Endurance activities, like distance running, have existed since ancient times. But humans’ relationship to those pursuits has changed, according to time and place. In the West, we’ve currently turned endurance sports into a science — tracking every metric and chasing personal records through sophisticated technology and personalized training plans. But as my guest, who’s spent years studying the running cultures in different societies, knows well, this modern, individualized, data-driven approach isn’t the only way to pursue the art of endurance.
Michael Crawley is a competitive runner, social anthropologist, and the author of To the Limit. On the show today, we first examine how Western athletes have “workified” running through technology and social media. We then look at how other cultures approach running differently, including why East African runners emphasize group training over individual goals and how the Rarámuri people of Mexico incorporate spiritual dimensions into their running. We end our conversation with how we might rediscover more meaningful, holistic ways to approach our own physical pastimes.
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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Endurance activities like distance running have existed since ancient times, but humans relationship to those pursuits has changed. According to time and place in the West, we’ve currently turned endurance sports into a science tracking every metric and chasing personal records through sophisticated technology and personalized training plans. But as my guest who spent years studying the running cultures in different societies knows well this modern, individualized data-driven approach isn’t the only way to pursue the art of endurance. Michael Crawley is a competitive runner, social anthropologist and the author of To, the Limit. On the show. Today we first examine how Western athletes have workified running through technology and social media. We then look at how other cultures approach running differently, including why East African Runners emphasize group training over individual goals and how the Raramuri people of Mexico incorporate spiritual dimensions into the running. We end our conversation with how we might rediscover more meaningful holistic ways to approach our own physical pastimes. After shows over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/endurance.
All right, Michael Crawley, welcome to the show.
Michael Crawley: Thank you for having me.
Brett McKay: So you are a social anthropologist and you recently put out a book exploring why humans willingly and some might say, I would say this ’cause I’m not an endurance guy, needlessly take part in endurance events like marathons and triathlons, things like that. What led you down that line of research?
Michael Crawley: Well, I guess I’ve been running for over 20 years now. I’m 36, so I’ve been running for most of my life that culminated in running at a relatively high level. I run for Scotland and Great Britain run a 2:20 marathon. But I suppose I’ve always been interested in running culture or endurance culture. So growing up as a teenager, I had a coach who was very good in the 1980s in the northeast of England. And back then there was a club called [0:02:11.2] ____ that produced loads of really good runners, Olympic medalists, commonwealth games, medalists, but all from, from quite a small area of the northeast of England. And so he would tell me about in the ’80s it was very normal to run 100 miles a week if you went to a running club. That’s just what was expected. So I was curious about the fact that that’s changed and it seems like there’s some sort of cultural influence that makes people want to train that hard. So that was an area of the UK where there’s a lot of working class people. It was part of working class culture to do a lot of running. So I was interested in cultures of endurance a long time before I even knew what anthropology was, I suppose.
Brett McKay: And then you also, so you started anthropology and then you’ve taken this interest in the cultures of endurance and like you didn’t you like spend time with Ethiopians to figure out why they run the way they do?
Michael Crawley: Yeah, so the, the biggest project I’ve done so far really was in Ethiopia. So I was there for nearly a year and a half. And that was motivated by this curiosity about what it was about Ethiopia, that made them produce so many top runners. I think we tend to lump Ethiopians, Kenyans and Ugandans together as the East Africans, but we don’t know very much about people from Ethiopia, lots of people had gone to Kenya to do research ’cause it was a former British colony and people could speak English and things. But I really wanted to understand what it was specifically about Ethiopia that made runners tick basically. So the idea for this new project actually came from Ethiopia ’cause what I found there was that people saw running success as something that was collectively produced through practices of living in training together rather than as something that was quite individualistic.
I think we sometimes think of running, I guess in the west. And I learned that people in Ethiopia saw energy in quite different ways. So if you think about a sport scientist, they tend to think of energy as, as something that’s bounded within an individual body, a system of inputs and outputs that you can measure in the lab. But in Ethiopia, people thought about it as a shared substance that meant that it had to be very carefully sort of shared out between people. It meant that running had to be something that was communal, that was done together and that you could see what other people were doing basically. So when people would run together, they would literally time their footsteps with each other and run in sync with each other, which is something that I found quite difficult to replicate.
Brett McKay: Yeah, okay. That, that’s one of the big takeaways from your book and your explores how in the West we typically take an individualistic approach to running or other endurance events. And then in other cultures like Ethiopia, Kenya, it’s more communal. And I hope we can flesh that out. But let’s talk about just like running in the West and you make a point in the book. I thought it was interesting as an anthropologist, sometimes you notice people in the popular culture put too fine of a distinction between westerners and the non-westerners. It’s, it’s more squidgy than we think. But when you ask Westerners, and by that I mean Americans, people living in the United Kingdom, Canada, things like that. When you ask them why they take part in endurance events like running or cycling, what are the typical answers you get on why they do it?
Michael Crawley: Well, a lot of people would tend to say something like, it allows them to strip things back to the sort of the bare minimum to return to something more simple and profound basically. So the ultra runner, Damian Hall who, he, won a race called the Spine Race in the UK, which is a nonstop race along the Pennine Way, which is 268 miles. He talked about that in a joking way. Is that an extreme way of battling phone addiction? So it is like a way of getting away from his emails and stripping things back to this, this simpler way of being. And I think to a certain extent when we put our running shoes on or jump on our bike, we are embracing this freedom, allowing our minds to wander and all those kinds of things.
