“Why We Run: A Natural History” by Bernd Heinrich
Paperback, 304 pages
Published April 2001 by Cliff Street Books/HarperCollins
ISBN-10 : 0060958707 | ISBN-13 : 978-0060958701
Date Finished: Jan 29, 2016
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
Find it at Amazon & Bookshop
Comparative physiologist and ultrarunner Bernd Heinrich explores the evolutionary and biological underpinnings of long-distance running in his 2001 book, “Why We Run.” Though there are a few bits that don’t hold up twenty years later—and some that didn’t hold up when it was published, like his discussion on doping in sport—I loved this book. Originally titled “Racing the Antelope: What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life,” I read this book years ago, but as I marshal my energy towards my next book effort I decided to look through my notes on it… and throw them up on my website. For more, check out Jeré Longman’s New York Times review of the book from 2001 and Salomon shoe’s short video on the author from 2020.
My Notes:
Given the grand diversity of animals on this planet, we are hardly more unique or even special than most others.
“… The essential thing in life is not so much conquering as fighting well.” Baron Pierre De Coubertin, on reviving the Olympics in 1896
We are, deep down, still runners, whether or not we declare it by our actions.
America is an experiment where the driving force is individuals chasing money. I would not risk my bones for a society guided by this principle.
I became a scientist in part because I sought some measure of certainty in a world where values were all too often defined on the basis of stature, individual bias, unproven assumptions, wishful thinking, dogma, and sentimentality.
How does a grown man convince himself to spend money an precious time to run himself half to death along the Chicago lake shore?
Plato, who participated in the Isthmian Gaes as a wrestler, as well as Socrates, who was said to keep himself in excellent condition by training in a gymnasium, emphasized the necessity of physical training in a sound education. Some of Plato’s dialogues, I later learned, took place literally in a gymnasium.
Among the Penobscot tribe in Maine, each family group used to have some young men who were specifically designated as runners to chase down moose and deer. These “pure men” were chosen because of their fleetness of foot, and to be one of these few was considered an honor.
In my opinion, that mind-set alone will kill the onward march of record performances, and the college athletics that spawn them, dead in their tracks, even before we exhaust our biological potential.
Fortunately, one of the great things about running, at least distance running, is that on the whole it is honest. Recall that when running a 10,000-meter or a marathon, you are operating a whole machine of an almost incalculable number of parts that are integrated, with no one part taking precedence over any of the others.
That this mix-up would happen to me, and never to anyone else (to my knowledge) at UMO, and then on the very final of the very many races I had run —the only one where I assuredly would have set a record—seemed almost bizarre.
Some storks and vultures cool themselves by a reverse, yet similar, strategy. They defecate runny feces down their legs. The blood in the bird’s legs is cooled by the evaporation, which reduces overall body temperature by as much as 2 degrees Celsius.
Fall and spring, untold billions of birds take to the skies for nonstop flights of thousands of miles that often take them over oceans and deserts. Their very survival depends on their athleticism, mental resolve, and navigational skills.
The sandpipers, like airliners, often fly higher than fifteen thousand feet, where the air is thinner and there is less aerodynamic drag. One downside is that there is less oxygen available. To stay aloft in thinner air requires more speed to generate sufficient lift, which in turn requires greater energy expenditure and more oxygen to sustain the greater flight effort. This is a catch-22 situation, which the birds resolve by their digestive and respiratory physiology.
Bar-headed geese (Anser indices) fly over the summit of Mount Everest (8,848 meters), making a journey of about 900 miles nonstop. The birds lungs, with their impressive capacity to extract oxygen from the atmosphere, are only part of the solution.
When women do run as fast and far as men (as many can), they likely do so at a reproductive cost. They must lose so much body fat that ovulation ceases. Animals are consummately pro-choice. Their bodies commit to the massive task of reproduction only when the resources to pull it off are available.
… and the antelopes then registered an impressive VO2max of 300 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. This is only half that of a budgerigar and a fourth that of a sphinx moth in flight, but it’s impressive when compared to that of an elite human distance runner such as Olympian Frank Shorter: about 71 milliliters per kilo grams per minute.
