You've probably either read Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, or at least heard about it. It has had a big influence on the way many runners run, and it also seems to have caused passionate reactions: some runners say the story it tells has rescued them from injury and given them a new sense of freedom. Others consider the book misguided.
My own view is that this book is actually made up of three very different stories glommed together into one: a wild, over-the-top, tall tale about the legendary barefoot-running Tarahumara Indians of Mexico's remote Copper Canyons; a surprisingly bitter polemic about modern running shoes; and a fascinating perspective on human evolution. The first two stories are somewhat misguided and misinformed, though entertaining. The third is well researched and, I think, profoundly important.
I don't know if I have ever before read a book that is so wrong and so right between the same two covers. So, this review can't be like one of those "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" assessments we've come to expect in our ever more polarized, quick-message pop culture. For one thing, it would be a mistake to count my two basically "down" assessments versus one "up" as indicating a net-negative. The third story--about our origins and nature as humans--outweighs the other two.
Here are my thoughts about those three strange-bedfellow stories, in turn:
The Over-the-Top Tall Tale: On the second page, McDougall writes: "When it comes to ultradistances, nothing can beat a Tarahumara runner--not a racehorse, not a cheetah, not an Olympic marathoner." Well, that's true about the racehorse and the cheetah, for the simple reason (discussed later in the book) that when it comes to ultradistances, nothing can beat a well trained human runner. But in this provocative sentence, McDougall seems to be singling out the Tarahumara as different from the rest of us. (To emphasize that this wasn't just a careless mistake, he repeats the point a hundred pages later: "They had proved themselves, indisputably, as the greatest ultrarunners on earth.") What's actually the case, though, as we will later see, is that the Tarahumara are not fundamentally different. As the book's title suggests, all humans are born to run. And there are equally great ultrarunners in many countries.
As for the "not an Olympic marathoner" part, that's unsubstantiated speculation, since Olympic marathoners rarely run ultradistances. Marathons and ultras are two very different things! To put that in perspective, note that of the many hundreds of thousands of runners who have competed in America's largest marathon (New York) or largest ultra (JFK 50-mile) over the past four decades, only two have ever finished in the top three places in both races.
So, in saying "nothing" can beat the Tarahumara when in comes to ultradistances, McDougall is comparing apples and oranges (cheetahs and humans, or marathoners and ultramarathoners). What he cleverly does NOT say is that when it comes to ultradistances, no other ultrarunners can beat a Tarahumara! Yes, later in the book we will read a dramatitic account of a small race in Copper Canyon where a group of Tarahumara run 50 miles with a group of gringo Americans, and one of the Tarahumara guys finishes ahead of the seven-time Western States 100-mile winner Scott Jurek. Jurek is a close second, and overall the two groups from culturally opposite ends of the earth are fairly evenly matched. And what if some of the top Russian, Japanese, or South African runners had been there too? Bottom line: humans are humans. Give McDougall credit for eventually emphasizing that critical point.
In the early going, though, the author clearly wants to lure the reader with a myth that ranks right up there with Big Foot in its breathless buzz about superhuman beings somewhere out there in the deadly Barranca del Cobres--a land of treacherous trails, rattlesnakes, killer heat, ruthless drug dealers, and mysterious murders where an epic "greatest race the world has never seen" will take place. I think the Spartathlon, or a lot of other races, have been greater.
So for the first third of the book, McDougall keeps building on these misleading comparisons, at one point gratuitously contrasting the Tarahumara scrambling up and down steep canyon trails with Lance Armstrong struggling to run on a paved road: "Lance Armstrong is one if the greatest endurance athletes of all time, and he could barely shuffle through his first marathon despite sucking down an energy gel nearly every mile." When I read that, I thought: What would happen if you took a great Tarahumara runner who'd never trained for bicycle racing, and put him in the Tour de France? Again, apples and oranges.
The wild-tale part of Born to Run isn't just deceptive myth-building, though. Some of it is an unfortunate lack of knowledge about running history. In one gee-whiz paragraph, McDougall writes, "According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping until you were closing in on Detroit"--as though such a feat is the stuff of legend. Maybe McDougall should have consulted a historian of running, as well. The long-distance-running historian Dan Brannen, for example, would have pointed out that the Greek runner Yiannis Kouros, among many others in many countries, has run more than twice that distance nonstop. In 19th-century England, runners exceeded that distance in regular 6-day competitions, as shown in the vintage advertisement at the top of this page. McDougall has studied the Tarahumara well, but doesn't exhibit much knowledge of ultrarunning in the rest of the world.
The Polemic About Running Shoes: I discussed this in my last blog post, noting that here, too, McDougall is just plain wrong about some of this facts. When I read his account of Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, I was actually a bit saddened. McDougall writes that Bowerman invented the modern running shoe in 1972 by sticking a chunk of rubber under the heel to enable a runner to land on his heel and thereby unnaturally lengthen his stride. Ostensibly, that invited injury. Implicitly, it seemed, McDougall was blaming his own struggle with a painful foot injury on a guy who died years ago and who, if he'd ever been confronted by his accuser, would have pointed out that while he did indeed invent the waffle sole, he didn't invent the built-up rubber heel. That had been invented over half a century earlier. Claiming that Bowerman thought up the built-up heel caught my attention not only because I had been running with built-up rubber heels for years before Bowerman's presumed invention, but also because of a memorable incident in my first marathon, when I found myself pulling even with Ted Corbitt, whom the New York Times called the "godfather of American ultrarunning." At the time, I was "running on my toes," as my high school coach had taught, but Corbitt glanced at my footfall and suggested that I might run better if I let myself touch down on my heels. This was years before the first Nikes, and runners who wanted built-up heel cushioning could easily get it in shoes made by Adidas or Tiger. (In fact, I've been told by a knowledgeable friend that the first Nikes were basically Tiger or Asics models with a Nike swoosh glued on.) And the heel-running Ted Corbitt's multi-day and 50-mile performances are just as impressive, even today, as the Tarahumara's. Moreover, it wasn't just in the mid-1960s that some of our shoes had built-up heel rubber. In my collection of old running memorabilia, I have a hundred-year-old advertisement from a company called O'Sullivan Heels of Live Rubber, featuring a photo of the Olympic marathon champion of 1908, Johnny Hayes, shaking hands with the company's owner, Humphrey O'Sullivan. In the caption, Hayes is quoted as informing Sullivan that the shoes with which he had won the Olympic Marathon had the O'Sullivan Heels of Live Rubber, and that "I always wear your heels in my races."
What, then, of McDougall's core argument that running injuries have proliferated since 1972? I strongly suspect that here, McDougall has fallen into the very common trap of confusing correlation with causation. The fact that the rise of Nikes and other modern running shoes is correlated with a proliferation of running injuries does not mean they are the cause. The building of the modern Interstate Highways in America was correlated with a rise in the number of motor vehicle collisions and fatalities, but it wasn't the cause! Auto deaths increased despite the improved safety of the highways--because of other factors such as the rise of rush-hour congestion, happy-hour drinking, road rage, and the thrall of cars among teens (I was there). Similarly, I think, running injuries increased after the early 1970s because far more people were doing things like trying to complete a marathon in their first year of running. In the 1950s and '60s, most long-distance runners trained for years before attempting a marathon, so they were less vulnerable to injuries caused by ramping up too fast.
Finally, just one more point of misconstrued history. McDougall compares Bowerman with the legendary coach Arthur Lydiard, writing: "Lydiard was by far the superior track mind; he'd coached many more Olympic champions and world-record holders. . . . Lydiard liked Bowerman and respected him as a coach, but Good God! What was this junk he was selling?"
Is that what Lydiard thought? Well, in 1977, I filmed an interview with Lydiard at my house in Virginia, and got to know something about what he thought. And as it happens, Lydiard, too, designed and sold running shoes--under the Lydiard name. They were the same kind of basic design as the new Nikes. The "junk" argument is apparently McDougall's guess at what Lydiard was thinking, not anything Lydiard said. Bottom line: cultural evolution has put a lot of distance between us modern runners and our barefoot ancestors--and while some of us are still able to run like the hominids, others are not. Nike's shoes (like Lydiard's or earlier Adidas or Asics models) were a boon to some of us, and too much cushioned protection for others, but there's very little evidence that they caused an epidemic of injuries. The epidemic was probably caused by too many people trying to ramp up their mileage and speed too fast. Americans have become more and more impatient.
A New Perspective on Human Evolution: OK, I've taken too long to get here. I talk too much. Mea culpa. This third story is what makes reading McDougall's book worthwhile. And it's a curious thing, too: in the earlier stories, McDougall does what I supppose he does for magazines like Men's Fitness or Esquire--he indulges in a lot of macho, gonzo-journalist exclamations like "First, two villages would get together and spend the night making bets and pounding tesjuino, a homemade beer that could blister paint." Or, "Secret agents, whizzing bullets, prehistoric kingdoms . . . even Ernest Hemingway would have shut up and surrendered the floor if Fisher walked into the bar." When he gets to the science, though, McDougall drops the slick language and tells a story that is--to my mind--far more exciting and insightful than any of the wild or polemicized stuff that precedes it.
