Podcast #1,021: You Were Born to Run

For decades, some researchers have argued that the notable human capacity for endurance evolved from the hunting practices of our ancestors, which produced physiological adaptations that make us uniquely well suited for running.

But this theory has always had its detractors.

As my guest explains, a new study addresses these long-standing criticisms and adds evidence that, indeed, we were all born to run.

Alex Hutchinson is a journalist who covers the science of endurance and fitness, and today on the show, he explains what those criticisms were and how this new research counters them. We talk about the role running held amongst peoples of the past, how running is not only primal but cultural and even spiritual, and why we continue to run today, even though we’re not hunting for food. And we discuss how, even if we are born to run, that doesn’t mean everyone will always enjoy running all of the time, and how to get into running if you’re someone who doesn’t feel an innate desire for it.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. For decades, some researchers have argued that the notable human capacity for endurance, evolved from the hunting practices of our ancestors, which produced physiological adaptations that make us uniquely well suited for running. But this theory has always had its detractors. As my guest explains, a new study addresses these long standing criticisms, and adds evidence that indeed we were all born to run. Alex Hutchinson is a journalist who covers the signs of endurance at fitness, and today on the show, he explains what those criticisms were and how this new research counters them. We talk about the role running held amongst peoples of the past, how runny is not only primal, but cultural and even spiritual, and why we continue to run today, even though we’re not hunting for food. And we discuss how even if we are born to run, that doesn’t mean everyone will always enjoy running all the time, and how to get into running, if you’re someone who doesn’t feel an innate desire for it. After the show is over check at our show notes at aom.io/borntorun. Alright, Alex Hutchinson, welcome back to the show.

Alex Hutchinson: Thanks a lot Brett. It’s great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are a sports science writer, you write over there at Outside Online, and you’ve recently written about a study that’s come out on why humans run. So we’re talking jogging, but also just running in general, before we get to the study, let’s just talk about human running, what makes human running different from how other animals run, besides the fact that we’re bipedal?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I think the most obvious thing is that we do it when nobody’s chasing us, and also when we’re not chasing anybody else. So I think that’s the sort of starting point is that we run for the fun of it. And as I say that I’m already thinking, okay, no that’s not quite true, because other animals do play, but we run for long distances just for the heck of it, and so that’s the fundamental riddle that we wanna understand. Why do humans do this? And if we look at, well, what is it about the way humans run? We see all sorts of differences in terms of the way we’re able to cool ourselves, the way we breathe, the way our bodies are structured that suggest that running is something that we are actually surprisingly good at.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we were kind of born for it, so tell us about this, like what is it about our cooling system and our breathing that allows us to be such great runners?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so the two key things are that we cool ourselves by sweating, and if you think about a dog, dogs are much more typical of the Mammal world that they cool themselves by panting, and so there’s only so much you can pant, especially when you start running where you’re also needing to use your breath to get oxygen in. So dogs have to stop and pant and so do a lot of other animals, and we’re also… We’re the hairless ape. So if you’re gonna cool yourself by sweating, it helps not to be wearing a fur coat at all times, so we’re able to lose heat much more efficiently as we run. And then also running on two feet, one of the things that enables us to do is breathe as hard as we want independent of how fast we’re running, we don’t have to time our breaths to our foot strokes, and that’s one of the things where if you’re trying to outrun a deer, they can either trot or they can sprint, but as soon as they sprint, the breathing gets much more constrained by their leg motion. So there’s all these things that conspire to make it harder for other animals to both stay cool and get enough oxygen in.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the sweating aspect, I know horses sweat, but they don’t sweat as much as us humans do.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And they’ve got to… Yeah, sorry, I should clarify, it’s not that no other animal sweat, but we can dump a lot of heat because we are the naked ape, it would be very different if you were trying to cool yourselves and you were covered completely by a layer of fur.

Brett McKay: And then also humans, our muscles, we’ve got lots of efficient and fatigue-resistant slow-twitch muscles in our legs.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and obviously everyone’s different, but by and large as a species, crucially in the big muscles of the legs that are involved in running, we are unusual in the extent… To the extent that we have… Even the sprinters among us have a lot of slow-twitch fibers that allow them to sustain the running for a longer period of time.