I capitalize on my knowledge that I’m a descendant of hunting apes who probably ate meat regularly.
The issue boils down to the question what unique features account for the antelopes' high the VO2 max, which is necessary to support their sustained high running speed?
There are no tricks. No one adaptation by itself makes the difference. Pronghorns are just better at everything that affects sustained running speed.
One potential cost of a high VO to Max could be that it results in an elevated basil metabolic rate. That is, having a large muscle mass packed with mitochondria might mean that more is squandered in the long run.
As I later learned — from India and running by Peter not block off 1981 – many Native American tribes highly prized running ability for hunting and for war.
Antelopes, like any runners, make compromises and energy reserves and indigestion in order to achieve speed in long distance running.
The sprint must come at the end, because you could pay off the oxygen debt when you're done.
Our specialty as bipedal runners spends a history of at least 6 million years. It probably beget in Africa, when opened or semi open plains were replacing forests and our ancestors begin to diverge from other apelike creatures to venture out of the forests and feed on the vast assemblage of herbivores supported by the growing season of grass. There were many other predators out there and little safety from them in trees. Nor was it easy to hide.
Speed was useful, and necessary as well. We never run 60 miles an hour like a cheetah, but if she doesn't need to run for an hour. It needs to run only for a half minute, and it can't run much further before it runs head on into the problem of overheating and lactic acid buildup, and must stop.
British physiologist Peter Wheeler has proposed that our bipedal is involved in part from thermoregulation under exposure to the blazing tropical sun.
The was brought home, to be shared in mutual obligations with other hunters, and to trade for sex. Sleeping together and eating together became interrelated. It is an old formula. Chips trade sex for food routinely, as do baboons. Craig Stanford studied the hunting practices of chimps at Gombe.
All animals have to pay something for sex.
What is most strongly selected for in any line of dogs destined to be Iditarod ultraracers is the desire to run. Those destined to race are the dogs that seem overwhelmed with eagerness as they strain to take off and to keep going, and going, and going.
Running throwing jumping in the repertoire of track events are the basic body movements required for hunting and warfare, and they have been ritualized to games dances and initiation ceremony.
To run a championship performance requires commitment and willingness to take risks, but the risks are greater with the talent is less. Those who seemingly show less greatness because they run in the PAC man actually draw for my fount of courage.
Similarly, running head been a constant in our lives throughout evolutionary history, it may not require a supplement for optimal health, analogous to vitamins, which provide chemicals that our bodies not evolve to produce because they have always been present in the food of all normal diet.
Staying lean is necessary to out running predators. For most animals continually available food translate to never being fat because there is then no need for fat but advantages to being sent. On the other hand those animals including woodchucks bears raccoons and skunks who's food supply disappear in the want to become obese in the fall when given the chance they feed as if there were no tomorrow.
Normally the predators eat after the chase, not for it, and the stomachs response makes sense. But what if the stomach is trained? I trained by eating a sandwich, a hamburger and potatoes, or even a full meal immediately for a long run. It's seldom cause problems, but then I didn't run fast, either.
Racing mentality requires a steady, unflappable calm, and also a devil may care abandon where all the stops are pole
The next most important consideration and running long-distance is efficiency — converting as much as possible of the expanded energy into mileage. For well conditioned human to run a mile takes about 1600 steps at a cost of about 100 kcal for a man weighing 150 pounds.
The quarry I'm trying to catch will be defined by number, my finishing time: hours, minutes, and seconds separated by a cold. And that number once made will be with me for the rest of my life. Maybe it should go on my tombstone. After all, two sets of numbers designating birth and death dates say little about a person. It is the in between that matters. The number I making now is pure. It will define the limits of my animal nature— It will be the measure of my imagination, achieve by God in spirit. It can't be bought, traded, or achieved through leverage. All other owners or poultry in comparison. It is valuable, because it's a product of free of others judgments, prejudices, jealousies, and ignorance. This is life not as it is, but as we idealize it.
"Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness," Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote.
Our inability to retain his sensory memory of pain may be a psychological adaptation allowing us to repeat the hunt, to not become immobilized, and to repeat the race again and again.
For more… find it at Amazon & Bookshop