The gist of this story is that for a long time, evolutionary scientists have believed we humans evolved as walkers, but in recent years a few bold researchers have put together a now convincing case, the Running Man theory, that we evolved as long-distance runners who hunted by chasing down faster-running animals by getting them overheated or wearing them out. Key players in this scientific saga were researchers David Carrier and Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah, Daniel Lieberman of Harvard, and Louis Liebenberg of Noordhoek, South Africa. McDougall does an excellent job of reconstructing the story of how these scientists built their case, drawing on both lab studies and field observations over three decades. I won't steal McDougall's thunder by attempting to summarize that story. But it's a good one, and it has profound implications not only about our past and present nature as humans, but our now endangered future, as I'll be exploring in my own writing and website.
For more discussion of our nature and future as the planet's most enduring species, see http://www.willhumansendure.com/.
Josh about to pass his grandpa
Here, at age three, Josh regularly runs a mile or two with me--and I have to work hard to keep up!
Friday, June 3, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Nefarious Nike: Can Chris McDougall be Serious?
It will be interesting to see if the barefoot and "minimalist" running shoe phenomenon turns out to be a fad. My guess is that it won't, and that in some ways, for some runners, it will be a part of our running gear for the future. But not everything about this phenomenon adds up. With the aid of a half-century's hindsight, here's my belated view of where we're going with this.
I say "belated" because I see that a lot of the impetus for this phenomenon came from the huge popularity of Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run, which I admit I did not read until quite recently. McDougall recounts the story of the barefoot-running or minimalist-sandals-running Tarahumara Indians of Mexico's remote Barrancas del Cobre (Copper Canyons), and then spins off into the history of the modern running shoe. His basic messages are (1) that the Tarahumara are the greatest runners in the world by far, and (2) that the modern running shoe is a terrible thing, ignorantly designed and cynically marketed for profit at the expense of thousands of unnecessarily injured runners, including McDougall.
I'm a little embarrassed to be reacting so belatedly, because I may be the most experienced long-distance runner in America (is there anyone else out there who has run competitively for 54 consecutive years?) and my experience has incuded (1) fairly good knowledge of the Tarahumara, and (2) fairly extensive familiarity with the history of the modern running shoe. In 1977, as the founding editor of Running Times magazine, I published three articles about the Tarahumara, and in 1984 a fourth article--shortly before the first scientific articles on the "Running Man" theory of human evolution were published.. And what our articles made clear is that while the Tarahumara are indeed amazing, they are not uniquely amazing. What made them remarkable was not that their best runners were "superathletes," as suggested by the subtitle of McDougall's book, but that everyone in their society runs. We of the USA have superathletes too (as McDougall eventually acknowledges), but we also have a huge number of people who are sadly sendentary and soft.
In the way he starts his story, suggesting that there 's a kind of god-like superhuman out there in the canyons somewhere, McDougall is over the top, as I'll discuss in a forthcoming post devoted specifically to reviewing his book. (And by the way, I won't totally trash the book, because in some respects it is really good.) And as for the origins and future of the modern running shoe--well, I think McDougall is just plain wrong. At Running Times, I published numerous independent reviews (by sports podiatrists and test runners) of running shoes from all the manufacturers--Adidas, Tiger (later Asics), New Balance, Nike, Etonic, Saucony, Brooks, Lydiard, Hi-Tec, Reebok, Turntec, Puma, and a few others. Over the years, we got feedback from hundreds of experts on biomechanics, anatomy, sports inuries, etc., and I don't think they could all have been as blindered as Born to Run suggests.
McDougall writes that the modern running shoe was invented by Nike's co-founder Bill Bowerman in 1972, and that Bowerman didn't know diddly about running. Which is a little like saying Dwight Eisenhower didn't know diddly about war. His implication seems to be that until Bowerman came along, all running shoes were what we'd now call minimalist. The new "modern" shoes introduced cushioning, pronation control, and more rubber under the heel, etc. McDougall's assessment is that these new developments were big mistakes. I disagree. Minimalist-shoe or barefoot running may be great for some people, but for others those modern shoes he disparages were a godsend.
I ran in my first pair of modern running shoes before McDougall was born, and long before Nike existed, so those shoes couldn't have been invented by Nike! (The waffle sole, yes, but the enhanced cushioning and stability, no.) I had started running cross country at Westfield (New Jersey) Senior High School in 1956, and all the kids on my team were given the standard distance-running shoes of that era--low-cut, black canvas-top shoes with no cushioning and only a small, narrow outsole under the heel. They were what we'd now call minimalist. But then I heard about the new kind of running shoe that some of the top runners were wearing, that you could get from a company called Adidas. I couldn't find a store anywhere in New Jersey that sold them, but I heard that you could get them at a place called Carlson Import Shoe Co, in New York City. I caught a train to New York and found the company in a dingy, second-story walk-up in lower Manhattan. There wasn't even a sign on the street. The shoes I bought were green and white, with kangaroo-skin uppers (later made illegal), good cushioning, and nice support in the heel. They fit me like kid gloves. They were magic, and I wish I still had them. I went from 7th man on my team to 7th in the state championship.
The thing is, those Adidas shoes were a huge improvement, at least for me, over the canvas flats. Today, I see tens of thousands of runners (many of them fairly new to the sport) going in the opposite direction, swept up in the thrall of McDougall's "naked tour" and the romance of the myth of the barefoot Tarahumara, denouncing the shoes of the past four decades as rip-offs. And I wonder if the shoe manufacturers, who have responded by offering lots of new minimalist models, are being swept up a little too easily themselves.
It's going to take me a while to sort this all out (and to learn more about the "barefoot debate"), but my present inclination is to think a lot of runners may have overreacted to the romance of the Born-to-Run cult. Philosophically, I like the idea of taking a cue from our ancient ancestors. (We need to do that in a lot of ways beyond just how we decide on footwear, as I discuss on the website http://www.willhumansendure.com/.) I think the science of the Running Man theory is sound. But civilization has subjected us to 10,000 years of cultural intervention and breeding that have separated us from our origins so drastically that it's unrealistic to think we can simply throw off our shoes and run free. Some can, but a lot of us can't. If you're starting to run at age 30 or 40 and have spent three or four decades letting your feet be carried around in rigid plastic or leather coffins on smooth floors or pavement, the muscles, tendons, and bones in your feet may retain very little of the strength and resilience our ancient ancestors had--or that today's Tarahumara still have. You may be better off doing what I did when I got those green-and-white Adidas. That was 52 years ago, and I'm still running strong. I have never bothered with shoes that cost $100 or more (McDougall is more on target in suggesting that buying one of the more expensive models can be a fool's errand), and for the past few years I've been happy with fairly basic Saucony or Asics models priced around $60 to $80, which have the same basic features those magical Adidas shoes had half a century ago. I hope the shoe companies keep making shoes like that for people like me. And if Chris McDougall would like to set up another "greatest race the world has never seen" with some of the over-70-year-old Tarahumara included, those guys can run in their sandals and I'll be there in my Sauconys. And I think I'll do pretty well.
I say "belated" because I see that a lot of the impetus for this phenomenon came from the huge popularity of Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run, which I admit I did not read until quite recently. McDougall recounts the story of the barefoot-running or minimalist-sandals-running Tarahumara Indians of Mexico's remote Barrancas del Cobre (Copper Canyons), and then spins off into the history of the modern running shoe. His basic messages are (1) that the Tarahumara are the greatest runners in the world by far, and (2) that the modern running shoe is a terrible thing, ignorantly designed and cynically marketed for profit at the expense of thousands of unnecessarily injured runners, including McDougall.
I'm a little embarrassed to be reacting so belatedly, because I may be the most experienced long-distance runner in America (is there anyone else out there who has run competitively for 54 consecutive years?) and my experience has incuded (1) fairly good knowledge of the Tarahumara, and (2) fairly extensive familiarity with the history of the modern running shoe. In 1977, as the founding editor of Running Times magazine, I published three articles about the Tarahumara, and in 1984 a fourth article--shortly before the first scientific articles on the "Running Man" theory of human evolution were published.. And what our articles made clear is that while the Tarahumara are indeed amazing, they are not uniquely amazing. What made them remarkable was not that their best runners were "superathletes," as suggested by the subtitle of McDougall's book, but that everyone in their society runs. We of the USA have superathletes too (as McDougall eventually acknowledges), but we also have a huge number of people who are sadly sendentary and soft.