Brett McKay: And I think another thing you mentioned too about our anatomy that makes us great runners is our long achilles tendon. What does that have to do with it?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and just to back up a second, so there’s a famous paper that came out in 2004 that sort of goes through all the different parts of our anatomy that are fine tuned, that when you look at it carefully, you’re like, oh, if I was designing a runner, this is what I would do, and some of them are very obscure things, it’s like we have a ligament that helps keep our head steady so we can be bouncing around, running and still be able to see the horizon, keep it level. So there’s a lot of very subtle morphological things about our bodies, and one of them is the achilles tendon, this is basically what connects your heal to your lower leg muscles, it’s a spring, with every step that you take, you are loading that spring, and then as you take the next step, it springs back and the estimates vary, but by some estimates, about half the energy you need to take a step is stored and returned from the previous step. So we’re kind of bouncing along with this energy return system, and other animals have achilles tendons, but ours is particularly long and springy and well-suited to be able to conserve energy as we run.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we can cool ourselves off easily, we’ve got tendons and ligaments that allow for better running, we can breathe more efficiently when we run. Have scientists like pitted human beings against animals and running, and when that… If they have, what are the results of that?

Alex Hutchinson: That’s a good question. I don’t think they’ve actually had official races, although there are a number of man versus horse races around the world. In fact, there’s one in… I think it’s in Wales, that’s been going on for at least 30 years. And the deal is, it’s like the prize money each year is £1000, and it’s a 25-mile race across a really rough terrain, and if a horse wins, nobody gets the money, but if… And it just accumulates from year to year until a human wins, and a guy I used to train with 30 years ago eventually won the race after 25 years of no humans winning. So we got £25,000 for beating the horses in this 25-mile race, and it looked like the conditions make a difference, it’s like on a hot day, the humans do better, and there’s other, the Western say its 100 mile race, one of the most famous long distance races in the Western United States started out as a horse race and then someone wanted to run it and they realized, oh, this should be fun, we should have humans do this.

Brett McKay: Okay, so it seems like we’re evolved for running. Was there a period when scientists started actually trying to figure out why humans run, because on the surface, it seems kind of like, why do we run? It seems like it expends a lot of energy. So why would we do this? So when did scientists first start exploring human running?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I think the sort of pop psychology or pop science version of this idea has been out there for a long time, but the major the first paper that people used to talk about was in 1984, a guy named David Carrier, who was a PhD student at the University of Utah, came out with his paper, arguing that, Hey, we are “born to run”, we have this evolutionary incentive to be able to run down other animals for hunting purposes, and that’s why that’s shaped the way both our bodies and our culture. That was 1984, but it didn’t get a ton of attention, it kind of lingered… The paper, people didn’t read it. People didn’t pay attention to it. Then there was this 2004 paper in Nature by another guy, Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah, and Dan Lieberman of Harvard, and that one got a lot of attention. It was on the cover of Nature, and maybe the running culture was more mature at that point. The readers of Runners World for which I wrote for many years, were eager to hear this message that we were born to run, so that really took off.

And then 2009, Chris McDougall wrote his book Born to Run, which made that story essential part of the book. And from then on, it’s been sort of bubbling at the surface of pop culture, almost, it kind of left the scientists behind, and the scientists maybe still had some doubts about this, but in popular culture, the idea that we’re born to run caught on.

Brett McKay: Well the idea is that we evolve to run, to aid in hunting, correct? Is that what it is?

Exactly.

Alex Hutchinson: So the idea is, if I try and chase an antelope, I have no hope, antelopes can blow me away over the short distance, but if I’m patient and persistent, if I can track the antelope and just keep it at a distance… Tortoise and the hare of slow and steady, wins the race. If I just keep running, the antelope might sprint away from me, but every time he sprints away from me, he’s getting even more tired, and if I just keep on coming, by the end of the day by three hours or six hours or eight hours, that antelope’s gonna be so tired. He’s just gonna lie down and I can walk right up to him and stab him in the neck and bring him back home for food. And so that idea of persistence hunting is not the only rationale, ’cause you could also say, Well, maybe if you can run… You see buzzards in the sky, in the distance, 20 miles away or 10 miles away, you can run and get to the carcass of an animal that’s just died before all the other scavengers strip it clean. So there’s been various versions of the theory, but the fundamental one is you run the deer or the antelope or whatever the animal is in that location to exhaustion.