But then on the other hand, as you say, there’s a tendency to think of these activities in precisely the kinds of terms that we are actually trying to escape. So we celebrate individual resilience, the drive for productivity. We try to quantify as many variables as we can. We rank each other, rank ourselves against other people and things. So endurance sport seems to embody these elements of play, but also lots of qualities of work as well. So someone like Eliud Kipchoge, the first man to run under two hours for the marathon, one of the things he likes to say a lot is only the truly disciplined in life are free, which embody it brings these two things together. You know, this idea that it’s this is a really contradictory statement that you have to be disciplined in order to be free, but it seems to be that endurance sport brings together work and play in these really interesting ways.
Brett McKay: Why do you think Americans and British people, people in the West do that? Like why have they taken something that I think maybe 100 years ago was something just you did for fun just it was just something you did maybe for exercise and we started to make it more work-like where you’re quantifying how many steps you’re taking, you’re looking at your VO2 max, you have this very set out program you need to follow in order to get ready for a race. Like why the drive towards workifying recreational endurance sports?
Michael Crawley: I think endurance sport just ends up reflecting the broader culture really. I think it’s just that we spend so much, much time sort of emphasizing things like productivity and ranking each other based on achievements and things that we can’t help but apply that to anything that we do, including endurance sport. I guess it seems like if you look back in sort of bit further back in history, endurance sports have tended to become really popular at times of societal change or when there’s been broader anxieties about things. So at the turn of the 19th century, the most popular sport in the world was walking and it was people walking for six days around places like Madison Square Gardens without sleeping. And they would draw these enormous, like tens of thousands of people would come and watch that. And historians have speculated that it’s ’cause people were worried at that point about automation and about the introduction of motor cars. And it was a way for humans to be like we can still do this. There are unique things that we can do as humans that machines can’t do. So it seems like endurance support tends to sort of reflect or push back against certain elements of what’s happening in the broader culture. So I think we can trace those today as well.
Brett McKay: Yeah. ’cause we’re having a lot of change with artificial intelligence, digital technology, things like that.
Michael Crawley: Yeah, yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And speaking into Pedestrianism, like when walking was this huge sport, we actually did a podcast on this a long time ago, episode number 167. It was with Matthew Algeo. He wrote a book?
Michael Crawley: Oh yeah, I read his book. Yeah. Yeah. Great book.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s a great book. It’s really interesting because you wouldn’t think endurance walking would be a compelling spectator sport, but it was huge. Like, competitors would walk laps for six days straight and then the winner would get the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s money. So it was a really, it was really peculiar.
Michael Crawley: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It’s, and it’s, sort of disappeared from the popular consciousness. But yeah, there was that, and then there were dance marathons in the depression era where that was a huge thing that everyone wanted to watch people dancing and dancing for like weeks on end basically on very little sleep. Which sort of, I guess reflected something of what was happening more broadly in America with ideas of the American dream. If you just keep dancing long enough, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, but you might eventually make it and become famous or whatever. But you know, these things have, there’s been a few pockets of real attention on endurance sports and I think we’re in one now as well, which is interesting.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think social media has only just amplified the popularity of endurance activities and you actually write about how social media has changed our relationship with endurance sports like running or triathlons. Walk us through that. How has social media changed how people approach their sport, say compared to 20, 30 years ago?
Michael Crawley: Sure. Yeah. So my interest in social media started with this project that I did during Covid Lockdowns where I was interested in asking people, professional athletes, how they experienced having to post on social media as part of their contracts basically. And what happened was that we’re talking about this idea that posting on social media was basically a form of work and it was something that they found quite sort of physically and emotionally draining a lot of the time. And that was ’cause it was something that they weren’t necessarily trained to do, but they needed to do it in order to continue to get paid by the brands that they were working with. And what I think is interesting is that that amateur cyclists and runners tend to mimic the kinds of scripts that professional athletes will produce.
So they’ll produce very similar kinds of posts without necessarily knowing that the professional athletes that are posting in that way are doing it without really wanting to. So I explored these ideas about presumption, this idea that we’re both producing and consuming when we use social media that we think that we’re consuming something, but we are the ones who are actually creating the value for these companies. So just basically asking the question of whether we need to think a bit more carefully about how and what kinds of things we post. Social media had ruined endurance sport. I think it tends to amplify particular kinds of messages. So ideas about taking personal responsibility about just pushing harder all the time. And then you can make it those kinds of messages and it tends to push quick fixes, which might not necessarily there aren’t really many quick fixes for endurance sports.
So I spoke to a guy called Andy Berry for the book who holds the record for the most mountains run up and down in the late district in a 24 hour period. And he said he went on a podcast and talked about one training session he did, and then the next day it was all over social media with these posts saying this is the one training session that everyone must do in order to become a better runner. You know, this quick fix idea. So he, when I asked him for training advice and what kinds of training sessions he would recommend, he was really reluctant to tell me. He was like, I can tell you some things, but don’t put them in your book ’cause people will, people will grab onto one little thing. And really the message that people who do endurance support need to learn is that it’s all about patience and cumulative effort over a really long period of time. Which isn’t, it doesn’t fit the sort of temporality of social media very well or the kinds of sort of easy messages that people want to pick up there. Really.
