Born To Run

Over winter break, I read a book called Born To Run by Christopher McDougall. It is a piece of literary journalism that outlines the story of the Tarahumara Indians, a small civilization of people living in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. These people are the best distance runners on Earth. Their style of running and their diet are the same as they have been for the last several hundred years. They don't wear modern shoes, utilize modern sports medicine or eat a typical runner's diet. The book gives an overview of their traditional style and then attacks the modern way of going about running. After this is established, the book goes into detail about human's evolution as distance runners. It it believed that humans used to run down their prey through a long-distance pursuit. I watched a video of a tribesman in Africa performing this kind of hunt and it was awesome and very interesting. I think it's really interesting that humans seem to have no idea that their bodies evolved to be distance runners capable of running down every other animal on Earth. It was a really great read for me because it was a combination of my three biggest passions: environmental studies/evolution, journalism, and athletics. I'm considering the topic of "the evolution of humans as runners" for my final paper, using Born To Run and Darwin.

This is the persistence hunting video!