Brett McKay: Okay, and because we can sweat and cool ourselves off and we have these slow-twitch muscles, we can outlast other animals. That’s the idea.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. One of the reasons this thesis took so long to catch on is that it just seems so ludicrous on the surface that every animal you see when you’re out in the woods is faster than you. And so the idea that we could out-run a deer of all things or an antelope, it’s just crazy, but it’s all about setting the parameters right, it’s not in the 100-meter dash, and it’s not in the 400 meter dash and it’s not in the mile. It’s on a hot, sunny day. Or some other circumstances that allow us to leverage our advantages and to leverage our intelligence, our ability to track. So there’s cognitive elements to this too, you have to be able to figure out where… You put yourself in the animal’s mind and say, alright, I see he went here into the water here, which way did this animal go? So the tracking element is essential too, ’cause you can’t keep up with the animal in the short term. So there’s a lot of stuff that goes into it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s interesting, there’s been a lot of research done by evolutionary scientists about how hunting made humans humans in a lot of ways, so I guess you say running, the reason why we run, you say track it back to hunting, other things, our ability to throw like other primates, they can’t throw things like we do, because their shoulder anatomy is different than ours, but the idea is that throwing spears or rocks led to that development in our shoulder anatomy just like our ability to cooperate, humans are very good co-operators, they trace it back to hunting, because typically you’d hunt in a group. Communication, even talking, speaking, might have been influenced by hunting, and there’s a whole book, I think it’s called The Hunting Hypothesis by this guy named Robert Ardrey, it’s interesting, he talks about all these different ideas of how hunting drove human evolution.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And the running hypothesis I think fits right into that. It’s maybe a sub-subset of that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I think… And the other thing too they say is that starting to eat meat helped our brains get bigger, maybe. That’s interesting. Okay, so there’s this theory that persistence hunting led to us evolving attributes that allowed us to be better at long distance running, but there were criticisms of this theory for a long time, so what were the key criticisms of this persistence hunting, theory of running?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, the big problem is that running burns calories, it’s just an extremely inefficient way to cover distance, and so if you’re thinking in the crucible of evolution where the small edges determine who’s gonna pass on more genes to their offspring or whatever, or have more offspring that survive, you don’t wanna waste energy. So it’s a neat trick if you can run down an antelope, but think of how many calories that burns compared to maybe if you just hide behind this bush and sit there for eight hours eventually and the antelope’s gonna wonder by. You’re gonna conk it on the head and you’re gonna get just as many calories, so the number one objection was it’s just too energetically costly. And the number two objection is, if this is what made us human, how come there’s only six people in the Kalahari and a few people in the canyons of Mexico who’ve ever been documented to do this.

It can’t be the crucial thing that made us human if it only happened in Southern Africa and in the southwest of United States, or in Mexico.

Brett McKay: Okay, so it expended too many calories, the observation was it wasn’t very wide spread. But then recently a paper came out, and this is the paper you wrote about in your article from these two guys, Morin and Winter Hadler and yeah, this study seems to validate the persistence hunting theory of running, walk us through the study.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so this guy’s Jean Mahler and Bruce Machaulder from Trent University and UC Davis, they published a new analysis that I think does a pretty effective job of countering those two particular objections, so the first one is it burns too many calories. Well, the way they came to this study is that they’ve been doing these analyses, basically return on investment calculations for different ways of getting food, including different types of hunting, so they use big data sets to make estimates of like, okay, let’s say you wanna go, do a persistent hunt. Like how long does it take? How many calories do you burn? How often do you get. Do you succeed? And if you do succeed, how big is the animal you get, how many calories can you use, how many can you carry back? And so you can come up with this calculation that you spend this many calories, you receive this many calories, so you have a return on investment of whatever, 20% or something. And you can do the same for other types of hunting, and they look at different things like community hunts and encounter hunts, so it’s like, okay, you go out in to the forest, you’re gonna try and just carefully, quietly, slowly track an animal or track a group of animals until you can shoot one.

