by Ed Ayres
In very cold climates, you’ll also need a running suit, and/or a combination of tights and jacket. The most important thing here is that the gear be made of a light, high-tech, quick-drying material (lest your sweat accumulate in the fabric and freeze), and that it be vented to let the heat you generate escape. You might also want a water-repellent, ventilated rain suit or jacket. But don’t ever run in something like one of those slickers or waterproof outfits you see firefighters in, because without adequate ventilation or “breathing,” the heat buildup from your body’s metabolism—even in cool weather—can be fatal.
So: shoes, shorts, shirt, hat—plus whatever you need for hydration and for cold or rainy weather. It’s best to buy all of these things at a shop that specializes in running gear or at a running expo. (Almost every major road race or marathon these days has an expo the day before, with lots of reputable vendors.) Avoid big chain sporting-goods stores, where a big part of the inventory is golf clubs, guns, ammo, and camping stoves, and where whatever running shoes or water bottles they have may not be designed specifically for serious long-distance runners.
8. Be Cautious About Techno-Assists
Any human enterprise can be corrupted—even something as unpoliticized and relatively uncommercialized as ultrarunning. There’s a risk that the increasing popularity of carry-along technologies for long-distance runners will begin to erode the very attributes that make ultrarunning the uniquely strengthening and enlightening experience it is.
You may already have decided that one of the reasons you’re drawn to this sport is that what you do in an ultra is something you control, interdependently with other people but independently of anyone else’s manipulation. Government agencies, corporations, or media may strongly restrict or control how you travel through airports, behave on airplanes, drive and park on public streets, buy drugs, enter courthouses, hospitals, or office high-rises, run a business, pay for health care, or pay taxes. Along with all the restrictions and regulations, you get lots of security, safety, subsidies, and assistance. When you run 50 kilometers or 50 miles or 100 miles, you’re on your own—and about as free as a modern human can be. It’s hugely challenging to be on your own in a difficult endeavor, but edifying and exhilarating if you succeed.
The problem is that over the past half-century, we’ve become increasingly enamored with—and dependent on—new technologies designed to relieve us of tasks we once did with our bodies and brains. In the 1950s, washing machines relieved women (who were expected to do all the laundry in those days) of the need to wash clothes by hand. Power mowers spared men (who were expected to do the yard work) the effort of pushing a hand mower. Since then, the aids have proliferated to the point that virtually every basic function of the body, and many functions of the brain as well, have been relieved of the work they once did as their contribution to survival. Personal mobility, lifting and carrying, communication, observation, calculation, physical defense, food processing, waste disposal, and monitoring of physiological conditions have been automated. Not everything we do has been automated, but the trend is relentless. If a doctor wants you to provide a stool sample, you may still have to do that manually. But if you do it in a public or hospital restroom, you may not have to manually turn the faucet—a motion sensor will do it for you. And now, I have read, a Japanese company has designed a toilet for your home that will collect your poop on a regular basis, analyze it, and automatically report any abnormalities to the local health department. Big Brother under your bottom, so to speak.
The Orwellian toilet is an exception, but most other techno-aids have been introduced to us with such fanfare that we too easily overlook how extensively they have subverted our self-sufficiency, strength, and independence as individuals. When a muscle isn’t used, it atrophies. And so does the brain. Mental passivity is evidently one of the factors in Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. As noted earlier in this book, recent research in England found that heavy reliance on GPS can cause shrinking of the part of the brain responsible for mental mapping.
For ultrarunners, the risk in this trend is that our culturally inculcated acceptance of techno-assists for all we do (think smartphone apps) will begin eroding the independence that makes our sport what it is. The pioneer running doctor George Sheehan urged the runner to “listen to your body”—to become attuned to all the internal signals that allow us to monitor and adjust our pace, hydration, refueling, and so on. But now we have devices that can do those things for us—GPS-based wrist watches that monitor heart rate, oxygen uptake, lactate threshold, pace, body fat, and the distance you’ve run. There’s nothing inherently wrong with such devices, but if they shortcut the work of running (and remember that self-monitoring is an essential part of that work), excessive reliance on them may be too much like taking a shortcut in a race.
We can’t condemn technologies altogether, because we need the cushioning and toe-boxes in our running shoes, and we need stopwatches or finish-line clocks for timing. But with performance-enhancing aids, where do we draw the line? If we accept performance-enhancing heart-rate and lactate-threshold monitors, do we also accept performance-enhancing drugs?
This isn’t a question for race directors or USA Track & Field or government regulators. It’s very much a question for you. If one of the great appeals of ultrarunning is the sense of extraordinary independence it bestows, any intervention that increases your dependence should give you pause.