In the way he starts his story, suggesting that there 's a kind of god-like superhuman out there in the canyons somewhere, McDougall is over the top, as I'll discuss in a forthcoming post devoted specifically to reviewing his book. (And by the way, I won't totally trash the book, because in some respects it is really good.) And as for the origins and future of the modern running shoe--well, I think McDougall is just plain wrong. At Running Times, I published numerous independent reviews (by sports podiatrists and test runners) of running shoes from all the manufacturers--Adidas, Tiger (later Asics), New Balance, Nike, Etonic, Saucony, Brooks, Lydiard, Hi-Tec, Reebok, Turntec, Puma, and a few others. Over the years, we got feedback from hundreds of experts on biomechanics, anatomy, sports inuries, etc., and I don't think they could all have been as blindered as Born to Run suggests.
McDougall writes that the modern running shoe was invented by Nike's co-founder Bill Bowerman in 1972, and that Bowerman didn't know diddly about running. Which is a little like saying Dwight Eisenhower didn't know diddly about war. His implication seems to be that until Bowerman came along, all running shoes were what we'd now call minimalist. The new "modern" shoes introduced cushioning, pronation control, and more rubber under the heel, etc. McDougall's assessment is that these new developments were big mistakes. I disagree. Minimalist-shoe or barefoot running may be great for some people, but for others those modern shoes he disparages were a godsend.
I ran in my first pair of modern running shoes before McDougall was born, and long before Nike existed, so those shoes couldn't have been invented by Nike! (The waffle sole, yes, but the enhanced cushioning and stability, no.) I had started running cross country at Westfield (New Jersey) Senior High School in 1956, and all the kids on my team were given the standard distance-running shoes of that era--low-cut, black canvas-top shoes with no cushioning and only a small, narrow outsole under the heel. They were what we'd now call minimalist. But then I heard about the new kind of running shoe that some of the top runners were wearing, that you could get from a company called Adidas. I couldn't find a store anywhere in New Jersey that sold them, but I heard that you could get them at a place called Carlson Import Shoe Co, in New York City. I caught a train to New York and found the company in a dingy, second-story walk-up in lower Manhattan. There wasn't even a sign on the street. The shoes I bought were green and white, with kangaroo-skin uppers (later made illegal), good cushioning, and nice support in the heel. They fit me like kid gloves. They were magic, and I wish I still had them. I went from 7th man on my team to 7th in the state championship.
The thing is, those Adidas shoes were a huge improvement, at least for me, over the canvas flats. Today, I see tens of thousands of runners (many of them fairly new to the sport) going in the opposite direction, swept up in the thrall of McDougall's "naked tour" and the romance of the myth of the barefoot Tarahumara, denouncing the shoes of the past four decades as rip-offs. And I wonder if the shoe manufacturers, who have responded by offering lots of new minimalist models, are being swept up a little too easily themselves.
It's going to take me a while to sort this all out (and to learn more about the "barefoot debate"), but my present inclination is to think a lot of runners may have overreacted to the romance of the Born-to-Run cult. Philosophically, I like the idea of taking a cue from our ancient ancestors. (We need to do that in a lot of ways beyond just how we decide on footwear, as I discuss on the website http://www.willhumansendure.com/.) I think the science of the Running Man theory is sound. But civilization has subjected us to 10,000 years of cultural intervention and breeding that have separated us from our origins so drastically that it's unrealistic to think we can simply throw off our shoes and run free. Some can, but a lot of us can't. If you're starting to run at age 30 or 40 and have spent three or four decades letting your feet be carried around in rigid plastic or leather coffins on smooth floors or pavement, the muscles, tendons, and bones in your feet may retain very little of the strength and resilience our ancient ancestors had--or that today's Tarahumara still have. You may be better off doing what I did when I got those green-and-white Adidas. That was 52 years ago, and I'm still running strong. I have never bothered with shoes that cost $100 or more (McDougall is more on target in suggesting that buying one of the more expensive models can be a fool's errand), and for the past few years I've been happy with fairly basic Saucony or Asics models priced around $60 to $80, which have the same basic features those magical Adidas shoes had half a century ago. I hope the shoe companies keep making shoes like that for people like me. And if Chris McDougall would like to set up another "greatest race the world has never seen" with some of the over-70-year-old Tarahumara included, those guys can run in their sandals and I'll be there in my Sauconys. And I think I'll do pretty well.
Monday, May 2, 2011
John F. Kennedy and the Origin of Modern Ultrarunning
NOTE: This is a followup to my last blog, about President John F. Kennedy's worries that Americans were becoming too physically and mentally soft.
In the winter of 1962-63, during his ruminations about whether Americans were fit enough to meet the challenges of an increasingly dangerous age, President Kennedy came across an Executive Order that had been written half a century earlier by another president who valued physical vigor and had been similarly concerned. In 1908, Teddy Roosevelt had declared that all U.S. Marines should be able to prove their fitness by walking 50 miles in three days, doing the last half-mile by alternating 200 yards of double-time marching and 30 seconds of rest, then sprinting the final 200 yards. The records showed that some of TR's officers had done the distance in one day, and Kennedy wondered whether the Marines of 1963 were as fit as those of 1908. He sent a memo to the Marine commandant, General David Shoup, suggesting "Why don't you send this [Roosevelt's order] back to me as your own discovery? You might want to add a comment that today's Marine Corps officers are just as fit as those of 1980, and are willing to prove it. I, in turn, will ask Mr. Salinger [Pierre Salinger, the White House Press Secretary] for a report on the fitness of the White House staff."
That began the great "50-mile walk" phenomenon of 1963--a phenomenon that was regarded both then and later largely as a "craze". On February 5, the White House put out a press release about Roosevelt's order, noting that the president had suggested to General Shoup that he find out how well his Marines could do, compared with Teddy Roosevelt's Marines. A group of officers was called up to do the test. However, JFK's brother, Bobby Kennedy, decided he was going to do it too, and wasn't going to wait for the Marines. That Sunday, Bobby set out on a 50-mile hike with four of his aides, on the C&O Canal Towpath from the Washington, DC suburbs to Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The weather was freezing, the towpath was covered with slush, and one by one the aides all dropped out. As the last one quit at mile 35, Bobby Kennedy said to him, "You're lucky your brother isn't president of the United States." Kennedy reached 50 miles in 17 hours, 50 minutes.
Within days, thousands of civilians, likewise, had responded to the challenge intended for Marine officers. A 15-year-old, Paul Kiczek, did the distance and decades later revisited the experience in an Internet search of 1963 newspaper stories about the hikes. A New Jersey newspaper, The Daily Record, reported on February 15, 1963 that a 24-year-old policeman and ex-Marine, Francis wulff, had done the feat on the spur of the moment. "I read about some army officers shooting off their mouths about the Marines and I decided to give it a try," Wulff told the reporter. On February 16, the same paper reported that a group of eight teenagers from Boonton, New Jersey had set out in sub-freezing weather and three had gone the distance. One of them, 17-year-old Ken Middleton, remarkably finished the 50 miles in under 12 hours--which meant he had to have run a good part of the distance. On February 22, the paper reported that The Mansion House Tavern, in Boonton, had announced a competition, a "Fifty-Mile Endurance Walk," to take place on March 10, with a $25 Savings Bond for the winner and free draft beer for everyone who finished. Meanwhile, in Marin County, California, 400 high-school students set out to do the 50 miles, presumably even without the incentive of free beer, and 97 of them finished.
Across the country, the "fad" was met with quick scorn and skepticism from medical and health experts.
From the American Medical Association: "People can endanger themselves. We get distressed when people go out and strain themselves."
From the National Recreation Association: "The 50-mile hike verges on insanity."
From the Soviet Union's Olympic track coach: "So a man walks 50 miles in one day--what of it? Tomorrow he catches a taxicab again to go four blocks."
So, what was Kennedy thinking? Had he had second thoughts about his comment [in his Sports Illustrated article] that his goal was not to train our youth to be warriors like the ancient Spartans? One clue may be that unlike some of the more cocksure politicians who would succeed him, Kennedy had an abiding interest in military history and in the rises and falls of empires. He may have been more conscious than some of his generals that in the history of civilization, the capacity to conquer or destroy often turns out to be only the beginning of the story. Often, a decisive part of the story is a people's capacity to wait and endure. JFK was doubtless familiar with the history of the Arab revolt led by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in 1917, which dramatically demonstrated how consequential that capacity can be. The British, who were encouraging the revolt against the Ottoman Empire, wanted the Arabs to attack the Turks at their stronghold in Medina. But whereas the Turks had thousands of men, Lawrence had only a few hundred. The Turks had unassailable power, but the Arabs had something else--an ability to hit and run, striking repeatedly at the railroad that supplied the Turkish garrison. With all their heavy armor, the Turks couldn't effectively chase down their attackers, who travelled light and could fade into the desert, In his well-researched article in the May 11, 2009 New Yorker, "How David Beats Goliath," Malcolm Gladwell notes that Lawrence led his Bedouins over 600 miles in summer heat while the Turks stayed fixed in their garrison. He quotes Lawrence: "Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets are movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of country...." In the end, the tribesmen killed or captured 1,200 Turks while losing only two men of their own. In this context, Gladwell quotes the 15th-century French general Maurice de Saxe, who famously said that the art of war is about legs, not arms. And, noted Gladwell, "Lawrence's troops were all legs."