Brett McKay: And then going back to your point that in the west we typically have an individualistic approach to everything, but you see it in endurance sports where it’s just running is like a solo activity. Social media I imagine just amplifies that ’cause when you’re doing social media, you have to make yourself the main character of the event and you have to think about how can I script this video or this picture so it shows me doing this thing. So you start getting very self-reflective about how you present yourself. And again, it makes it more just about you and the self and the individual as opposed to, as we’ll talk about here in a minute in other cultures where it’s more communal.
Michael Crawley: Yeah, absolutely. So I think it does a similar thing in some ways to the wearable technology that has become far more popular where it it’s encouraging people to focus on the individual and on your own data or your own self or whatever it is, rather than looking outwards towards others. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And then, I mean, I imagine too the social media where you have to think about not only professional athletes where they have to think about, okay, I got to put out this stuff so I can get the sponsorship so I can do my races. So in a way it acts as a distraction from the main thing that you’re trying to do, which is run. I imagine you can do the same thing to recreational runners where they took up a sport, they took up running, they took up cycling ’cause they really enjoyed it. They found it, as an intrinsic good, but then if they start adding in social media and maybe they started to do it ’cause they just wanted to share with their friends, like, here’s what I’m doing. And it was sort of like a, maybe it was like a communal thing, like you’re just sharing with your other friends who do running as well and you’re able to share that with people who’ve lived far away from you. But then it might turn into something a little bit more ’cause maybe you’re getting like some reach outs from brands saying, Hey, if you tag us or should talk about our product in your video, we’ll give you some money. And so it it changes the relationship to their sport from one of like intrinsic worth and value to something like, well I got to do this so I can get something else, get money or whatever.
Michael Crawley: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then you see a lot of the videos will be someone’s propped up their phone on a tree or something and then they’re going and running past it and making sure they time themselves running past it, right. So that they can capture the image that they can then go and post on social media. And I just wonder the act of doing that, is that improving the experience of that run? Or is it just interrupting it and Yeah, exactly what you’re saying. It changes the reason for doing it, which I think is really, really important. And in endurance sport as well, people get injured an awful lot ’cause you’re doing a huge amount of running or a huge amount of cycling. So you end up, what happened when I spoke to the professional athletes was that they said sometimes the highest performing posts were the ones where they’re talking about being really vulnerable or about being injured ’cause they’re actually more relatable than the ones about where they talk about being able to run, a 13 minute 5K or something like that, that most people can’t comprehend. So they end up focusing on the moments of, vulnerability and injury and things, which can be quite, yeah, again, quite draining for people to have to be that vulnerable on social media, I guess.
Brett McKay: Yeah. ’cause then you start getting questions from everybody they want to like pry further. Well tell me more.
Michael Crawley: Yeah. Yeah. And then sooner or later you’re spending five or six hours on Instagram, which is what the runners that I spoke to said they were often doing. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. They don’t wanna do that. I imagine a lot of runners are introverts and so having to do that, it’s just like, uh, geez, I don’t want it.
Michael Crawley: Yeah totally.
Brett McKay: Just drains me. So you mentioned the tracking devices, the data wearable the smart watches, apple watches, WHOOPs, things like that and how that’s also changed our relationship to endurance sports and just sports in general in the West. Walk us through that. What’s the history of that? Like, when did Americans, British people, people in the west start using data to improve their running times?
Michael Crawley: Well, the history goes back quite a long way. So if you, if you look back a hundred years in the 1920s there was a finished runner called Paavo Nurmi who was a industrial sort of training college basically. And he came up with the idea of running with a stopwatch in his hand. And at the time that was unheard of. Basically he would run with a stopwatch in his hand in races. And, people were really critical of that. Cartoons at the time depicted him as like a stopwatch with his limbs made out of industrial chimneys. And as this stiff limbed robot who was crushing his opponents into the ground is the way that it was put in an article at the time. So it shows that these worries about people merging with machines or about the dehumanizing effects of technologies goes back a century basically.
But I think what I’ve traced in the book is the fact that I think we can say that there’s been a relative explosion of the use of these kinds of tracking devices just in the last sort of 10 years. So what I did was I basically used a whole load of different things. So I used, WHOOP band, I used a Garmin watch, I used Supersapiens live glucose monitoring. I did some home blood tests where you post off a little vial of blood to accompany to get it tested and things. ’cause I was interested in sort of experiencing them myself. These things are marketed by the companies as explicitly performance enhancing, which I think is interesting. So they’re marketed is giving us this privileged insight into our bodies and ourselves, which made me wonder whether we’re, ’cause the other thing is they’re not actually particularly accurate.
So if you wear multiple devices that measure heart rate variability, for example, you’ll normally find that there’s quite a big discrepancy between them. So if we’re giving a lot of our agency away to these devices, it might not actually be particularly beneficial. And rather than giving ourselves new insights, I wonder whether we’re actually blunting our ability to learn how to feel things sort of for ourselves or through intuition or something like that. So one of the things I did for that chapter was I took all these different kinds of devices to a guy called Charlie Spedding, who was the last British Olympic medalist in the marathon, who happens to live two streets away from me. And I said, if all this stuff had been available in the ’80s, would you have used it? And he said he would’ve used one or two things, but very selectively.
So he’d have used heart rate monitors for maybe one run so that he could get a baseline for it, but then he would put it away for a while and then use it again ’cause he wouldn’t want to become dependent on it. And he told me a story about going down to do a training session one night, driving through to Gateshead, warming up, just not feeling right, and basically putting his track suit back on, driving home again, driving through the next night to do the session again and being really proud of the decision to not do it. And what he said to me was I really wouldn’t have wanted to watch making that decision for me ’cause he needed to know that he was able to make that decision. And he drew a line between that and when he got his Olympic medal and being able to make the right kinds of decisions about what to do in the heat of the moment in a race.