9. Rethink Food and Fitness—and the Meaning of Patience
You already know that a long-distance runner is much slower than a sprinter—but lasts much longer. You may also be familiar with the concept of “slow food”—the nutritional and philosophical opposite of fast food. “Slow” running and “slow” food are closely connected. With both, quick gratification is out of the question. Good nutrition for a distance runner, like the cardiovascular endurance training that it fuels, is a gradual process taking place over months or years. Supplying the nutrients for optimal base building takes—and teaches—considerable patience. In the long-term relationship between food and ultra-fitness, here are three basic principles to keep in mind:
Good food is not about boosting performance on race day or the night before. Ultrarunning is not about taking shortcuts. Good fueling is important, but not nearly as important as good nutrition in the months (and if possible, years) before the run. Food for performance can’t be mainly a last-day thing any more than building cardiovascular capacity can. What you eat over the long term has far more effect than what you eat at a carbo-loading dinner or aid station.
All food is made up of living organisms, and all complex organisms get their nutrients from other organisms. We humans can only live by consuming other living (or recently living) things, whether animal or plant. For hundreds of millennia, that meant hunting or gathering; now it means farming. It means that even if you’re a Buddhist, Quaker pacifist, or Lascaux Cave artist who reveres animals, you can only live if you accept some form of taking other life to sustain your own. What food is not is any of the hundreds of petrochemical preservatives, dyes, artificial flavors or colors, stabilizers, or emulsifiers found in thousands of highly processed products that Americans now eat. Many of those products, combining chemicals with highly refined sugars, fats, and salt, have been heavily implicated in what nutritionists now call “lifestyle diseases”—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and many more.
Defensive dieting invites failure. If your main motivation for choosing particular foods is that you fear being overweight or being at high risk of heart attack or cancer, you’re playing a losing game. It’s like a football coach having his players expend all their energy trying to stop the other team from scoring. Most sports coaches advise that it’s a big mistake to just focus on trying not to lose, as opposed to focusing on doing really well. You need offense, too!
What’s missing in these defensive reactions is a seeking of food that doesn’t just help prevent malnutrition or illness, but can actively make a person more well
, and by extension more fit. And that, in turn, affects the health of the earth in myriad ways. For example, consider the links between meat eating and climate change. We evolved as long-distance-running hunters who ran down animals for food, so meat eating is in our genes. But it’s significant that 99 percent of that evolution occurred during a period when the human population was very small and stable. It is now huge and growing by more than seventy million people a year—the equivalent of a hundred more New York Cities or Cairos in just the next decade. Today, we still get protein from meat, but producing a pound of protein from meat also produces about eight times as much global-warming gas as producing a pound of protein from plant sources.
Without fellow humans, there’s no foot race. Without a healthy planet, there’s no human race. Philosophically and physically, you can’t separate your running from your larger world without paying a heavy penalty. If you do, your enjoyment of the running—and as a result, your performance and longevity—will probably be stunted. It’s not surprising, then, that many ultrarunners, including some of the best in the world, have adopted natural-foods diets. It’s also not surprising, given the massive changes in the ecology of food that civilization has wrought, that some of the world’s top ultrarunners are now vegetarians.
This is not an argument for vegetarianism. You can be a happy and successful runner and a meat eater, too. What’s most important from a nutritional perspective is to find foods that are free of heavy processing and as close as possible on your plate to the way they grow in the wild. At least eat foods made with whole grains rather than white flour. Get brown rice rather than white. Raw vegetables more than cooked. If you eat chicken or eggs, get free-range, rather than chickens or eggs produced in poop-ridden pens (the standard industry practice), dosed with antibiotics as required to get permitting for such conditions. If you eat fish, eat small, wild-caught fish rather than farm-raised ones fattened with monoculture feeds and antibiotics (and in the case of salmon, made to look wild with artificial orange color). And for anything that you eat from agricultural sources, try to keep it organic (rather than produced with chemical pesticides and fertilizers) as much as possible. People often complain about organic foods costing more, but over a lifetime, the added cost could well be dwarfed by what you will save in medical costs down the road.
10. Be at Home in the Wild
A common failing of long-distance runners, especially on solo training runs, is the desire to get back home. You’re out on a bleak winter day, and you imagine being back in your living room, snug with a big sandwich, chips, and TV. Do you have a fireplace? Even worse. Or, it’s a hot summer day and the water in your bottle has gone tepid, and you anticipate getting back home and pouring cold juice over a tall glass of ice cubes, then exercising twenty seconds of patience to let the drink chill before beginning to sip.
OK, the twenty seconds of patience could be a good sign—you’re learning. But the real problem here is your subconscious, default feeling about “home.”
This is not to suggest there’s anything wrong with your desire to get back to house and hearth. But if that desire causes you to cut the run short, or skip it on a day when the weather looks bad, then there may be something important missing in your feel for the place where you’re running.
Our species evolved in the wild, and for every century we’ve been civilized, there were ten centuries or more when we lived in the wild, and that was home—and that deeper sense of home is still in our DNA. One way to look at it is to consider that just as dogs are domesticated from wolves, modern humans are domesticated from nomadic hunter-gatherers. Give a healthy dog a chance, and it will revel in being able to go for a run in fields or woods—and, significantly, it will most likely exhibit more pleasure with that outing than with any time it spends in the living room or dog house. A dog that is too dog-show domesticated is a sad thing. Ditto a human who can’t reconnect with our primordial love of the wild—the source of all our adventure, discovery, and sustenance for hundreds of thousands of years before we had sitcoms, spectator sports, or potato chips.
