Born to Run

Last weekend my friends Grace and Ingrid and I finished the Portland Marathon--26.2 miles with 12,000 other runners.  There was some question if Ingrid would run as she developed shin splints about 3 weeks before the race.  Grace was running with what she described as "little knives stabbing her knees" and I had plantar fasciitis, heel pain that caused me to have to run around the house in high heels even when in pajamas (as bizarre as that sounds, it's what my podiatrist told me to get the pressure off my heel!).  We were a sorry lot but still determined to finish the run as we'd invested long hours training for this race.  Many people shook their heads, puzzled as to why we'd subject our bodies to such a punishing regiment, and Ingrid's chiropractor begged her, with tears in her eyes, not to run the marathon as she'd do "irreparable damage" to herself.  With all this negative perception towards the effects of long distance running, it hardly seemed sane that each year, tens of thousands of people participate in marathons all over the world.  But then again, no one's ever accused us of being too sane.

We headed up to Portland the day before, partaking in some good grub including kimchee tacos and fresh burgers served on some nice, buttery Texas toast at some of the fine food trucks Portland is known for as well as a restaurant in the Pearl District called "The Fish Grotto."  This is the sort of place where the hipster waiter tells you his recommendations with a nonchalance bordering on insolence but ultimately turns out to be a sweetheart who gave each of us a coupon for free appetizers next time we came around.  The place itself is dark and somewhat dive-y, but everything we ate there was delicious and the lobster mac and cheese is absolutely the thing to carbo load on the night before a big race.

On Sunday, we all got up before six to head over to the start line.  Our awesome support crew, Eveline and Tony, provided much needed moral support throughout, giving us plenty of cowbell and encouraging not just us but other runners along the way, telling them, "You own this!"  Some of the signage along the way also provided some comic relief including: "This is the worst parade ever" or "Running sucks."  For me, the first 18 miles were pretty good but about the 19th mile is where the lack of food (the race planners provided water, energy drinks, and just gummy bears and occasional pretzels to replenish lost glycogen stores) and general tiredness begin to set in.  But usually by then, there's really very little doubt that you can finish.  After all, you've finished over 3/4 of the race.  Our motto had been "Under five and alive" and we all made our goal: we finished alive!

We spent the next few days sore and tired but happy that we'd accomplished our goal.  Conversations around the house went something like this:
"Are you okay?"
"What makes you think I'm not okay?  Just because I scream each time I stand up or sit down doesn't mean I'm not okay."

This is my 3rd marathon and each time I think, "This is it.  No more," especially as different injuries have flared up over the years.  Just when I think I've solved my knee problem, I end up with a heel problem.  It really makes you appreciate when you have a healthy body.  I'm not convinced though that distance running is the issue.  I'd been reading Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run, a narrative about a tribe of runners called the Tarahumara who live and run out in the Copper Canyon in Mexico.  They neither have fancy running shoes (they run with huraches or sandals crafted from rubber tires) nor do they have a strict training schedule (in fact they usually have a huge party where they get completely smashed before their two day running parties) but they don't get injured or hurt.

Some of the "secrets" of the Tarahumara include a simple mostly vegetarian diet and a drink made out of chia seeds, which apparently one tablespoon of the seed is like "a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone," packed with omega 3s, omega 6s, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber, and antioxidants.  You just have to get over the ick factor of eating a Chia pet.  Another thing the Tarahumara do often is run barefoot or with barely any footwear.  Barefoot running has been a huge trend lately but the Tarahumara have done it for decades.  The logic is that tennis shoes are helpful is you have good running posture but the majority of us don't.  We run with poor posture, with big, sloppy strides, which twist and tweak our backs, and the shoes mask the problem, thus resulting in injury.  In fact, one of the pioneers of barefoot running, Barefoot Ken Bob's "Naked Toe Manifesto" says "Shoes block pain, not impact!  Pain teaches us to run comfortably!  From the moment you start going barefoot, you will change the way you run."  In fact, feet are supposed to like a good beating and will stride down harder in cushioned shoes to search for a hard, stable platform.  I asked my podiatrist about this and he of course said, "Don't believe everything you read."  Of course, according to barefoot running subscribers, his living is built upon the foot problems that are supposed to disappear once you ditch the shoes, but I'm not quite at the point of chucking my shoes though once my plantar fasciitis heals up, I may be inclined to give it a go.