He was like, if you give that agency a way to a watch or some sort of device, you are not gonna be building that trust in yourself to know your body for a start, but also to trust your own decision making processes, I guess.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So with these devices promise, like the WHOOP or the Oura Ring you wear these things and it can tell you based on data they collect, like, your heart rate variability. So HRV, if that is high, actually high HRV is good. It means you’re like, not stressed, looks at your sleep, it looks at your activity. It, gives you what’s called like a readiness score. So you can, you wake up and you’re like, oh, it’ll tell you you are, you could hit a PR today on your runtime. You can go hard. But I… And I’ve used these devices too, and I found that it was, yeah, it was really weird. So one thing I noticed too, there’s differences between like how these things measure sleep, even your heart rate. And then sometimes you’d wake up and it would say like, your readiness score is lousy, but then you check in with yourself and you’re like, actually I feel pretty good. I feel like I could go hard today. And so I would just ignore it and I had a great workout. And I imagine there’s people who just, they live their lives, particularly like recreational runners who live their lives by their, what these devices tell them. And they’re probably, they’re probably leaving stuff on the table as a consequence.
Michael Crawley: Yeah, I think so. Definitely. I definitely had experiences where, what the watch was saying and how I felt were really out of line with each other. Sometimes a very, very high HRV score as well can indicate that you’re extremely stressed. So there, there’s this thing of the, it’s really high that’s really good, is not necessarily always the case, but most people just assume that really high means really good. One of the interesting things, so I asked people about this when I was doing the interviews about social media as well, and I talked to some athletes who were sponsored by HRV monitors and they would, they said if we go to the world championships or the Olympics or something, you take it off for the four or five days before the race ’cause you don’t want it telling you that your readiness score is low. But also if you’re running an Olympic final 1500 meters in the evening, your readiness score isn’t gonna be through the roof ’cause you’re gonna be stressed ’cause you’re about to run the Olympic 1500 meter final. So, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not ready. So there’s yeah. These professional athletes, they understand it with a level of nuance that I think is it’s important to bring that level of nuance to interacting with these things. Really.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And but the recreational runner might not, they might think, well this professional said this is what they use, so I’m gonna use it all the time. But without that nuance that the professional takes to the device.
Michael Crawley: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brett McKay: I’ve done weightlifting and HRV actually doesn’t have play much of a role in anaerobic activities like weightlifting. So if you had a crappy HRV or high HRV, it doesn’t really affect strength-based sports based on the research I’ve read. But there are devices in weightlifting that monitor things like that can tell you how fast the bar is moving. So that you can use that information to be like, well, the bar’s moving fast, then I can, you can do these calculations to figure out what your PR is for that day, the highest amount of weight you could lift that day. And I thought it was interesting. It was useful to play around with actually you got some interesting information, but again, it doesn’t really tell you much that you already don’t know. You know, the device tell you the bar’s moving fast. Like, well, I know it’s moving fast. I felt it go up fast like. And so I don’t know how much like how useful it it was compared to just listening to your body.
Michael Crawley: Yeah. It reminds me of the, one of the biggest agents for Kenyan athletes is this guy called Jos Hermens. He was a very good dutch runner in back in the ’70s. And he was the world record holder for 10 miles running and they did a special new muscle biopsy on his leg to see what muscle fibers he had and things. And they came back two weeks later and said, oh, it turns out from the muscle biopsy that you, you’re probably really good at running pretty fast for a long time. And he was like, well yeah, I know that ’cause I regularly run fast for a long time. So it’s like, whether it’s actually teaching you anything new is a big question, I think.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Again, and what these devices do, it makes running your sport more work-like, so you have data how you can improve yourself and then also just reinforces the individuality of the sport. ’cause all of this data that you’re getting is gonna be unique to you. So I mean, if you wanted to try to run with the group, it’d be hard to coordinate that if everyone’s using these devices. ’cause one guy would be like, well my HRV is great today, so I’m gonna go hard. And then your buddy’s like, well, mine’s crappy so I’m gonna go slow. So you wouldn’t be able to sync up with a group.
Michael Crawley: Yeah. And I’ve had this with people who just run based on their heart rate as well people who go out and say, I’m gonna go for a run today, but I’m not gonna let my heart rate go over 160 and you’ll be running along with them feeling good and you wanna push a little bit up a hill ’cause it feels good to do that. And they’re looking at their watch saying, oh no I’ve got to slow down. So you can’t, it, it means, it makes it hard to run with other people basically, if you can’t all run according to the same sort of heart rate zone. So I think there’s important things to think about there. There’s a good anecdote from one of the top coaches of Kenyan athletes who also coaches some European runners.
And he said if he gave two a group of Kenyan runners and a group of European runners the same training session where he said you’ve got to run three minutes per kilometer for an hour or something like that. The European runners, if they didn’t think they could do it, they would all decide what pace they could run for an hour and do it on their own. Whereas the Kenyan runners would go as a group and they’d run at three minutes per kilometer until they couldn’t do it anymore. So it’s two different ways of approaching, two different ways of valuing things, I guess. Yeah. One of which is, is far more communal than the other.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. Okay. So yeah, we’ve basically, in the west, we’ve really, we’ve workified running with data, with technology, with our approach to training. We’ve made it very individual. But every now and then there’s the Westerners get fed up and think, oh, I just, I wanna bring back the joy into running into my cycling. I mean, what they’ll often do is they’ll look to non-Western or indigenous cultures to figure out how to get back to a more natural or simple way of running. And Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run is often the gateway into this approach of “natural running.” For those who aren’t familiar with this book, what’s the basic thesis of Born to Run?
