Inspiration from Born to Run

I finished Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall in just a few sittings. I would have finished it faster if I hadn't read the first part aloud to my family, much to their annoyance.

I needed the inspiration, as I'm training for the Oakland Marathon, which is this Sunday. This will be my second marathon. The first was Big Sur in 2004, a hard initial outing -- hilly, windy and winding. My iliotibial band seized up at mile 17 thanks the to cambered road (Highway 1) -- along with hundreds of others, as evidenced by the agonized stretching going on around me.

Though I continued running shorter distances, I've enjoyed triathlon training the last two years and had begun thinking maybe everyone was right: triathlons were better for you than marathons. However, this training experience has been wonderful, long and slow (18 weeks!), and I have remained ache- and injury-free (fingers crossed). My knees protested the increase in distance around 13 miles, but now they seem happy. I have iced them only occasionally after runs, and haven't had to pop any pills.

Born to Run makes the argument that endurance running is not only not bad for your joints, it's what humans were designed to do. It also posits that today's plethora of running injuries are due to over-engineered shoes that encourage heel-striking rather than a forefoot-centered stride. Skeptic that I am, I thought the barefoot runners were nutty, though I did buy the argument that running on grass or beach was good for the muscles in the feet. We had a barefoot guy in last year's tri team, and now I'm embarrassed about my ignorant questions (for some reason I remember wondering if it was for religious reasons).

If you consider it, though, the flat-footed stride of a barefoot runner is more natural than heel-first. I also used to think our super-fast coach's (and her husband's) speedy hamster-wheel steps (similar to the POSE method) were strange. Now I find myself doing the same thing: picking up my heels, focusing on fast foot turnover, and landing flatter. My old way of running was with big, quad-crunching strides and major arm pumping. Now I keep my arms close to my torso.

I don't know how my stride will evolve further, but I have gotten faster in the last seven years -- and especially the last two. So check this out: Maybe I have even more years of speed ahead of me than I thought!

McDougall quotes Dennis Bramble, biology professor at the University of Utah in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains: "We monitored the results of the 2004 New York City Marathon and compared finishing times by age. What we found is that starting at age nineteen, runners get faster every year until they hit their peak at twenty-seven. After twenty-seven, they start to decline. So here's the question -- how old are you when you're back to running the same speed you did at nineteen?" The answer is not 36, or 45, or 55, but an astonishing 64 years old!

"There's something really weird about us humans; we're not only really good at endurance running, we're really good at it for a remarkably long time. We're a machine built to run -- and the machine never wears out," says Bramble in the book.

"You don't stop running because you get old, the Dipsea Demon always said. You get old because you stop running..." writes McDougall.

Further, as humans evolved, the difference between male and female diminished such that it's far less than in other primates. Human men are only 15% bigger than women, while gorillas are twice as big and chimps one-third. And women have proven, especially lately, that "caring for kids on the fly isn't that hard, as American ultrarunner Kami Semick demonstrates; she likes to run mountain trails around Bend, Oregon, with her four-year-old daughter, Baronie, riding along in a backpack." McDougall also notes that Emily Baer finished 8th overall among men and women in the 2007 Hardrock 100, while stopping to breastfeed her baby at every aid station (OK, that makes my boobs hurt just thinking about it -- but having climbed mountains while nursing I know it can be done). Among the world's last nomads, Congo Pygmies still hunt in mixed-gender groups.

I adore the wild characters and settings McDougall describes in the book, although sometimes his gonzo style makes me question the factual accuracy. I've read a number of adventure journalism books and his, unlike many I've seen, does not come with foot- or end notes. But it works well for the topic. His descriptions of my beloved Western states and Mexico, where he covers the running culture of the Tarahumara Indians, are effective and enticing.

Rather than go on, I'll close with a quote on one of many pages I dog-eared (oops, in my friend's book), where McDougall talks about Jenn, a wacky young party animal who runs 50-mile trails with the joy of a child. I couldn't help thinking of jazz traditionalists as I read this.

"Her naked delight is unmistakable; it forces a smile to her lips that's so honest and unguarded, you feel she's lost in the grip of artistic inspiration. Maybe she is. Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the '20s, Beat poets in the '50s, and rock musicians in the '60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance."

You needn't run 50 or 100 miles to get that feeling, but that sensation of doing something that everyone around you says is insane, or pointless, or irresponsible -- and the fleeting nirvana when you realize you have just done it? I want some more of that.