However, I suspect Kennedy wasn't just thinking about the physical endurance of the Marines, but a broader set of concerns: the role of persistence as well as power, of patience as a reality check to impulsive urgency, and the long view as an essential factor in planning, especially in response to emergencies. I wonder if he may have sensed, even before its outlines were clear, that the world was headed toward a global emergency even more all-encompassing--and fateful--than that of the global war that had ended a few years earlier. Scientists had not yet foreseen the specter of catastrophic climate change. And the threats of ecological failure, resource wars, peak oil, and Malthusian outcomes were then only faint shadows on the horizon. Whatever JFK had in mind, he never got to fully explain in a thoughtful memoir,or even in policy discussions, as his life was suddenly cut off. But his call was taken to heart by more than just the Marines.
A few months after the 50-mile phenomenon began, President Kennedy was assassinated and the hiking party was over. The accepted view was that it all had been basically a fad, and that with the charismatic president gone, whatever real inspireation there had been in it had died with him. The decade would quickly turn to graver, and more turbulent, concerns. If anyone had sensed that personal fitness might be a precondition for societal wellbeing, that sense was numbed by the violence of the following years--from the assassination of Martin Luther King and Kennedy's brother Bobby, to the Vietnam War, the protests and riots, and the fast-spreading drug culture--a much quicker route to gratification in a country where ever-quicker routes were becoming the rule of the rising sprint culture-- than taking long hikes on winter days. Even as seemingly well-researched a history as Paul Kiczek's posting on the JFK hikes concluded that by the mid-1960s, the 50-mile fad had ended. "Interestingly, only one 50-mile event appears to remain active in the U.S.," Kiczek quite mistakenly wrote in 2009. Maybe he can be excused for not knowing, because such events are almost never seen or mentioned by sports shows or reporters, and rarely seen by the general public, as they usually take place on remote mountain or desert trails. But in fact, more than 500 ultramarathons were held in the United States that year. And the number has continued to grow since then.
The "one remaining" event Kiczek referred to was the appropriately named "JFK 50-mile," which was first held in 1963 and has been held every year since. The JFK 50 started as a hike, was soon changed to a "hike/run" and then to just the "JFK 50-mile run." It is the largest ultra in the U.S., and probably second only to Western States as the most competitive. This fall will be its 49th year, and I plan to be running.
In the winter of 1962-63, during his ruminations about whether Americans were fit enough to meet the challenges of an increasingly dangerous age, President Kennedy came across an Executive Order that had been written half a century earlier by another president who valued physical vigor and had been similarly concerned. In 1908, Teddy Roosevelt had declared that all U.S. Marines should be able to prove their fitness by walking 50 miles in three days, doing the last half-mile by alternating 200 yards of double-time marching and 30 seconds of rest, then sprinting the final 200 yards. The records showed that some of TR's officers had done the distance in one day, and Kennedy wondered whether the Marines of 1963 were as fit as those of 1908. He sent a memo to the Marine commandant, General David Shoup, suggesting "Why don't you send this [Roosevelt's order] back to me as your own discovery? You might want to add a comment that today's Marine Corps officers are just as fit as those of 1980, and are willing to prove it. I, in turn, will ask Mr. Salinger [Pierre Salinger, the White House Press Secretary] for a report on the fitness of the White House staff."
That began the great "50-mile walk" phenomenon of 1963--a phenomenon that was regarded both then and later largely as a "craze". On February 5, the White House put out a press release about Roosevelt's order, noting that the president had suggested to General Shoup that he find out how well his Marines could do, compared with Teddy Roosevelt's Marines. A group of officers was called up to do the test. However, JFK's brother, Bobby Kennedy, decided he was going to do it too, and wasn't going to wait for the Marines. That Sunday, Bobby set out on a 50-mile hike with four of his aides, on the C&O Canal Towpath from the Washington, DC suburbs to Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The weather was freezing, the towpath was covered with slush, and one by one the aides all dropped out. As the last one quit at mile 35, Bobby Kennedy said to him, "You're lucky your brother isn't president of the United States." Kennedy reached 50 miles in 17 hours, 50 minutes.
Within days, thousands of civilians, likewise, had responded to the challenge intended for Marine officers. A 15-year-old, Paul Kiczek, did the distance and decades later revisited the experience in an Internet search of 1963 newspaper stories about the hikes. A New Jersey newspaper, The Daily Record, reported on February 15, 1963 that a 24-year-old policeman and ex-Marine, Francis wulff, had done the feat on the spur of the moment. "I read about some army officers shooting off their mouths about the Marines and I decided to give it a try," Wulff told the reporter. On February 16, the same paper reported that a group of eight teenagers from Boonton, New Jersey had set out in sub-freezing weather and three had gone the distance. One of them, 17-year-old Ken Middleton, remarkably finished the 50 miles in under 12 hours--which meant he had to have run a good part of the distance. On February 22, the paper reported that The Mansion House Tavern, in Boonton, had announced a competition, a "Fifty-Mile Endurance Walk," to take place on March 10, with a $25 Savings Bond for the winner and free draft beer for everyone who finished. Meanwhile, in Marin County, California, 400 high-school students set out to do the 50 miles, presumably even without the incentive of free beer, and 97 of them finished.
Across the country, the "fad" was met with quick scorn and skepticism from medical and health experts.
From the American Medical Association: "People can endanger themselves. We get distressed when people go out and strain themselves."
From the National Recreation Association: "The 50-mile hike verges on insanity."
From the Soviet Union's Olympic track coach: "So a man walks 50 miles in one day--what of it? Tomorrow he catches a taxicab again to go four blocks."
So, what was Kennedy thinking? Had he had second thoughts about his comment [in his Sports Illustrated article] that his goal was not to train our youth to be warriors like the ancient Spartans? One clue may be that unlike some of the more cocksure politicians who would succeed him, Kennedy had an abiding interest in military history and in the rises and falls of empires. He may have been more conscious than some of his generals that in the history of civilization, the capacity to conquer or destroy often turns out to be only the beginning of the story. Often, a decisive part of the story is a people's capacity to wait and endure. JFK was doubtless familiar with the history of the Arab revolt led by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in 1917, which dramatically demonstrated how consequential that capacity can be. The British, who were encouraging the revolt against the Ottoman Empire, wanted the Arabs to attack the Turks at their stronghold in Medina. But whereas the Turks had thousands of men, Lawrence had only a few hundred. The Turks had unassailable power, but the Arabs had something else--an ability to hit and run, striking repeatedly at the railroad that supplied the Turkish garrison. With all their heavy armor, the Turks couldn't effectively chase down their attackers, who travelled light and could fade into the desert, In his well-researched article in the May 11, 2009 New Yorker, "How David Beats Goliath," Malcolm Gladwell notes that Lawrence led his Bedouins over 600 miles in summer heat while the Turks stayed fixed in their garrison. He quotes Lawrence: "Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets are movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of country...." In the end, the tribesmen killed or captured 1,200 Turks while losing only two men of their own. In this context, Gladwell quotes the 15th-century French general Maurice de Saxe, who famously said that the art of war is about legs, not arms. And, noted Gladwell, "Lawrence's troops were all legs."
However, I suspect Kennedy wasn't just thinking about the physical endurance of the Marines, but a broader set of concerns: the role of persistence as well as power, of patience as a reality check to impulsive urgency, and the long view as an essential factor in planning, especially in response to emergencies. I wonder if he may have sensed, even before its outlines were clear, that the world was headed toward a global emergency even more all-encompassing--and fateful--than that of the global war that had ended a few years earlier. Scientists had not yet foreseen the specter of catastrophic climate change. And the threats of ecological failure, resource wars, peak oil, and Malthusian outcomes were then only faint shadows on the horizon. Whatever JFK had in mind, he never got to fully explain in a thoughtful memoir,or even in policy discussions, as his life was suddenly cut off. But his call was taken to heart by more than just the Marines.