Michael Crawley: So Born to Run, it’s a book about the Raramuri in Mexico, also known as the Tarahumara, which is the name that the Spanish gave them. And McDougall basically interweaves this narrative of a 50 mile trail race featuring some Raramuri runners and some top American ultra runners with this narrative about the fact that humans are born to run. This idea that endurance running is an important part of our, evolutionary history ’cause we basically used it as a technique for hunting called, persistent hunting, basically, where we would’ve chased animals to exhaustion over many hours of determined running. So like I found the book extremely compelling when I first read it. I read it in a couple of days, like a lot of other people have. And his argument is basically that the Raramuri, what he calls a near mythical tribe of stone age super athletes, and that we can therefore see in them some representation of our ancestral past.
So this is a view that’s shared by a lot of people. So he writes that if Scott Jurek could win the race that he describes in Eureka, he wouldn’t just be beating Arnulfo and Silvino who is main sort of Raramuri rivals, but he’d be demonstrating that he was the best of all time. So I think there’s a problem ’cause it, these representations reinforce ideas about the differences between so-called savages and supposedly civilized people or between like westerners and non Westerners. And the Raramuri therefore come to represent humanity as a whole in this pristine and supposedly like physically superior state. Right.
Brett McKay: It it’s the myth, it’s the myth of the noble savage that Rousseau popularized. Yeah.
Michael Crawley: Yeah, yeah. Basically. Yeah.
Brett McKay: But Something you point out too is that one of the critiques you make of McDougall’s thesis, right? So these, these runners, they represent sort of like man at its best if it’s like the Edenic state of man, if we run like them and approach running the way they do all of us, everyone could be just these high performing athletes. But one of the critiques you make is that McDougall, while he lionizes these indigenous runners, he takes a very western view of the tribe, which misses the broader context, which you try to dig into. Can you flesh that out a little bit for us?
Michael Crawley: Yeah, well I guess I’d just argue that he focuses mainly on some things that the Raramuri themselves wouldn’t have thought were that important. So he spends a lot of time focusing on the fact that they wear very rudimentary sandals to run in rather than running shoes. And so there was the whole argument that that was a far more natural way of running and it spawn this whole interest in barefoot running shoes and a whole market for like vibrant shoes and things that mimicked being barefoot. So what I’ve tried to do is, rather than focusing on things like that, I tried to focus on the cultural sort of reasons why people run. So basically what people would say is that there was this really important spiritual dimension to running in Raramuri culture.
So God who’s referred to as Onoruame, basically likes it when people bet a lot of money on the running races. And he likes it when the music that accompanies the runners is performed really well and that the running goes on for a really long time. So the music’s important ’cause it’s that the emotion of running is supposed to be very important. And basically it, if people are able to run or dance for really long periods of time, God is thought of as having a tendency to reward that through making it rain and through, through causing people to have a prosperous future basically. So running has this very spiritual importance where it also has this symbolic idea that through running or dancing, you’re stamping down any bad vibes, keeping them down below, and you are literally keeping the world turning by running. So I think those kinds of sort of cultural reasons for running are for me anyway, those kinds of explanations are more interesting than the evolutionary ones. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Or even like the technique, like what gear you use to run. Yeah, I mean I think that’s, that was an interesting point that the book focuses really on like, oh, what stuff are they using to run or how is their form when they run? And I mean, I remember when that book came out and the whole barefoot running thing was a craze. I guess it was probably 15 years ago. I’ll admit I bought a pair of those vibrant five finger shoes and you just look goofy.
Michael Crawley: Well, the guy Silvino who was third in the race that Chris McDougall describes, I spent a lot of time with him when I went out to to Mexico and he took me running and he was just, he was wearing trail shoes. ’cause he said it’s more comfortable to run in these than it is to run in sandals that are made out of car tires.
Brett McKay: Right. Yeah. When you actually talk to him, it’s like, why do you run in the car tire sandals? It’s like, well it’s all we can afford. If I could, if I had the money I would buy, yeah, I’d have a good pair of shoes.
Michael Crawley: Yeah. So I, it’s tongue in cheek in the book, but I was saying that going to the Raramuri and focusing on the shoes is a bit like writing a book about French cooking and focusing on the spoons that they’re using to stir things with rather than the recipes and the ideas behind it and stuff. So I think yeah, there’s just, there’s more interesting things going on, I think.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And so going to their culture of running, like why they run, so it’s a spiritual practice for them. Like there’s actually existential stakes going on when they run. And I mean, the other thing you talk about too, it’s these races that they run these long distance races, how long are the races again?
Michael Crawley: So, sometimes they, as long as people can keep going for, basically, so the format is, it’s like a, about a five kilometer loop and you have te two teams normally and they throw a ball, they refer to it as throwing, but it’s like kicking, sort of scooping it with their foot, a wooden ball that goes around the loop. And sometimes the races are over a predetermined number of loops, but more often it’s just basically keep going around the loop until one team gets lapped or all of the members of one of the teams give up. So I heard stories about these races that go on for like 180 kilometers. Wow. Which is yeah, a long time.
