It is the other states, all other feelings, that are peculiar, for they are an abnegation of the way you and I are intended to feel. As runners, I think we reach directly back along the endless chain of history. We experience what we would have felt had we lived ten thousand years ago, eating fruits, nuts and vegetables, and keeping our hearts and lungs and muscles fit by constant movement. We are reasserting as modern man seldom does, our kinship with ancient man, and even with the wild beasts that preceded him.

Several years ago in Matopos (now Matobo) National Park, Zimbabwe, I had a rare opportunity to experience this feeling of kinship with ancient runners that Fixx alludes to. I was on a research trip to study how body temperature affects the running and fighting ability of scarab dung beetles. On the rolling hills, their rock outcrops covered by short grass, I saw and smelled white and yellow flowering acacia trees that were abuzz with bees, wasps, and colorful cetoniid beetles. Giraffes were peaceably grazing on the flat-topped acacias. Baboons and impalas, each in their respective groups or bands, roamed in the miombe bush. Tens of thousands of wildebeest and zebra can, at the right time of year, still be seen in such a landscape, thundering by during their massive migration. Elephants and rhinoceros lumber like prehistoric giants over the land, ever on the move. Serendipitously, I looked under a rather inauspicious and small rock overhang and was taken aback by what I saw.

The cave painting

Painted onto the wall under the overhang was a succession of small, sticklike human figures in clear running stride. All were clutching delicate bows, quivers, and arrows. These hunters were running in one direction, from left to right across the rock face. In itself, this two-or three-thousand-year-old pictograph was not particularly extraordinary. But then I noticed something more, and it sent my mind reeling. It was the figure farthest to the right, the one leading the progression. It had its hands thrown up in the air in the universal runners’ gesture of triumph at the end of a race. This involuntary gesture is reflexive for most runners who have fought hard, who have breathed the heat and smelled the fire, and then felt the exhilaration of triumph over adversity. The image of the Bushmen remains for me an iconic reminder that the roots of our running, our competitiveness, and our striving for excellence go back very far and very deep.

Looking at that African rock painting made me feel that I was witness to a kindred spirit, a man who had long ago vanished yet whom I understood as if we’d talked just a moment earlier. I was not only in the same environment and of the same mind as this unknown Bushman running hunter, I was also in the place that most likely produced our common ancestors. The artist had been here hundreds of generations before me, but that was only the blink of an eye compared to the eons that have elapsed since a bipedal intermediate between our apelike and our recognizably human ancestors left the safety of the forest for the savanna some 4 million years ago, to start running. There is nothing quite so gentle, deep, and irrational as our running—and nothing quite so savage, and so wild.

THREE

Start of the Race

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start.

—SHAKESPEARE, Henry V

For me, the Bushman painting embodies the connection between running, hunting, and humanity’s striving toward excellence for its own sake. All other animals are much more strictly utilitarian. They lack that artistic drive which is detached from ulterior motives and rewards. Looking at the Bushman painting, I thought of the late Steve Prefontaine, from Coos Bay, Oregon, former University of Oregon runner who was one of the greatest and gutsiest all-time middle-distance racers ever. Pre put it this way: A race is like a work of art that people can look at and be affected by in as many ways as they’re capable of understanding. Yes, the key to appreciation is in the understanding.

As I was growing up, my gods were runners like Herb Elliott, Jim Ryun, and the now-anonymous men on competing teams who could outrun me. These weren’t just people. Some of them seemed to defy natural laws. My appreciation came from the understanding that what they did was extraordinary, and not readily understood. All I knew was: it was not magic. I wanted to know what they ate and breathed and how they lived, what made them so different from other humans and so much like some of the animals I admired.

Seeing a great performance, whether by a human or another animal, still inspires me to no end. I’m moved by others’ dreams and by their devotion and courage in the pursuit of excellence. I get choked up when I see a kid, or anyone else, fighting hopeless odds—someone who goes out there to run the lonely roads with a dream in the heart, a gleam in the eye, and a goal in mind. I admire those who have the courage to step up to the line of a great race to run their heart out for a dream. I empathize with a heart touched by fire during this Dream Time of youth, when as runners we were still undefeated in spirit, felt invincible, and thought the world was pure.

Many of the people close to me in rural Maine did not appear to strive for great things. I saw them carrying their black lunch pails, with a thermos and a sandwich, each morning on their way to the dreary bowels of the clanging woolen mill. In the evening they came back, milked the cow, and went to bed. After some years of the same endlessly repeated routine, they died, usually in the same hospital where they were born.

I wanted to do something different. However, that is a difficult thing if you see no opportunity. On the other hand, it is hard not to try when you think you can do something when you have a chance at success, even though it is often hazardous to strike out on one’s own. That seldom goes unpunished. Any mark of difference may become a target. Even my own father, to whom I owe so much, had taught me this harsh lesson.

His eyesight was failing and he could not carry on much longer with his work as an entomologist. He wanted me to continue in his footsteps in ichneumonid taxonomy to perpetuate his dream. But I had my own dreams, in a different world. He was a fine field naturalist, but his interpretive skills were not based on modern science in which I was being trained. I recall the day when, near the end of my undergraduate studies, I was home on a short vacation, sitting near him at his desk in the old farmhouse where he spent hours each day peering through his microscope, preparing specimens. That preparation involved meticulously pinning the wings and legs of every