A few months after the 50-mile phenomenon began, President Kennedy was assassinated and the hiking party was over. The accepted view was that it all had been basically a fad, and that with the charismatic president gone, whatever real inspireation there had been in it had died with him. The decade would quickly turn to graver, and more turbulent, concerns. If anyone had sensed that personal fitness might be a precondition for societal wellbeing, that sense was numbed by the violence of the following years--from the assassination of Martin Luther King and Kennedy's brother Bobby, to the Vietnam War, the protests and riots, and the fast-spreading drug culture--a much quicker route to gratification in a country where ever-quicker routes were becoming the rule of the rising sprint culture-- than taking long hikes on winter days. Even as seemingly well-researched a history as Paul Kiczek's posting on the JFK hikes concluded that by the mid-1960s, the 50-mile fad had ended. "Interestingly, only one 50-mile event appears to remain active in the U.S.," Kiczek quite mistakenly wrote in 2009. Maybe he can be excused for not knowing, because such events are almost never seen or mentioned by sports shows or reporters, and rarely seen by the general public, as they usually take place on remote mountain or desert trails. But in fact, more than 500 ultramarathons were held in the United States that year. And the number has continued to grow since then.
The "one remaining" event Kiczek referred to was the appropriately named "JFK 50-mile," which was first held in 1963 and has been held every year since. The JFK 50 started as a hike, was soon changed to a "hike/run" and then to just the "JFK 50-mile run." It is the largest ultra in the U.S., and probably second only to Western States as the most competitive. This fall will be its 49th year, and I plan to be running.
Friday, April 22, 2011
The "Soft American" Problem
This fall, I plan to run in the JFK 50-Mile again--I think for the 15th time, although I've lost count. (The photo at the top of this page is from last year's JFK, and I apologize for keeping it there so long--I'm a real dunce with photography and will replace it and add new images in the next couple of weeks, I hope!) At JFK, I'll be going into the age 70-79 division this year, and hope to show that some of us old guys can run too!
I noticed, on the JFK-50 website, that this will be the 49th annual running of that race, and it reminded me of the reason the race has that name. Fifty years ago last December, president-elect John F. Kennedy wrote an article for Sports Illustrated, "The Soft American," in which he began by observing that the ancient Greeks considered physical excellence to be "among man's greatest goals and among the prime foundations of a vigorous state." He wote:
This knowledge . . . that the physical well-being of the citizen is an
important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of
the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge
which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.
Kennedy then reviewed a fairly shocking litany facts that had been the basis of his concern, and when I read it, just recently, I was struck by how prescient he had been about the "danger of forgetting." Among those now forgotten facts:
- Almost half of all young Americans examined by the Selective Service
in the late 1950s were rejected by the military as mentally, morally, or
physically unfit.
- In six tests of muscular strength and flexibility given to 4,264 American
children and 2,870 children in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland over
fifteen years of research, 57% of the American children failed one or
more of the tests while only 9 percent of the European children failed.
- In physical fitness tests given to freshmen at Yale University, there
had been a steady decline in the number who passed--from 51% in
1951 to 43% in 1956 to just 38% in 1960.
In calling for greater attention to the fitness of the country's kids, Kennedy also emphasized that "we do not, like the ancient Spartans, wish to train the bodies of our youth to make them more effective warriors." Rather, he was suggesting something both more radical and, ultimately, far more important:
Physical fitness is as vital to the activities of peace as to those of
war.... It is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The
relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of
the mind is subtle and complex. Much of it is not yet understood.
But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill
can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy
and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound
bodies. . . . If we fail to encourage physical development and prowess,
we will undermine our capacity for thought, for work, and for the use
of those skills vital to an expanding and complex America.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, soon after he took office, Kennedy might well have wondered if the CIA and military had done their planning in a stupor. (Half a century later, as we drift into the 10th or 11th year of Orwellian war in Afghanistan, have we learned anything at all?) And then, with the escalating development of hydrogen bombs hundreds of times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, something far more ominous loomed--the nuclear arms race punctuated by the Cuban missile crisis, which came terrifyingly close to raining Armageddon on our country.
Kennedy's "New Frontier" was aimed at breaking America out of its mid-century complacency. As a visionary leader, he would be remembered most for his call to launch the Apollo moon-flight program, which would amazingly land a man on the moon within a decade. But in retrospect, it was the call he made for a tougher, more physically and mentally fit citizenry that may ultimately have been the more important call.
A couple of years after writing his "Soft American" article, president Kennedy followed up with another initiative that captured the imaginations of thousands of Americans and resulted in the launch of the great 50-mile trail race that now bears his name.
Next post: JFK and the rise of ultrarunning in 20th-century America
I noticed, on the JFK-50 website, that this will be the 49th annual running of that race, and it reminded me of the reason the race has that name. Fifty years ago last December, president-elect John F. Kennedy wrote an article for Sports Illustrated, "The Soft American," in which he began by observing that the ancient Greeks considered physical excellence to be "among man's greatest goals and among the prime foundations of a vigorous state." He wote:
This knowledge . . . that the physical well-being of the citizen is an
important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of
the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge
which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.
Kennedy then reviewed a fairly shocking litany facts that had been the basis of his concern, and when I read it, just recently, I was struck by how prescient he had been about the "danger of forgetting." Among those now forgotten facts:
- Almost half of all young Americans examined by the Selective Service
in the late 1950s were rejected by the military as mentally, morally, or
physically unfit.
- In six tests of muscular strength and flexibility given to 4,264 American
children and 2,870 children in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland over
fifteen years of research, 57% of the American children failed one or
more of the tests while only 9 percent of the European children failed.
- In physical fitness tests given to freshmen at Yale University, there
had been a steady decline in the number who passed--from 51% in
1951 to 43% in 1956 to just 38% in 1960.
In calling for greater attention to the fitness of the country's kids, Kennedy also emphasized that "we do not, like the ancient Spartans, wish to train the bodies of our youth to make them more effective warriors." Rather, he was suggesting something both more radical and, ultimately, far more important:
Physical fitness is as vital to the activities of peace as to those of
war.... It is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The
relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of
the mind is subtle and complex. Much of it is not yet understood.
But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill
can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy
and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound
bodies. . . . If we fail to encourage physical development and prowess,
we will undermine our capacity for thought, for work, and for the use
of those skills vital to an expanding and complex America.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, soon after he took office, Kennedy might well have wondered if the CIA and military had done their planning in a stupor. (Half a century later, as we drift into the 10th or 11th year of Orwellian war in Afghanistan, have we learned anything at all?) And then, with the escalating development of hydrogen bombs hundreds of times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, something far more ominous loomed--the nuclear arms race punctuated by the Cuban missile crisis, which came terrifyingly close to raining Armageddon on our country.
Kennedy's "New Frontier" was aimed at breaking America out of its mid-century complacency. As a visionary leader, he would be remembered most for his call to launch the Apollo moon-flight program, which would amazingly land a man on the moon within a decade. But in retrospect, it was the call he made for a tougher, more physically and mentally fit citizenry that may ultimately have been the more important call.
A couple of years after writing his "Soft American" article, president Kennedy followed up with another initiative that captured the imaginations of thousands of Americans and resulted in the launch of the great 50-mile trail race that now bears his name.
Next post: JFK and the rise of ultrarunning in 20th-century America
Monday, March 21, 2011
Toes, Heels, and Human Evolution
Maybe you heard the news of a study about the lengths of people's toes (seriously), a couple of years ago. Published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, it found that people who have short toes use a lot less energy to run, but not to walk, than people with long toes. Also in the past few years, several popular books attracted attention to the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico's remote Copper Canyon, who run long distances barefoot or with minimal sandals. I have the impression that both of these events have contributed to the growing popularity of the minimalist running shoe movement. Remember when running shoe experts always advised us to allow an extra half-size of space in the toe box? That, plus the sturdy toe box material itself, effectively made our toes longer. If only I'd known! Over three decades ago (in 1977 and 1980), I published four articles on the Tarahumara in Running Times. But in those days, most long-distance running was on roads, where there was often a lot of glass shards and trash, and barefoot running probably didn't sound like much fun. Now, more of us run on trails, like the Tarahumara.
OK, you might say, so the lengths of toes vary from one person to another, just as the lengths of our whole bodies do. But why was that worth spending research money on, and why did it make headlines? Would anyone pay grant money to study whether long-bodied (tall) people are more likely to be good basketball players?
The answer is, the real signficance of this wasn't about comparing different groups of people, but about comparing people with other primates. Humans have shorter toes than apes and other primates, but the implications of that weren't entirely clear until the energy-use discovery was reported by two anthropologists interested in human evolution--Campbell Rolan of the University of Calgary and Daniel Lieberman of Harvard. Suddenly, a theory about human evolution that had been on the margins of academic paleoanthropology--the "persistence hunting" theory that humans evolved not as bipedal walkers but as bipedal long-distance runners--moved a little closer to being widely accepted.