How long does that take? How many calories, how often are you successful, what kinds of animals do you get? Or if you do it with a bunch of people trying to run the Buffalos of a cliff or whatever. How long does that take? Etcetera, etcetera, and the surprising finding they come out with is that persistence hunting is actually pretty similar or in some contexts, better in terms of its return on investment, and they look at various persistence hunting scenarios as like, well, what happens if you go a little faster or a little slower or if it takes two hours or four hours or six hours, and what they find is, for sure, running takes way more calories than walking, but you’re able to end the hunt much more quickly and have a higher success rate, and so it ends up, actually in some ways, the faster you go, the more energetically efficient it is ’cause the sooner you end the hunt. So I guess the caveat I would throw in there is that the numbers all have a lot of estimates and assumptions in terms of, well, based on their reading of the ethnographic literature or whatever, they’re like, well, this is how often a persistent hunt succeeds or whatever, but by their estimate, at the very least, it’s not worse than the other ways of hunting and might even be better. So that’s the calorie one.

Brett McKay: Right, okay. And then they also… There’s paper also countered that, other criticism that, well, persistence hunting is not widespread.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and this is actually pretty cool. They use machine learning to analyze a big… So this is one of those things where it’s like if you look back at ethnographic records, people who’ve tried to study groups around the world, you find that there are records of persistence hunts, and so in hindsight, you’re like, well, why didn’t someone come up with this theory ages ago, ’cause, yeah, we knew 100 years ago that people, the Tarahumara in Mexico sometimes were able to run down deer, it’s like… But it’s different people looking at different manuscripts, and so the person who’s studying some obscure diary from a trader who visited a group in Borneo in 1750, they may not care about persistence hunting, they may not have noticed that, or realized that that’s significant. So in this case, the research is basically uploaded all the memoirs and travel logs and missionary accounts and stuff that they could find into a big electronic database that I think they found 8,000 of these documents, and then they used content analysis software, not just like word search but it’s like they’re doing things like, okay, anywhere… Is there a passage where a word like run down or tiring or animal, they appear somewhere in the same paragraph. And so this was able to come up with a stunning number of descriptions of persistence hunting between the 1500s and the 1900s.

They had 391 different observations coming from every continent, except Antarctica, huge variety in the environments and society, so not just in hot deserts, but also in Newfoundland in the snow, the people that were able to run down deer and particularly, not just when it’s especially hot, but when there were certain types of snow conditions, if there was a crust on the snow that made it really hard for the deer to run, and so they were able to run them down more easily, remember they’re tiring for the deer to run, and the hunters had snow shoes, so they could follow more effectively. They found examples from Hawaii chasing wild goats to exhaustion, people in Borneo catching deer to exhaustion. So basically everywhere. And so it’s this completely revised view that this wasn’t just something that a few groups in an African Mexico did, but this is something that happened basically everywhere, the one gap is in basically Europe, the main part of Europe. And that’s probably because Europe and the Middle East is where agriculture first got widely established, and so the persistent hunts probably ended before anybody was writing down ethnographic accounts. So that’s why there aren’t any first-hand observations of that.