Brett McKay: That is a long time. And, they’re highly competitive. So like they’re betting lots of money on these things, but you talk about even though they’re highly competitive, the competition actually makes it cooperative. Can you walk us through that idea?
Michael Crawley: Yeah. So often the teams would be from competing villages or from Yeah, from the surrounding area, people that you know, but you don’t know that well, and then the villagers will normally bet lots of of money and other things like horses on the person who’s from their own village. So it’s a way of, and people will talk about the races for like weeks in the run up to them. So it becomes a real focal point for the communities. And people will talk about the races for like weeks in the run up to them. So it becomes a real focal point for the communities and it brings people together. And then beyond just the, so that you have the teams of runners that are normally sort of six people, but it’s not just them that are running a lot of the time you get the other villagers running alongside them for portions of the race. Large parts of the race obviously are overnight and it’s dark. And so people run with torches that are set on fire. You have musicians that run parts of the loops with everybody playing musical instruments to keep the morale up and things. So basically it’s just this focal point that brings the whole of the community together and where these big outpourings of energy are seen as something that is beneficial to the whole community basically.
Brett McKay: All right. So it’s a group activity, it’s not you’re just running by yourself. Do the people who take part in these long races, do they train for them like an American who train for a marathon?
Michael Crawley: No, absolutely not. So Silvino would, he took me for a run, but we ran really far down into this valley and we went to have a cup of tea with his brother and then we ran all the way back again. So even just taking an anthropologist to see what running is like here wasn’t really seen as a good enough reason for him. He needed to do something as well as the running. And if he had a load of spare energy and time, he would rather use it to do something like, chop some wood or, go and make some money than he would training. But I mean, I suppose it depends on how you think about training, but the everyday life for a lot of Raramuri people involves quite a lot of slow jogging or walking to get around places, but just training for the sake of training basically doesn’t happen.
Brett McKay: Yeah. If, you gave them like a six month program, they’d be like, this is weird. What are you talking about?
Michael Crawley: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brett McKay: I’m curious, has tourism or interest in the Raramuri, and how they run? Has it affected their running culture in traditions? ’cause I’ve seen you, you see this happen in other cultures where westerners go there and they say, oh wow, look at this cool exotic culture. And they start visiting it and then the cultures they pick up on it like, oh, these Americans like it when we do this and so we’ll just play up this one thing. So, ’cause it becomes like a moneymaking thing. Has that happened at all? Do they like play up for like the Westerners who read Born to Run and like, okay, yeah, we will give them some Huaraches and we will take them on a race.
Michael Crawley: Yeah, so there, there are lots of races that are organized that what the Raramuri refer to as marathoners as opposed to Rarajipari, which is the game with the ball. So marathoners just, it doesn’t mean marathons, it just means any race that is just a normal trail race. And the number of those has really exploded since Born to Run was written ’cause there’s a lot of interest in running, but people don’t tend to organize Rarajipari ’cause that’s a separate cultural practice I suppose. So what’s happened is that the Raramuri runners ended up running more of these conventional races to the detriment of the Rarajipari. But people did say, I talked to a lot of old people who used to do a lot of running when they were younger and they said the culture of the Rarajipari is going down anyway ’cause people, ’cause of things like the introduction of the cell phone and other kinds of forms of entertainment running for two days at a time and spending two weeks preparing for it and things, it just isn’t a priority for as many people anymore. People go away to work and things. So there was already a decline in the traditional running practices, which is a shame, but it’s just, I think it was what happens. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Okay. So this is one example of a culture that, Westerners might look to like, oh, this is inspiration, but we missed the mark and missed the mark on sort of the existential reasons why these people run in the communal aspect. Another group of people that Westerners look to for inspiration, we’ve been talking about them throughout this conversation, are Eastern Africans, Kenyans, Ethiopians. When you do this research, when you talk to Westerners, what do Westerners think these endurance athletes in Eastern Africa do differently and like, what are they trying to emulate?
Michael Crawley: Well, that’s a good question. I think a lot of the assumptions about why Kenyans and Ethiopians are so good come down to genetics and altitude. So people just assume that they’re particularly good ’cause of factors that are sort of beyond their control. Either that or they say they’re really good ’cause they’re coming from impoverished backgrounds, so they have to be good, right? So, and I think both of those ways of thinking about it are quite deterministic. They’re just like well they’re very, very poor, which naturally leads them to be very good at running or they just, they have this genetic advantage which naturally makes them good runners. And I think both of those explanations just downplay a lot of the hard work and expertise that runners in Ethiopia and Kenya have. So people are aware of the group training dynamic that exists in Ethiopia and Kenya, but I don’t think people really put it into practice that often.
And it’s, yeah, it tends to be that people assume that people are good ’cause they did things like running to and from school out of necessity and things like that. None of those, there might be some truth to the idea that there’s some genetic explanation for success of East African athletes, but they’ve tried a lot Scientists have tried really hard to find the secret there, and they’ve so far completely failed. So I would, I would say that the explanations are probably more to do with particular kinds of expertise that exist in those places or, cultural values.
Brett McKay: I wanna dig deeper into this idea of their communal aspect to running. And you talked about it a little bit, but what does that look like? Alright, so in the West we have our own individual running programs that we follow. When East Africans decide they’re gonna get into running, how do they approach training?