With the aid of hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Over the past half-century, I've been through a whole odyssey of encounters with questions about how we runners should touch down and push off our feet, and what kinds of shoes we should wear--or not!
My odyssey began with my first year of high-school cross-country in 1956, when my coach, who apparently had never been a runner himself, shouted repeatedly, "Run on your toes! Run on your toes!" I did, and it seemed to work out well. Where he got that advice, I'm not sure. Maybe it was one of those old chestnuts passed down from coach to coach, like "No pain, no gain!" (dead wrong) or "Never drink water during a hard workout" (dead wrong and deadly, but common belief in the 1950s). Or, maybe he'd watched track meets and noticed that all the sprinters and quarter-milers ran on their forefeet (true). In any case, I didn't question it and my running went well.
But a few years later, I found one day that both of my feet were in extreme pain. I went to an orthopedist, who told me I had collapsed my arches, would never be able to run again, and would have to wear full-lenth, rigid stainless steel arch supports in my shoes for the rest of my life.
I liked running way too much to take that seriously, soon started running again (and wearing the steel arch supports only in my street shoes), and have run another 45 years without a break since then. After about ten years I lost one of the steel supports, so I gladly threw away the other. I replaced them with plastic orthotics--but again, only in my street shoes. When I run, I want to feel the earth under me.
I continued to run on my "toes" (landing on the forefoot) until 1965, I think it was, when I decided to do my first marathon--the Cherry Tree Marathon in the Bronx. At around 17 miles, I caught up with a guy named Ted Corbitt, who'd been on the U.S. Olympic marathon team in the 1950s and was kind of a legend among the New York-area runners. Ted had been one of the founders of the Road Runners Club of America, and is now remembered as the father of American ultrarunning. By the mid-60s, he had slowed, but was still running road races and was a great inspiration to younger guys like me. When I pulled even with him, I saw him glance at my feet. Then he kind of smiled, and said, "You know, you'd probably run better if you let yourself land on your heels!" I was awestruck; it was as if I were a Little League kid who'd suddenly been offered personal advice by Micky Mantle!
Over the next four months, I took Ted Corbitt's advice to heart (or should I say "heart and sole"), and relaxed my gait, letting my feet touch down lightly on the heel, roll forward, and push off the forefoot. In retrospect, I think that one sentence from Ted Corbitt probably extended my running life by 20 years. Today, at age 69, I run much more mileage than I did in high school, and my feet feel as good now as they did at 16.
Which brings me back to the study of toe-lengths. I don't know whether the researchers addressed the question of forefoot (toe) strike vs. heel strike, and the rather important biomechanical difference between sprinting and long-distance running. For a sprinter, long toes wouldn't be a handicap, at least as far as energy use goes. You don't see a 200-meter guy stopping to grab a banana at the 100-meter aid station! Even a 1500 meter runner is only going to use less than a tenth of the glycogen energy stored in his muscles, so he can run for maximum power rather than be concerned about energy conservation. And indeed, as far as I know, all top middle-distance runners, as well as sprinters, are forefoot runners. They take more energy, but also get more leverage and lift. The design of a drag-race car doesn't care about MPG.
And finally, that brings us back to the implication of short toes for the evolution of humans. For decades, evolutionary scientists tended to dismiss this theory on the grounds that running could hardly be a survival advantage for early humans (hominids) because hominids were slower than all the animals they were chasing, or that might chase and kill them. What the persistence-hunting theorists suggested was that when the slow-footed hominids chased a faster animal like an antelope, the animal would easily dash away but would soon tire and have to stop for rest. The hominids were slower but had developed greater endurance, and would keep coming. The quarry would dash away again, stop again . . . and after a series of such escapes would finally be too exhausted to continue, and the hominids would catch up and kill it with a rock. (We described the Tarahumara doing just this, in our 1977 articles.) The Darwinian advantage for the humans, then, was not speed but endurance.
To me, that fact has huge implications not just about the human past, but also about our future. Right now, I think it's clear that humanity is in trouble. In the increasingly hectic and often frantic rush of modern civilization, we have become infatuated with speed and power in all things. As a consequence, we may be inadvertently abandoning the very qualities that enabled us to be good survivors--the qualities that brought us to the dance. Part of my argument is that with endurance came other qualities essential to long-run survival: patience and ability to anticipate what the eyes cannot yet see. I'm exploring this concern in a separate website, http://www.willhumansendure.com/. Comments are welcome!
OK, you might say, so the lengths of toes vary from one person to another, just as the lengths of our whole bodies do. But why was that worth spending research money on, and why did it make headlines? Would anyone pay grant money to study whether long-bodied (tall) people are more likely to be good basketball players?
The answer is, the real signficance of this wasn't about comparing different groups of people, but about comparing people with other primates. Humans have shorter toes than apes and other primates, but the implications of that weren't entirely clear until the energy-use discovery was reported by two anthropologists interested in human evolution--Campbell Rolan of the University of Calgary and Daniel Lieberman of Harvard. Suddenly, a theory about human evolution that had been on the margins of academic paleoanthropology--the "persistence hunting" theory that humans evolved not as bipedal walkers but as bipedal long-distance runners--moved a little closer to being widely accepted.
With the aid of hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Over the past half-century, I've been through a whole odyssey of encounters with questions about how we runners should touch down and push off our feet, and what kinds of shoes we should wear--or not!
My odyssey began with my first year of high-school cross-country in 1956, when my coach, who apparently had never been a runner himself, shouted repeatedly, "Run on your toes! Run on your toes!" I did, and it seemed to work out well. Where he got that advice, I'm not sure. Maybe it was one of those old chestnuts passed down from coach to coach, like "No pain, no gain!" (dead wrong) or "Never drink water during a hard workout" (dead wrong and deadly, but common belief in the 1950s). Or, maybe he'd watched track meets and noticed that all the sprinters and quarter-milers ran on their forefeet (true). In any case, I didn't question it and my running went well.
But a few years later, I found one day that both of my feet were in extreme pain. I went to an orthopedist, who told me I had collapsed my arches, would never be able to run again, and would have to wear full-lenth, rigid stainless steel arch supports in my shoes for the rest of my life.
I liked running way too much to take that seriously, soon started running again (and wearing the steel arch supports only in my street shoes), and have run another 45 years without a break since then. After about ten years I lost one of the steel supports, so I gladly threw away the other. I replaced them with plastic orthotics--but again, only in my street shoes. When I run, I want to feel the earth under me.
I continued to run on my "toes" (landing on the forefoot) until 1965, I think it was, when I decided to do my first marathon--the Cherry Tree Marathon in the Bronx. At around 17 miles, I caught up with a guy named Ted Corbitt, who'd been on the U.S. Olympic marathon team in the 1950s and was kind of a legend among the New York-area runners. Ted had been one of the founders of the Road Runners Club of America, and is now remembered as the father of American ultrarunning. By the mid-60s, he had slowed, but was still running road races and was a great inspiration to younger guys like me. When I pulled even with him, I saw him glance at my feet. Then he kind of smiled, and said, "You know, you'd probably run better if you let yourself land on your heels!" I was awestruck; it was as if I were a Little League kid who'd suddenly been offered personal advice by Micky Mantle!
Over the next four months, I took Ted Corbitt's advice to heart (or should I say "heart and sole"), and relaxed my gait, letting my feet touch down lightly on the heel, roll forward, and push off the forefoot. In retrospect, I think that one sentence from Ted Corbitt probably extended my running life by 20 years. Today, at age 69, I run much more mileage than I did in high school, and my feet feel as good now as they did at 16.
Which brings me back to the study of toe-lengths. I don't know whether the researchers addressed the question of forefoot (toe) strike vs. heel strike, and the rather important biomechanical difference between sprinting and long-distance running. For a sprinter, long toes wouldn't be a handicap, at least as far as energy use goes. You don't see a 200-meter guy stopping to grab a banana at the 100-meter aid station! Even a 1500 meter runner is only going to use less than a tenth of the glycogen energy stored in his muscles, so he can run for maximum power rather than be concerned about energy conservation. And indeed, as far as I know, all top middle-distance runners, as well as sprinters, are forefoot runners. They take more energy, but also get more leverage and lift. The design of a drag-race car doesn't care about MPG.
And finally, that brings us back to the implication of short toes for the evolution of humans. For decades, evolutionary scientists tended to dismiss this theory on the grounds that running could hardly be a survival advantage for early humans (hominids) because hominids were slower than all the animals they were chasing, or that might chase and kill them. What the persistence-hunting theorists suggested was that when the slow-footed hominids chased a faster animal like an antelope, the animal would easily dash away but would soon tire and have to stop for rest. The hominids were slower but had developed greater endurance, and would keep coming. The quarry would dash away again, stop again . . . and after a series of such escapes would finally be too exhausted to continue, and the hominids would catch up and kill it with a rock. (We described the Tarahumara doing just this, in our 1977 articles.) The Darwinian advantage for the humans, then, was not speed but endurance.
