born to run

After a week of storming and raining and refreshing cool-ish temperatures: Heat. The real stuff, the serious over-90 stuff.

This morning I went out on a run at seven o’clock, a habit that carried me through last summer and early fall, but that I’ve had the luxury of blowing off for most of the rest of the year. Usually I get up at 6:30, waste varying degrees of time on the internet, write a bit and/or catch up on e-mails, and then run in the late morning, or use the elliptical, depending on the weather and my level of motivation to leave the house. But recently, it occurred to me that if I don’t get back in the habit of early morning exercise, 1) I’ll have more trouble keeping it up when school starts and 2) I won’t get to run for the rest of the summer. At seven, I was already right at my personal edge, with a temperature in upper 70s that wouldn’t necessarily be so bad were it not for the crushing humidity that sits on my lungs like one of those silent smothering ghosts from Chinese folk tales.

I was doing an experiment. For the past few days I’ve been listening to the audiobook of journalist Christopher McDougall’s new book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and The Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. I probably wouldn’t grab this if I saw it on the bookstore shelf; I’m not usually drawn to stories about athletes, and my usual inclination would be to wonder why the hidden tribe can’t be left unpestered by journalists. But Eric sent me the Amazon link, and after reading a short interview with the author, I got curious enough to check it out.

If you’re a runner or like adventure stories, you’re going to like this one. McDougall is such a master of the suspense-tease that even his chapter on orthodics, sports podiatrists, and the development of the modern running shoe is kind of riveting. But maybe I found it riveting because I’m so intrigued by his thesis, which is that the modern running shoe is crap, and the blame for most modern running injuries sits at the feet (ha) of the Nike corporation, which invented it back in the 70s.

Before then, the world’s greatest competitive runners ran in the sort of floppy, un-engineered sneakers that we’re now told, with dire warnings, will incurably mess up our bodies. Sometime in the 70s, an entrepreneurial track coach got the idea that maybe it would be better for distances if runners started their stride by striking the ground heel-first. Because the human foot is manifestly not designed to do that, he created a company that made a shoe with a cushiony heel, then drummed up a market for the shoe by convincing people that their feet were deficient. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist. Now athletic shoe companies are enormous, sweat-shop-exploiting corporations and we’re all taught that we need to replace our shoes every 300 to 500 miles. Eric and I, like most runners, have an ever-increasing pile of dead running shoes hanging by their laces like a guilt albatross around our figurative necks. This growing pile violates our personal doctrine of non-consumerism and waste prevention, but we love running and hate injuries, so we always suck it up and buy the new shoes.

The thing is that it doesn’t work. I’ve been spared, so far, but I don’t run as many miles as Eric does, either. He is as injury-ridden as most serious runners are, constantly juggling the knee tendonitis, the Achilles pain, and the tweaky hip with his insatiable desire to run many miles a week. I’ve been told that I have a “runner’s body” and therefore will be less injury-prone than someone with Eric’s linebacker build, even as I add mileage. But I don’t believe it, because the statistics don’t back up that assertion; the fact is, runners of all sizes get injured, all the time, with tendonitis and plantar fascitis and stress fractures and weird shit like “runner’s knee.” And if the peer-reviewed studies that McDougall cites in his book are to be believed, the factor most strongly correlated to injury is the price of shoes. The more expensive they are, the more likely you are to be injured. And when you’re injured, doctors will either forbid you to keep running, or prescribe you even more expensive shoes.

The “hidden tribe” of the title is the Tarahumara people, an indigenous group in Mexico that has serious distance running built into its culture and routinely produces some of the fastest runners in the world. They aren’t competitive, though, and McDougall describes some of the predictable fiascos that arise when a typical exploitive Ugly American persuades a team of them to come compete in ultramarathons in the U.S. (A standard marathon is 26.22 miles; ultramarathons are typically 50 or 100. The Tarahumara, when they were competing, usually came out on or close to the top.) The Tarahumara have been stalked and terrorized by everyone from the conquistadors to, now, drug cartels, and they are not fighting folk, so running has a serious survival function in their culture. But it’s also social for them, and they seem to find it really fun. Another thing? They run next to barefoot, in sandals usually made from old tires. And they run well into old age, men and women alike, apparently without the sky-high injury rates that plague we of the Nike/Asics/Saucony-sponsored feet.

It’s a pretty compelling argument. I was listening to it yesterday, while running, and as a result, started mucking with my stride, trying to come down less on the heel. It felt impossible, though; the high-tech gel cushions beneath my heels were just too heavy to be denied. I ended up with a stride even clonkier and less natural-feeling than usual—and I’m pretty clonky on the best of days. I ran for three hot, miserable miles, and by the end I was completely spent, and discouraged.

This morning I decided to be crazy. I’m not quite willing to run barefoot; nothing would put this running stride obsession into perspective like impaling myself on a broken bottle or stepping on a hypodermic needle (not that I see many of those around here, but you get my drift). But I ditched my Asics and put on a pair of low-end, thin-soled Puma sneakers that are obviously designed for nothing but bumming around. No arch support, no nothing. I imagined the entire editorial board of Runner’s World screaming at me how I will shatter my joints without proper shock absorption, and then I told them to shut up, and I ran for two miles.

The stride, it fixed itself. Run barefoot across the room and you’ll see what I mean. In thin shoes with no heel cushioning, the foot reverts to doing what it undoubtedly did for the millennia that humans ran without encasing their feet in layers of gel-pumped plastic, and what it undoubtedly does for the Tarahumara when they run through the mountains with old tire bits strapped to their feet: it lands close to the ball. The heel is not involved. This is how I ran when I first started running, until I was corrected. Returning to it felt completely bizarre.

But by the end, my feet still felt fine. My calves, on the other hand, ached as badly as they did when I first started running, and I can tell they are going to be sore for days. They don’t feel injured-sore, though. I’m okay with muscle soreness, if it portends stronger muscles. A girl my size, I’ll take all the muscle I can get.

There’s another reason I’m tempted to persist with my experiment, though, and that’s my desire to experience the joy that McDougall sees as the essence of running. We think of running as this grueling act of conquest: against our minds, against our competitors, against nature, even, because we’re told that running is a dangerous, body-shattering activity and we don’t quite believe that we should be doing it, not unless we adopt a stride so counterintuitive that only a multi-billion-dollar industry makes it physically feasible. It’s an understanding of running that fits our narratives, our neuroses and our capitalism.

I don’t know it ditching my fancy shoes and altering my stride is the recipe for happier running, or not. But I love this idea, suggested by McDougall: that human beings don’t need to be excessively engineered in order to run. That all kinds of human beings can be runners, and that doctors or sports specialists who tell people they are too tall or too squat or too big-boned to run are spouting theories that are countered by the very fact that tall, squat, and big-boned people exist—meaning, at some point, that their ancestors had to run to survive. Of course, I don’t know any more about the workings of evolution than your average, humanities-educated layperson, so I probably shouldn’t get too enamored of that thought.

All the same, I like to think of running as an inheritance. Believe me, I’m not romanticizing a time when human beings who couldn’t run would have to perish. But I love to watch other runners when I’m on a run, or at a marathon, because despite what we’re led to believe, all shapes and sizes and ages of people are doing it, and it’s beautiful. I imagine us all, running with our ancestors. In cheapass shoes.