Brett McKay: Okay. So this paper, it shows that persistence hunting, hunting by running can be calorically efficient. And then two, persistence hunting is more widespread than we previously thought. Have you seen how this paper been received by the scientific community so far?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, you know I haven’t seen any strong pushback to it. And in general, if I write about an article that other people disagree with, I’ll tend to get some messages saying, you idiot, how could you write about this study? Don’t you realize that you know X, Y, and Z? So I haven’t heard any pushback, we’ll see. It’s sometimes the scientific publishing world moves quite slowly, so maybe there’ll be a response in months to come. I think I don’t see any like big factual disagreements. So at a certain point it becomes less about did persistence hunting happen in many places around the world? And the fact that it happens in many places around the world, I think also supports the idea that it’s calorically reasonable, that people aren’t doing these things just to waste calories. So I think that part of the story is getting quite solid. The question is, what do you do with that information? Does this mean that we’re all born to run or does it just mean that, oh, this is a waste, people sometimes got food sometimes, and it’s, but it’s not that fundamental to our existence.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. Well, another question it raises is why do we keep running even though we don’t hunt by running anymore? ‘Cause I mean, it’s interesting you see across cultures, humans even if they gave up persistence hunting, they continued to run. Maybe it might have been for sport, it might have been for religious ritual. Have you seen anything about that? Like why humans continue to run even though we don’t have to?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I mean, this is the question I ask myself every morning before I go for my run. Why am I doing this? Why do we do this? And there’s a lot of discussion about it. There is a biologist named Bernd Heinrich, who wrote a book called Why We Run, about 20 years ago that’s been very influential. And he has this idea or he had that phrase, chasing the antelope, that on some level we’re sort of recapitulating some evolutionary imperative. So I think there’s a lot of effort to understand this, and this goes from like biology to anthropology. And in fact, on that note, I just finished reading an advanced copy of a new book by an anthropologist named Michael Crowley called The Meaning of Endurance from, I think it’s from Mexico to the Himalayas or something like that, is the subtitle.

And he did his PhD by spending a year and a half living with elite Ethiopian runners, trying to understand, trying to go beyond the cliche of, these guys are just born to run and it’s easy, and that’s why they’re so good trying to understand what motivates them to run. And so for this new book, he went around the world and visited groups in, Nepal. He visited the Tarahumara, he talked to people in Sub-Saharan in the Kalahari, trying to understand these questions. Why do we run? And I can’t sum it up in 10 words, but I think to your point, what started out as something that was a way to get calories evolves into something that has meaning for the society evolves into a ritual that has greater meaning that we still seek. So one of the things that he sees is that, in running you can recapitulate or you can get a feeling of connection to the natural world and even particularly to the animal that you’re hunting.

So this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, to hunt, well, you have to be able to track, you have to get in the mind of the animal. And so for a lot of people there’s this sense of connection. By moving to exhaustion, you are ritualizing the chase. And so the Tarahumara who are the, the running people in Mexico who were written about by and born to run when he visits them, what he finds is that it’s not really about running for them, and it’s certainly no longer about persistence hunting, that they actually also do these kind of dance marathons that last for a day or two, and people go nearly too exhaustion. And that serves a very much the same rule for them, and it’s become a ritual in their society. So how does that connect to me going for a run in the morning? I’m not sure, but I think there is some sense of not, of trying to catch an antelope or not that I have to do it, but that there’s some feeling of connection to the world around me that I get out of it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Listeners are looking for a great anthropology of running. I just finished a book called Indian Running by this guy. He published a book, it was probably published in 1981. He was, I think an anthropologist of native Americans. And basically he tracks running culture in the American southwest. So we’re talking Navajos, Hopis, the Zunis. And it’s just… It’s incredibly fascinating how these tribes ritualized running. In fact, they called them action prayers. So like as they were running, they would pray, and to your point about you were trying to harness the animal, maybe that you were hunting, some of these tribes, they would put on different totems to help them run faster. So if they wanted to run faster, they might like have a deer tail on them. They might have an eagle feather in their hair so they can have keen eyesight so they can see the trail and see the animals.

I think one of the interesting parts was this idea of the Navajo. They had this like ritual of the morning run. I thought this was really interesting. So once you reach a certain age, the elders in the tribe would wake you up before dawn and you’d have to go out for these early runs. And the idea was that when you went out in the morning, the talking God was out there. So it was like the head god for the Navajo. And this guy named Rex Lee Jim, he was a Navajo runner. He said, my grandfather told me that talking God comes around in the morning, knocks on the door and says, get up my grandchildren. It’s time to run, run for health and wealth. And so yeah, they do this like running prayer. And I mean, it’s so interesting. It actually, this book and sort of how this guy explained the spirituality of running, it almost got me into running regularly just for… [laughter] ‘Cause it, it made it sound so cool.