To me, that fact has huge implications not just about the human past, but also about our future. Right now, I think it's clear that humanity is in trouble. In the increasingly hectic and often frantic rush of modern civilization, we have become infatuated with speed and power in all things. As a consequence, we may be inadvertently abandoning the very qualities that enabled us to be good survivors--the qualities that brought us to the dance. Part of my argument is that with endurance came other qualities essential to long-run survival: patience and ability to anticipate what the eyes cannot yet see. I'm exploring this concern in a separate website, http://www.willhumansendure.com/. Comments are welcome!
Friday, March 11, 2011
Overcoming Adversity, and the Amazing Story of Anne Audain
In my last post, I ruminated about competitiveness, and how conflicted I can be about whether competitiveness is the magical trait we Americans have been taught from the time we were old enough to run to first base in Little League. Yesterday, I got an email from a woman who ranks among the top competitive runners of all time, and her story puts a whole different light on my question. If you are old enough to recall the golden age of road running, in the 1980s (before a lot of us gravitated to the trails), you know the name Anne Audain. Anne was born with deformed feet, and couldn't walk correctly until she had reconstructive surgery at age 13. Three years later, she qualified as a middle-distance runner for the New Zealand Olympic team! She then came to the United States to run in our major road races. In the 1980s, Anne Audain won more races than any other runner in the world. For Anne, competitiveness was a path to leaving adversity in the dust. And she reminds me that that's been true for many others. Here's the email she sent me yesterday:
Ed,
30 years ago this month, I arrived in the United States at age 25 from my native New Zealand, in hopes of reviving a running career laid to rest by the 1980 Olympic boycott and a tough time with my first coach. At the end of 1980, I joined my second coach, John Davies, and he suggested I try going to the USA, where women were being given the chance to run the longer distances. You'll recall that at that time, the longest distance in the Olympic Games for women was 1500 meters. John thought I would be better at the longer distances.
I came with my savings, and my first race was the Crescent City CLassic 10K in New Orleans. Having come from an island nation, I questioned the city being below sea level, and asked what would happen if the levees broke! But I digress! I raced my first-ever 10K, finishing third behind Patti Catalano, who broke the American record, and Joan Benoit Samuelson -- I think you know her! I actually fell down at the start, and after recovering ran well enough to finish in 33 minutes, 12 seconds.
People were very encouraing and supportive, and I caught a train with Jeff Galloway and his wife Barbara to their home in Atlanta, where I stayed for two weeks Jeff introduced me to all the new changes in the sport. I then moved on to Eugene, Oregon, to join the Athletics West team.
Then it was on to Denver, Colorado, where I was introduced to altitude for the first time in my life. I thought I would die! There, Creigh Kelley found a running couple for me to live with, and became my first "agent"--at a time when the sport was still officially amateur. Fast-forward to June, 1981, when Phil Knight (co-founder of Nike) put up $50,000 in prize money for a race in Portland, Oregon, and encouraged us road-racers to attend and pledge to take a stand and turn the sport professional. The consequences of accepting any money as a runner at that time was a lifetime ban! I was running out of money, though, so I was happy to enter--and I won! I received a $10,000 prize and a lifetime ban as promised (later rescinded, as all the big races began offering prize money and giving runners a chance to earn a living at what they loved). I was also threatened with deportation, as I was here on a visitor's visa. My parents weren't too happy. But that race began a memorable decade for me, as I won 75 races in that span. Upon retirement in 1992, I founded what is now the largest 5K for women and children in the USA--the St. Luke's Women's Fitness Celebration in Boise, Idaho--a way to give back to a country that gave me so much!
No longer running in competition, but still happily running every day!
Anne Audain
Ed's note: Anne's website is http://www.anneaudain.com/, and the St. Luke's website is http://www.celebrateall.org/.
Ed,
30 years ago this month, I arrived in the United States at age 25 from my native New Zealand, in hopes of reviving a running career laid to rest by the 1980 Olympic boycott and a tough time with my first coach. At the end of 1980, I joined my second coach, John Davies, and he suggested I try going to the USA, where women were being given the chance to run the longer distances. You'll recall that at that time, the longest distance in the Olympic Games for women was 1500 meters. John thought I would be better at the longer distances.
I came with my savings, and my first race was the Crescent City CLassic 10K in New Orleans. Having come from an island nation, I questioned the city being below sea level, and asked what would happen if the levees broke! But I digress! I raced my first-ever 10K, finishing third behind Patti Catalano, who broke the American record, and Joan Benoit Samuelson -- I think you know her! I actually fell down at the start, and after recovering ran well enough to finish in 33 minutes, 12 seconds.
People were very encouraing and supportive, and I caught a train with Jeff Galloway and his wife Barbara to their home in Atlanta, where I stayed for two weeks Jeff introduced me to all the new changes in the sport. I then moved on to Eugene, Oregon, to join the Athletics West team.
Then it was on to Denver, Colorado, where I was introduced to altitude for the first time in my life. I thought I would die! There, Creigh Kelley found a running couple for me to live with, and became my first "agent"--at a time when the sport was still officially amateur. Fast-forward to June, 1981, when Phil Knight (co-founder of Nike) put up $50,000 in prize money for a race in Portland, Oregon, and encouraged us road-racers to attend and pledge to take a stand and turn the sport professional. The consequences of accepting any money as a runner at that time was a lifetime ban! I was running out of money, though, so I was happy to enter--and I won! I received a $10,000 prize and a lifetime ban as promised (later rescinded, as all the big races began offering prize money and giving runners a chance to earn a living at what they loved). I was also threatened with deportation, as I was here on a visitor's visa. My parents weren't too happy. But that race began a memorable decade for me, as I won 75 races in that span. Upon retirement in 1992, I founded what is now the largest 5K for women and children in the USA--the St. Luke's Women's Fitness Celebration in Boise, Idaho--a way to give back to a country that gave me so much!
No longer running in competition, but still happily running every day!
Anne Audain
Ed's note: Anne's website is http://www.anneaudain.com/, and the St. Luke's website is http://www.celebrateall.org/.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Do we all have to be competitive?
Here's a question I've been debating for the past 45 years. Are all runners, at heart, competitive? Are all humans? You may think the answer is obvious: it's Darwinian, it's in our nature. I don't know.
When I started Running Times in 1977, the idea was to have a magazine for "serious runners." I lived in Washington, D.C., and the D.C. Roadrunners would put on races every week or two, year-round. Maybe 50 of us hard-core runners would show up for each race. But there was a new phenomenon developing in those days -- the advent of the "jogging," and the booming popularity of recreational running as a means of losing weight, looking fit, and meeting members of the opposite sex. Some of us road racers found that whole scene a bit annoying. It was too commercial, for one thing. We began to see ads for ridiculous jogging products, apparently invented by people who wanted to cash in on the boom but had themselves never "jogged." One ad was for a jogger's rear-view mirror, which you were supposed to strap on your arm near the elbow. Of course, when you run your elbows swing back and forth, and I tried to imagine a runner swinging his head back and forth trying to see what was in his mirror. Wouldn't it be easier just to turn his head and look back? Another product we saw advertised was a pair of shoes with giant springs built in, ostensibly enabling the wearer to run in giant leaps like a kangaroo. I never did see a pair of those shoes at a road race.
Within a few years, though, most of us hard-core types had relinquished our scorn. We were won over by the sheer enthusiasm of the joggers, some of whom were our own wives or kids. At Running Times, we received -- and published -- voluminous reports of people going from fat to fit, giving up smoking, overcoming depression, lowering their cholesterol or blood pressure, and finding new vitality and enjoyment of life. Many, when they ran, talked as animatedly as if they were at a party. Competitiveness seemed to have little to do with why they were there. And I'd seen this in marathons and ultras, too. As I grew older and slower, I'd find myself among groups in a race who were regaling each-other with stories, clearly enjoying the companionship and appearing to have no interest in beating each-other's brains out.
On the other hand, they were doing this in races, which sometimes they had paid good money to come to from hundreds of miles away. And within a few years, the number of fun-loving runners entering races reached staggering numbers. One year in the 1980s, if I recall, over 100,000 men and women ran the Bay-to-Breakers 8-mile in San Francisco. About 80,000 ran the Bloomsday run in Spokane, Washington. Last year, over 40,000 ran the New York Marathon, and a similar number were turned away. Wasn't there, under all that chatty camaraderie, at least a little flame of competitiveness?
There's also the not-insignificant matter of how Americans have been exposed to an almost never-questioned doctrine of "being competitive" as the key to success in all things. Whether it's school, sport, business, or national supremacy, we're taught that the goal is to be winners. I don't know how many times I've heard a political or business leader quote the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, saying "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." I've never heard anyone challenge that. Yet, addicted to competition that I am, I think Lombardi was wrong.