One last thing the book talks about with the Tarahumara as well as other ultra marathoners is in the attitude towards running.  They embrace the effort, seeing fatigue not as an enemy but as a motivator.  They embrace "Easy, light, smooth, and fast" as the motto to their runs, not caring how high the hill or how far they've go to go.  They enjoy the run as an expression for the love of life, and as a way to live.  As McDougall says, "That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running.  They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation....the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet....You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else.  And like everything else we love--everything we sentimentally call our "passions" and 'desires"--it's really an encoded ancestral necessity.  We were born to run; we were born because we run.  We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known."  This is in contrast to the American approach of running as a way to get stuff--as a means to an end--getting medals, Nike deals, becoming faster, skinnier.  I'm not sure I agree with the whole woo-woo idea of running as the ultimate expression of love and creation but I do think we spend a lot of time as Americans thinking about stuff like better shoes or gadgets that are supposed to help us to be faster or better rather than just going out and just running.  We also spend a lot of time dealing with and complaining about the injuries we sustain, which definitely does not make you feel easy, light, or smooth in running.


One of the stories that the book ends with which really made me think about the idea that we were born to run was the story of David Carrier, a scientist who in looking at a rabbit carcass realized that one of the mysteries of human evolution, which was why man became upright, was to breathe better.  And if humans evolved to be better at breathing, then they evolved to be better at running.  The problem was that humans were not very fast runners compared to all other animals.  Even compared to our ancestors, the Neanderthal, humans are pretty wimpy.  Neanderthals are stronger, tougher, burlier, and had bigger brains.  So how did humans beat them out?  By being able to run longer.  Most other animals were faster, but because they didn't have the physiology to cool off, if humans could keep an animal galloping and in sight on a hot day, after about ten or fifteen kilometers' worth of running, it will go into hypothermia and collapse.  Then you can spear it and eat it.  David and his brother Scott, who worked for NPR, gave this theory a try and they recorded the event for This American Life.  They problem, they realized, was that while they were trying to run an antelope down, the animal has a few tricks of its own up its sleeve.  The antelope would run into the trees and rest while the brothers tried to track it or it would run in with its herd and a different antelope would run out, thus foiling their attempts to tire out the same animal.  David almost gave up at this point with trying to prove his Running Man theory when he received a call from a researcher named Louis Liebenberg who had been learning to track with a group of Kalahari bushmen in Botswana who still hunted in the old ways.  Liebenberg learned to read the tracks of animals in the dirt and then learned to track without tracks at all with something known as "speculative hunting."  This is where you project yourself into the mind of the creature, to anticipate what it will do.  After he had learned to live and track with these bushmen for several years, they took him out for a special hunt.  When they came across a clutch of kudu, an especially agile form of antelope, they started to run after them.  The bushmen ran as a group and whenever the kudu would dash into the trees to rest, one of the hunters would drive it back into the sun.  When the kudu would run into the herd, the four Bushmen would be so skilled as to be able to track and keep running after the same animal.  Thus in this way, after two hours, the animal buckled and crashed to the ground.  Liebenberg later discovered that this hunt had been particularly quick and that for most times, it will last about 3-4 hours, which coincidentally, is about how long a marathon lasts at the pace these Bushmen were running.  (Recreation has its reasons!)  In other words, according to McDougall, "running was the superpower that made us human--which means it's a superpower all human possess."

One more interesting thing is that when scientists monitored the results of the 2004 NYC marathon and compared finishers by age, they found that starting at age 19, runners get faster every year until hitting their peak at 27.  At that time, runners' speed starts to decline but it isn't until you are 64 that you're back to the same running speed as at 19!  There's a lot more that the book talks about, including why running is good for both men and women and how it makes us more human, more cooperative, basically better people and how our quest for efficiency is what's killing our love for it but I shall let any interested parties read it for themselves.

Who knows.  If I have until I'm 64 until I'll be running like a 19 year old, that's not a bad thing.  As McDougall quotes in the book, "You don't stop running because you get old.  You get old because you stop running."