Alex Hutchinson: Almost is almost there. But I think what I would say is, so these sort of culturally defined sources of meaning are created by society. So it’s no longer specific to the action of running. It’s not that like we were born to have that cultural experience. So there are lots of ways to obtain meaning. And some people get that from lifting weights or, climbing rocks or whatever the case may be. But for some people, for many people running is, or for everyone running is one way that we can try to find meaning within our larger society and connect with something that I think it’s not just about, oh, my sweat glands are so good at this, I need to do this. I think for most of us today, the meaning is cultural more than evolutionary.

But our body is well equipped to then step into this task that when we do it all of a sudden that certain brain chemicals that are produced that are probably a legacy of this born to run idea. The running high kind of stuff, which is so that’s an interesting, I guess we haven’t talked about that. It’s like if you look at, when you go for a run or when you do any exercise, your brain produces endocannabinoids, which is the brain’s internal version of cannabis. And it makes people feel good, but it’s the specific production of these endocannabinoids tends to peak at a sort of moderate sustained intensity. You don’t get a ton if you’re just like walking. You don’t get a ton if you’re sprinting. But if you’re at the sort of persistence hunting pace, then there’s this feeling of wellbeing that you may get. And animals that are also well adapted to run long distances like dogs, they also get these endocannabinoids, whereas other animals like in one of the studies it was ferrets that aren’t good at running long distances, they don’t get this endocannabinoid basis. So there are these holdovers from our evolutionary past that conspire to make running and activities like it feel good because we’ve evolved to have that cue to tell us you’re doing the right thing.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And you can make the case that in the west and non-Native American culture, we’ve ritualized running, but it’s in our own way. Instead of putting on eagle feathers, we put on our hokas or whatever.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And future anthropologists will have a field day with it, right? Like the colorful garb of the spandex clad modern runner. It is very ritualized for sure though maybe not as ritualized as cycling.

Brett McKay: And I imagine you’re a runner. Like when you try to explain to people why you run, I think most sort of modern people say, well, I run ’cause it’s for my health. And I’m sure that’s probably why you got into running, but I’m sure what keeps you running is more than just your health. You’re probably not even thinking about your aerobic capacity when you go out on a morning run.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I mean, it’s a helpful motivator because, I think an important point to make is that, to say that we’re born to run or that we’re sort of evolutionary equipped to do it, is not to say that it’s easy or that, it’s just a bundle of smiles that, for people who don’t run, who might think, man, this does not apply to me, I find running hard. The thing is, even people who run every day generally find it hard and wake up in the morning and think, oh man, it’s too hot or it’s too cold, or I’m too tired. So it’s not that it’s not hard, it’s just that there are enough benefits to overwhelm this feeling of hardness and the fact that it’s good for your health is one of them. But it’s, as you said, after a while, if you’ve run running for a long time, it’s often more than that. It’s more that just it in some hard to articulate way. You feel better about the world and about yourself and about your day after you’ve done that run.

Brett McKay: Another point this guy makes in Indian Running is that we might have started running for hunting, but humans have this tendency to take these things, these evolved capacities and turn into something else. So we might ritualize something. So, you see these southwestern tribes in the United States, ritualizing running. Another thing he saw that the tribes used this evol capacity to run for was communication. And so a lot of these southwestern tribes, they developed these elaborate networks of trails so that they could communicate long distances in just a day. And so they would just run, they would just run to share messages. They would actually like be people called in a tribe to be the messenger guy. And that was his job just to run. And they would… Some of the stuff they were like doing ultra marathons this one account a guy ran 156 miles in less than 24 hours just crazy. And no shoes just barefoot. And he knocked it out in less than a day.

Alex Hutchinson: It’s interesting you mentioned that because, another book I recently read is by Roger Robinson, who’s a longtime running writer and but also a historian. And has a book called Running Throughout Time, the greatest running stories ever told, which kind of traces some of the stories of running and tells them in a different way. So I mean, he starts with, Atalanta, who’s like this, a Greek legend, which he casts as this sort of foundation of women’s running, but he has a whole chapter on running messengers. And I knew about Native American messengers and I knew about Pheidippides, who’s the ancient Greek messenger who’s supposedly ran from Marathon to Athens to say, that we won and then died. It turns out that this idea of running messengers was… It was like a profession around the world.