As anyone who is an alcoholic or who struggles with an addiction to cocaine, or cigarettes, or gambling knows, addiction gives us our momentary highs but in the end is crippling. America was on a half-century-long high up until the first decade of the 21st century, but half a century is only a moment in evolutionary time. If the human journey on this planet began around 5 million years ago, as the most recent finding suggests, that half-century high out of a 5-million-year evolution is the equivalent of less than the last second of a 24-hour day. And now we may be starting to feel some of the crippling.
Back in the 1970s, there was a lot of talk about the "positive addiction" of running, and the "runner's high." There was some joking about LSD, which was a popular narcotic in the 70s but for a few of us stood for "Long Slow Distance". Running can trigger the release of endorphins, which can mask pain and may be part of what's going on when you find yourself in what athletes who've just had fantastic performances call "the zone." But undeniably, competition can be addictive in ways that are not always positive. How else to explain the fact that many of the 400 richest Americans, who together have as much wealth as 150 million other Americans combined, recently fought as if their lives depended on it to win still more of the country's wealth by extending the Bush tax cuts? They can't stop! Fighting the rest of the country for financial ascendance is the only game they know.
Having been a competitive runner for over 54 years, I know I probably can't stop what I do, either. There are times when running feels terrific, just as there are times when an alcoholic or a compulsive gambler claims to feel terrific. But ultimately, any addiction--even a "positive" one--is a burden. I no longer tolerate cold weather as well as I once did, and on a dreary winter day I can experience a wrenching internal tug-of-war between two parts of myself -- one wanting to keep training for the next race, the other wanting to curl up with a blanket and good book. Sometimes the book wins; sometimes the frigid outdoors. I also know that if I weren't addicted enough to get out for at least a good many of those forbidding days, I wouldn't be in touch with the genetic messages I'm accessing from my early hominid ancestors -- about what terrible ordeals they endured, and how their experience and adaptations to hardship ultimately enabled us modern humans to have the adaptive capabilities we now enjoy. We wouldn't have had the endurance, patience, and ability to envision a place that still lies out of sight ahead of us (to dream, to plan), if our hunter-gatherer ancestors had not built these capabilities over many millennia.
Sport can sometimes be painful, exhausting, or disappointing, but at least it doesn't leave us dead on the side of the road, like the losers in a war over ideology, oil, or control of territory. Sport allows us to compete with others without maiming or murdering them. And if I'm, still wondering why millions of people who don't seem as compulsively competitive as I am still run races, a conversation I had one day with the former NFL football player David Meggyesy (see my earlier blog) may offer an answer. David offered an explanation for the seeming paradox of players beating each-other up yet still being good friends: "The players need each-other. If they don't have the other players, they don't have a game." And of course, that's true for runners too: it helps to explain why there's so much camaraderie even in a competition. If we don't have other runners who are friendly and not trying to spear us like enemy warriors, we won't have a way of enjoying the social ritual of running together -- we won't have a race. On a global scale, competition can stimulate new inventions and more efficent production, as economists stress. But if the great majority of people can't do it with good will and mutual cooperation, we won't long have a human race.
When I started Running Times in 1977, the idea was to have a magazine for "serious runners." I lived in Washington, D.C., and the D.C. Roadrunners would put on races every week or two, year-round. Maybe 50 of us hard-core runners would show up for each race. But there was a new phenomenon developing in those days -- the advent of the "jogging," and the booming popularity of recreational running as a means of losing weight, looking fit, and meeting members of the opposite sex. Some of us road racers found that whole scene a bit annoying. It was too commercial, for one thing. We began to see ads for ridiculous jogging products, apparently invented by people who wanted to cash in on the boom but had themselves never "jogged." One ad was for a jogger's rear-view mirror, which you were supposed to strap on your arm near the elbow. Of course, when you run your elbows swing back and forth, and I tried to imagine a runner swinging his head back and forth trying to see what was in his mirror. Wouldn't it be easier just to turn his head and look back? Another product we saw advertised was a pair of shoes with giant springs built in, ostensibly enabling the wearer to run in giant leaps like a kangaroo. I never did see a pair of those shoes at a road race.
Within a few years, though, most of us hard-core types had relinquished our scorn. We were won over by the sheer enthusiasm of the joggers, some of whom were our own wives or kids. At Running Times, we received -- and published -- voluminous reports of people going from fat to fit, giving up smoking, overcoming depression, lowering their cholesterol or blood pressure, and finding new vitality and enjoyment of life. Many, when they ran, talked as animatedly as if they were at a party. Competitiveness seemed to have little to do with why they were there. And I'd seen this in marathons and ultras, too. As I grew older and slower, I'd find myself among groups in a race who were regaling each-other with stories, clearly enjoying the companionship and appearing to have no interest in beating each-other's brains out.
On the other hand, they were doing this in races, which sometimes they had paid good money to come to from hundreds of miles away. And within a few years, the number of fun-loving runners entering races reached staggering numbers. One year in the 1980s, if I recall, over 100,000 men and women ran the Bay-to-Breakers 8-mile in San Francisco. About 80,000 ran the Bloomsday run in Spokane, Washington. Last year, over 40,000 ran the New York Marathon, and a similar number were turned away. Wasn't there, under all that chatty camaraderie, at least a little flame of competitiveness?
There's also the not-insignificant matter of how Americans have been exposed to an almost never-questioned doctrine of "being competitive" as the key to success in all things. Whether it's school, sport, business, or national supremacy, we're taught that the goal is to be winners. I don't know how many times I've heard a political or business leader quote the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, saying "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." I've never heard anyone challenge that. Yet, addicted to competition that I am, I think Lombardi was wrong.
As anyone who is an alcoholic or who struggles with an addiction to cocaine, or cigarettes, or gambling knows, addiction gives us our momentary highs but in the end is crippling. America was on a half-century-long high up until the first decade of the 21st century, but half a century is only a moment in evolutionary time. If the human journey on this planet began around 5 million years ago, as the most recent finding suggests, that half-century high out of a 5-million-year evolution is the equivalent of less than the last second of a 24-hour day. And now we may be starting to feel some of the crippling.
Back in the 1970s, there was a lot of talk about the "positive addiction" of running, and the "runner's high." There was some joking about LSD, which was a popular narcotic in the 70s but for a few of us stood for "Long Slow Distance". Running can trigger the release of endorphins, which can mask pain and may be part of what's going on when you find yourself in what athletes who've just had fantastic performances call "the zone." But undeniably, competition can be addictive in ways that are not always positive. How else to explain the fact that many of the 400 richest Americans, who together have as much wealth as 150 million other Americans combined, recently fought as if their lives depended on it to win still more of the country's wealth by extending the Bush tax cuts? They can't stop! Fighting the rest of the country for financial ascendance is the only game they know.
Having been a competitive runner for over 54 years, I know I probably can't stop what I do, either. There are times when running feels terrific, just as there are times when an alcoholic or a compulsive gambler claims to feel terrific. But ultimately, any addiction--even a "positive" one--is a burden. I no longer tolerate cold weather as well as I once did, and on a dreary winter day I can experience a wrenching internal tug-of-war between two parts of myself -- one wanting to keep training for the next race, the other wanting to curl up with a blanket and good book. Sometimes the book wins; sometimes the frigid outdoors. I also know that if I weren't addicted enough to get out for at least a good many of those forbidding days, I wouldn't be in touch with the genetic messages I'm accessing from my early hominid ancestors -- about what terrible ordeals they endured, and how their experience and adaptations to hardship ultimately enabled us modern humans to have the adaptive capabilities we now enjoy. We wouldn't have had the endurance, patience, and ability to envision a place that still lies out of sight ahead of us (to dream, to plan), if our hunter-gatherer ancestors had not built these capabilities over many millennia.
Sport can sometimes be painful, exhausting, or disappointing, but at least it doesn't leave us dead on the side of the road, like the losers in a war over ideology, oil, or control of territory. Sport allows us to compete with others without maiming or murdering them. And if I'm, still wondering why millions of people who don't seem as compulsively competitive as I am still run races, a conversation I had one day with the former NFL football player David Meggyesy (see my earlier blog) may offer an answer. David offered an explanation for the seeming paradox of players beating each-other up yet still being good friends: "The players need each-other. If they don't have the other players, they don't have a game." And of course, that's true for runners too: it helps to explain why there's so much camaraderie even in a competition. If we don't have other runners who are friendly and not trying to spear us like enemy warriors, we won't have a way of enjoying the social ritual of running together -- we won't have a race. On a global scale, competition can stimulate new inventions and more efficent production, as economists stress. But if the great majority of people can't do it with good will and mutual cooperation, we won't long have a human race.
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