Michael Crawley: Well, so a lot of people when they first start, they find somebody else who’s already a runner and just try to join in with them in the forest or something. And so they, they’re passing on information directly from one person to another or through practice basically through following somebody else. People were quite skeptical about a scientific approach to running. So they would, I remember one runner saying, a doctor doesn’t understand running ’cause they don’t run if your mind and your legs are not integrated, you can’t understand running. So they would really not trust a abstract sports scientist approach. But I do think that the approach that they have, it can be described as scientific just in a slightly different way.
So they’re continually experimenting with different environments with the balancing of different kinds of environments within Ethiopia, they’re constantly experimenting with training practices in a way that I think is scientific, but in a citizen scientist way. They’re learning through doing things. And one of the things that I think they’ve learned is that basically you, in order to improve, you need to be running with other people. So that’s the main thing that they kept saying to me. You know, if you run on your own, that’s just for health. If you wanna improve, you’ve got to run with other people all the time. And that’s something that they’ve learned through basically doing it, I think.
Brett McKay: How Do you think running with other people improves your running? Like you, you’ve talked about you sharing the energy, but, but tell us more about that.
Michael Crawley: So, in harder training sessions, people would run in a single file line and they would think about it in a far more, like the way we think about velodrome cyclists, this idea that, somebody’s in somebody else’s slipstream and they’re using a hell of a lot less energy to do that. They just really believed that you would be able to do more harder running, run quicker whilst expending less energy if you’re within that group environment basically. So there was a real taboo against training on your own. If I occasionally went for a run in the forest on my own, it was like that was as bad as eating in a restaurant on your own, which is also really frowned upon in Ethiopia. But it was, I guess it, so it’s also a reflection of the broader cultural values, but people really thought you really just can’t improve unless you’re with other people. ’cause they’re gonna, they pull you on, they pull you to a new level basically.
Brett McKay: Yeah, And I mean, I’m sure everyone’s experienced that when you work with a group, like you push yourself more ’cause you want to keep up with the group. And there’s something like, I mean, I think you talk about this Emile Durkheim, the sociologist came with the idea of collective effervescence where when you’re with a group, you somehow are able to push yourself more ’cause you feed off the energy of everyone else.
Michael Crawley: Yeah. And he, so he talks about, I guess like religious experiences and things like that as well, but there’s clearly some energy that is greater than the sum of all its parts when loads of people come together to do a particular thing. And I think that Ethiopian runners, they’ve experienced that often enough in their training that they just do it all the time and yeah, it’s become taboo to train on your own, basically.
Brett McKay: Well, how do the Ethiopians transition from this like group running where you’re pushing each other and pulling each other other and doing things together, like how does that transfer to race day where it becomes an individual thing?
Michael Crawley: That’s a good question. So the group that I trained with was a professional group that were managed by a guy, a Scottish guy called Malcolm Anderson, who, is one of the agents. And so they all trained in a group in Addis together, but he was really careful to not send athletes from the same group to the same race basically. So you would try to make sure that people didn’t have to compete against people that they trained with. And so that meant that competition with people were able to see competition as something slightly different, where they were able to sort of change their mindset a little bit.
Brett McKay: That’s interesting.
Michael Crawley: But the people who would race in training were seen as a real problem that had to be dealt with. There were one specific training speed sessions, which people would do maybe once every couple of weeks, like really, really fast running. Those were seen as opportunities to practice more competitive kinds of running, but it was seen as important to really limit that ’cause otherwise people would, exhaust themselves basically. So yeah, people were quite careful about reigning in competitive instincts until they needed to be unleashed basically.
Brett McKay: Have you seen any westerners go to Ethiopia? They catch this idea that running is a communal group activity. Have you seen them take that idea and bring it back home to the west?
Michael Crawley: It’s quite hard to do that in some ways. So I would, I’ve tried to bring groups of people together in when I was training in Edinburgh and things like that, but I think it also relies on the being a group of people who are roughly the same level or there being enough people who are willing to train hard enough to sustain that. Often it’s the case that there’s only a few people who are running at a similar level to you and even if you try to bring them together, they’ve all got their own coach and they’ve all got slightly different ideas about what they want to do. And it’s a bit like herding cats. I have tried it, but it’s difficult.
Brett McKay: What do you think given current trends in technology, commercialization, social media, where do you see endurance sports heading in the next decade?
Michael Crawley: That’s a really good question. I’m not actually, it’s hard to say. I think in some ways these things yo-yo back and forth, so you get the super shoes, these really big thick spring loaded shoes that people are really into at the moment. And then you have the barefoot running shoes, which are exactly the opposite. So things might continue to yo-yo back and forth, but I think you could also see this datafication thing just going to a real extreme. So they’re already companies developing AI training programs. So you could imagine an AI taking all your HRV data and your GPS data and all that thing and crunching all those numbers and coming up with what would be the optimum, I suppose for your own particular physiology and things.
But for me that would be a dystopian outcome. Everybody training on their own and being told what to do by an AI rather than an actual coach. So my whole competitive running career, I had the same coach and he would always say if I would try to schedule a training session for a time when, which was more convenient for me where he couldn’t make it, he was always very resistant to that. He would be like, no, I need to be able to look into the whites of your eyes and see how tired you are and we need to be able to chat about how your day’s been and that peripheral stuff ’cause that’s also important. And I think if we do go fully into this training by the numbers, I think that would be a shame for me. But yeah.
Brett McKay:And I mean it also goes to this question, and you talk about this in the book in relation to the super shoes that are allowing runners to I didn’t like, it was like we broke the two hour marathon record ’cause of these shoes That.