And so there’s these, famous stories about like 300 years ago there was a legendary Welsh messenger named Griffith Morgan, who performed all these feats and was a hero in his time. And so all these societies around the world had like a professionalized group of ultra long distance runners who served as messengers. They were more efficient, more knowledgeable, more able to navigate different circumstances than a horse would’ve been or whatever. And so it’s exactly that. It’s take… We didn’t evolve to be messengers, but we took advantage of the way we were constructed and it’s fascinating reading the stories of things that, naively I would’ve thought it’s like nobody was running 150 miles until, the 1970s when people were trying to figure out, the meaning of life. But it’s like no, they were doing that 2000 years ago. They were doing it 1000 years ago. They were doing it 500 years ago and they were doing it remarkably quickly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. In Indian Running talks about the Spanish when they came to the Western Hemisphere, they finally realized that they could probably just hire the indigenous people to get messages faster. So they said, there’s like this one trip from Lima to Cusco, this is in Peru. If they use their horse mail service, it would take 12 to 13 days to get a message, but if they use the runners, they can cover it in just three days.

Alex Hutchinson: There you go. There’s the race we were looking for, man versus animal. We win.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we win. Okay, so it sounds like we were… I mean, that book Born to Run, there’s something to it. So if we’re Born to Run, why… I mean, I think we kind of talked about this earlier, but why do so few people like to run?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so like I said, I mean, I think that the first thing to acknowledge is that in the moment experience of running is difficult. And that’s true, not just for, let’s say me, but it’s true for the Ethiopian or Kenyan runners who win the Olympics. It’s true for the Tarahumara who were sort of lionized in the Born to Run book. And actually there was a scientific paper that came out maybe two years ago, which was a kind of reexamination of the Tarahumara in Mexico fighting against what they called the myth of the Athletic Savage. This idea that, these people who are closer to our evolutionary origins, they just sort of are born to run. They wake up, they float long distances, and it’s like no, the Tarahumara are capable of… Many of the Tarahumara are capable of, impressive feats of running, but there are some who are terrible at running.

And even the ones who do run after they do one of these ultra marathons, they’re often like unable to walk for two weeks because it’s so hard and so unpleasant. And they struggle with it in the same way that all of us do. So being born to run doesn’t mean that running is easy. So then it just becomes a question of, are the rewards of running in the broadest sense of the word, do they overcome the challenges of running, not just in a global sense, but, or not just over time, but at that moment where you’re sitting at the door or standing at the front door with your running shoes on, deciding whether you wanna go for a run. Because it’s one thing to say, we all are familiar with this idea of like of things that we know we’ll be glad we did once we’ve done them, but we don’t wanna do them anyway.

So I’m rambling a little bit here, but just one other point to make is Dan Lieberman, the Harvard anthropologist who co-authored the 2004 paper, Born to Run. He wrote a book, I don’t know, four or five years ago or something called Exercised. And the basic message of that book was, just being born to do something doesn’t mean we’re gonna wanna do it. And that it’s totally natural for us not to want to go for a run or do other kinds of exercise. Because we’re also evolved to save energy, to be as stingy with wasted energy as we possibly can. So it’s natural that we have a big barrier urging us to be as lazy as possible, and we shouldn’t feel bad about that. We just have to think carefully about how we wanna live, what we wanna do in the context of wanting to be healthy and happy and trying to engineer our living conditions so that it’s easy to take the route that we’ll be happiest as we took. If you see what, so that it’s not every morning you wake up and decide, for me, for someone who runs on a regular basis, the key thing is I don’t leave it to myself to make the decision every morning I decide and then I make it as easy as possible to follow up with that decision.