The key is to see the wild not as lonely or sinister, as commonly depicted in TV shows or movies, but as a realm where you can be comfortable and self-reliant and free, and where you belong. Once the wild feels like home, you’re home free to be an ultrarunner.
Notes
Chapter 2
Clarence DeMar, Marathon (Brattleboro, Vermont: Stephen Daye Press, 1937), 26–27.
John F. Kennedy, “The Soft American,” Sports Illustrated, December 26, 1960, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1134750/1/index.htm.
“Computer Gamers Have ‘Reactions of Pilots but Bodies of Chain Smokers,’” The Telegraph, June 7, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/7808860/Computer-gamers-have-reactions-of-pilots-but-bodies-of-chain-smokers.html.
Kennedy, “The Soft American.”
Joe Henderson, Running Commentary, Running Times, September 1987, 6.
Chapter 3
Nathaniel G. Plant and Gary B. Griggs, “Interactions Between Nearshore Processes and Beach Morphology Near a Seawall,” Journal of Coastal Research 8, no. 1 (1992): 183–200.
Joseph Ellis, DPM, FACFO, “Shoe Selection Guide,” 15–19; “The 1980 Models: How They Rate,” 20–24; and “Methodology,” 27, Running Times, October 1979.
Chapter 4
1 Alex Ayres, “Body and Brain: The Impacts of Aerobic Running on Intelligence,” Running Times, August 1982, 21 (emphasis added).
Ibid.
Alex Ayres, “If They Don’t Run, They Don’t Eat,” Running Times, March 1977, 13.
Ibid.
John Annerino, “Running Against Time,” Running Times, May 1984, 23.
David Carrier, A. K. Kapor, Tausko Kimura, Martin K. Nickels, Satwanti, Eugene C. Scott, Joseph K. So, and Erik Trunkaus, “The Energetic Paradox of Human Running and Hominid Evolution,” Current Anthropology 25, no. 4 (August–October 1984).
Twenty years after the publication of Carrier’s seminal article (note 6 above), Bramble and Harvard University professor of human biological evolution Daniel Lieberman coauthored a landmark confirmation of the running-man theory: D.M. Bramble and D.E. Lieberman, “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” Nature 432, no. 7015 (November 2004).
Joan Benoit, Running Tide (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 21–22.
Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (New York: Knopf, March 2011), 223.
Dennis Bramble, email message to author, October 19, 2011. The email noted: “I recognized your name from back in my earliest days of becoming interested in human running and its evolutionary implications. I subscribed to Running Times for a time while you were still editor. I thought your publication the best ready source of data on distance performance vs. age and gender, a subject that continues to interest me rather deeply, especially as it may relate to larger issues in human evolution.”
Herb Mann, “Mozart the Runner,” Running Times, September 1982, 29.
Chapter 5
Scott Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 32.
Ibid. (emphasis added).
Morris County (NJ) Daily Record (February 15, 1963).
Paul Kiczek, “The 50-Mile Hike Phenomenon: a Look Back at the New Frontier of Fitness,” 50milehikers (blog), November 13, 2010, http://50milehikers.wordpress.com.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Chapter 6
Henry A. Bent, “Interface Series: Energy and Exercise,” Journal of Chemical Education 55, no. 12 (December 1978), 796.
“Pocket Movement,” Alamo City Quarterback Camp, http://alamocityqbcamp.com/?page=Pocket%20Movement.
3 Mike McCarthy, quoted in Kareem Copeland, “Fate of Super Bowl XLV Rested with Green Bay Quarterback Aaron Rodgers,” http://packersnews.greenbaypressga
zette.com, February 9, 2011.
Steve Taylor, Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It (London: Icon, 2005).
5 Roy S. Johnson, “Slow Your Roll,” Men’s Fitness, February 2011, 8.
Chapter 7
Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973).
Ibid., 7.
Jim Burgess, “Spectators Witness History at Manassas,” Hallowed Ground Magazine, Spring 2011, http://www.civilwar.org/hallowed-ground-magazine/spring-2011/spectators-witness-history-at.html.
Theodore B. Taylor, “Circles of Destruction,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 52, no. 1 (January 1996).
Chapter 8
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651).
Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1987, 64–66.
Ibid.
Ibid.
5 George Sessions, foreword to The Tender Carnivore and The Sacred Game (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973), ix.
Shepard, The Tender Carnivore, 83–84.
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Sierra Club Books, 1996).
David Carrier, “The Energetic Paradox of Human Running and Hominid Evolution,” Current Anthropology 15, no. 4 (August–October 1984), 483.
Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman, “How Running Made Us Human,” Nature 432, no. 7015 (November 18, 2004).