Michael Crawley: Yeah. And the female world record for the marathon is now under 2:10, which is incredibly fast. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And something you talk about is people don’t talk about the athlete that broke who actually did the running? Like I don’t even know the name of the person. Yeah. But like I know about the shoe, the technology behind the shoe and something you talk about is this technology might be subsuming or taking over the humanity of the sport.
Michael Crawley: Yeah. And I think it’s a bigger problem than previous technological developments in footwear ’cause it’s such a big leap. I talked to some mechanics about this and they say the interesting thing about the shoes with the spring in is that they improve everybody but by different degrees. So some studies have like some people improving 1% and some people improving 8% in a particular shoe. So it seems to be that it comes down to the combination of the particular biomechanics of the person and the footwear, which means that I think more than other technological improvements, you could see the outcome of races being determined by the particular shoes that athletes had on. And the slower athletes might end up winning the race ’cause they’ve got a particular shoe on and it just happens to fit with the way that they run better. And I think that’s a problem ’cause yeah, it’s potentially changing results, but then when you get the coverage, so both of the men’s and women’s world records were broken just while I was writing, the book and all the coverage was about the shoes and the only questions that they asked the athletes were about the shoes as well.
So you, you end up learning nothing about SFA who was the Ethiopian woman who broke the world record or Kelvin Kiptum, Kenyan athlete. If it becomes about the shoes, then we’re even less likely to learn the stories of athletes from countries like Ethiopia and Kenya, which for me seems yeah, be better to spend more time learning about them and what makes them tick and what they think about things than just reading about shoes all the time.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think this goes back to Rousseau I think wrote an essay about this, talking about how technology advancements in technology tend to downplay virtue, like things like courage and generosity ’cause like you can just rely on the technology to do that thing for you. You know, if you have a better military technology a missile to get your enemy, like does it, do you still need courage anymore? That was his thing. And I think you can see the same sort of thing with this running. It’s like, well if you have this shoe or this data that gives you all this information, like is there any role for human grit or human resilience or whatever you want, like those just very human virtues when you have the technology that can do it for you.
Michael Crawley: Yeah. And those are all things that also aren’t measured by the kinds of wearable technology that we use now to make decisions about how to train, right? So you can have all the data on HRV and how many watts you are producing and your heart rate and all that thing, but it’s not telling you about your emotional state or how competitive you’re feeling on that particular day. There are whole loads, there’s so many of the things that are important for doing well in endurance sport, still can’t be captured by anything like that. So we’re missing a lot of information I think if we, give too much up to those things.
Brett McKay: Right. So I mean, based on your research and your own personal experience, do you have any advice for people who are listening to this and their endurance athletes and maybe they feel sort of burnt out about how they’ve approached their endurance sport ’cause they’ve gotten really into the quantification and they just get really obsessed with technique and programming anything they can do to inject a bit more joy and meaning or even spirituality into the running?
Michael Crawley: Yeah, I mean I think one of the things I think that’s interesting about the evolutionary theories we’ve talked about is that what people tend to pick up on when they think about hunter gatherer lifestyles and things is they pick up on the things that can be marketed. So things like cheer seeds and barefoot running shoes, or they get a hold of the paleo diet and that’s the thing that is gonna transform things for them. And we tend to emphasize the things that are particularly compatible with our own culture or compatible with capitalism or whatever. One of the things I think we can learn from people like the Rara Murray from Hunter gatherers is that endurance activities have basically been embedded in our everyday lives as part of just our normal way of doing things for a really long time. So when we finish recording this, I’m going to put my running shoes on with my jeans and jog to the, to school to pick my daughter up and then jog to nursery to get my son and then push a pram up a hill.
And that’s like, that’s most of the training I’ll do today. It’s only like a couple of miles, but it means that I’ll get there in a way better mood than I would’ve done if I’d sat in traffic. And it’s just, it’s, I think building things into your everyday life in a way that may sometimes make life a little bit harder, but also I think can reduce stress and make things more interesting as well. And I’m not sure about spiritual, but I do think that there’s something important about the ritual of some of these endurance events, particularly longer, ultra marathons and things. I think a lot of the sort of interest in data and really looking drilling into times and all that stuff is often with road running and track running and things. And once you get into the longer ultra distance races, that’s where things start to get a little bit, in some ways a little bit more interesting where people start to talk about it as a form of ritual that really there’s a liminal period that people go through where they’re really struggling and where their mindset is sort of transformed in some interesting way and at the end of it they come back with a completely new perspective on the rest of their lives.
Lots of people talk about that, but it’s one, one guy I spoke to referred to it as doing a factory reset on themselves. You know, that after they’d done an event like that it just flicked a switch for their mental health and for their way of looking at the rest of their life that was really, really, useful. So I guess, yeah, trying something a bit more extreme where it’s pushing you into places where you’re a bit less comfortable, that thing does seem to be a way of transforming the way that you look at the rest of your life sometimes.
Brett McKay: Well Michael, it has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Michael Crawley: So, still on x at the moment, @mphcrawley, and I’m Mikecrawl on Instagram. If people are interested in the more academic work, best place to find that would be the Durham University website. Just Google, Durham University, Michael Crawley, I guess.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michael Crawley, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Michael Crawley: Thank You very much. Enjoyed it.
Brett McKay: My guest today is Michael Crawley. He’s the author of the book To the Limit. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/endurance where we can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to get your review off a podcast or Spotify, it helps us out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think we of something out of it. As always, thank for the continued support in 10x times Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