Brett McKay: Any advice on how to make it easy so you can get over that inertia to start running? Help me out. Like I read Indian Running, I’m man, I should become a runner. But there’s still a part of me ah, I don’t know, so help me out. How can I become a runner?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the best tricks and tips are different for each person, but one thing that helps me a lot is, let’s say I wanna go for an hour run. That’s a really daunting thing. And so there’ll be times when, because of the weather, ’cause of how I feel, that sounds awful. And so I never sort of impose a minimum distance on my run or a minimum speed. Very often I will wake up and I’ll be like… And I have stuff going on and, I gotta get my kids to school and I have deadlines and I’m stressed out. I don’t have time to run. Well, I do have 10 minutes I’m gonna put on my clothes and I’m gonna go out the door and I’m gonna jog out for five minutes. And then if I’m tired and still feeling overwhelmed, I’m gonna turn around and I’m gonna get back.

And then I’ll have jogged for 10 minutes. Almost always, once I get out there, I’m like well, I can do 20 minutes or, well, now that I’m out here, the marginal cost, an extra five minutes is nothing. And I’m actually starting to enjoy myself. ‘Cause the first 10 minutes of the runner off and the hardest and the most sluggish for me. But I’m absolutely willing to go out, spend seven minutes running and come back in if it’s not, if I just have too much going on. So, ’cause getting out the door is the hard part. So you wanna, if getting out the door involves agreeing to go for an hour, then that makes it harder. So I lower the barrier and I just… I also, this is totally personal, but for me, if I wait till the end of the day, life fills up, I’ve got too much other stuff going on, so I get up and I just go before breakfast for as long or as little time as I have. So I get it outta the way first thing. Other people find that intolerable, they hate morning runs and they do it at the end of the day. And that’s cool too. But figuring out when it fits in your day and won’t get overwhelmed I think is important.

Brett McKay: I like that idea of setting your expectations incredibly low ’cause I think a lot of people when they think about, I wanna take up running, they think, well, I gotta run a 5K, I gotta do a race, no, just run. Just even if it’s just for 10 minutes. I think I can do that ’cause lately I’ve been waking up really early for some reason I think it’s like middle age, my body’s like Hey, you’re gonna wake up at 5:30 now? So I’ve been going for two mile walks early in the morning ’cause I got nothing else to do. Maybe I can just start running, I can start jogging a little bit of that.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. Like look, I’m a very serious runner. I’ve been running my whole life. I’ve competed at a very high level. I make my living writing about running. I do lots of, not lots of, but I definitely do some like 14 minute runs and some 16 minute runs and stuff like that. And it’s still something, it’s still gets my blood flowing and it’s good. But by being open to that, that gets me out there most days and then often I end up running longer and just… Yeah, exactly. Don’t, and as a more general thing, just as a like the standard running advice thing, because the other thing people run into is injuries, right? And things like that. Be patient just because your friend runs 5Ks, if you haven’t been running regularly for a long time, that doesn’t mean you should go out and run 5K right away. And so the programs that start with like a minute of jogging in a minute of walking and stuff, those are great. And your goal should not be, I’m gonna run a 5K or much worse, I’m gonna run a half marathon in three months. Your goal should be in two years I wanna still be running and building up and enjoying it.

Brett McKay: And I imagine if you start with these sort of like low expectations, you’ll eventually, maybe you’ll eventually learn to oh, I like this, this is something I really enjoy. And then maybe you start getting more serious about it.

Alex Hutchinson: Maybe you do. I think a lot of people that happens, maybe you don’t, but you know what, if you establish a habit of going for a 15 minute run three times a week, I guarantee that is dramatically improving your overall fitness and possibly your mental health and happiness.

Brett McKay: Oh. For sure. Well, Alex, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Alex Hutchinson: Thanks, Brett. Yeah, I write basically roughly once a week for Outside Magazine. So outsideonline.com is a good place to look for my articles. I also, my website is alexhutchinson.net or my, social media accounts are @SweatScience.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Alex Hutchinson, thanks for your time’s. Been a pleasure.

Alex Hutchinson: Thanks a lot, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest Davis is Alex Hutchinson. He’s a journalist who specializes in exercise science. You can find more information about his work at his website, alexhutchinson.net. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/borntorun, where you can find links to resources where you 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 this so already, I’d appreciate it. If you take one minute to give view up a podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who think can get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind you listening to our podcast, put what you’ve heard into action.