Appalachian Perspective: "Born to Run" Author Christopher McDougall

the following is a presentation of Appalachian State University this year's convocation speaker at Appalachian is Christopher McDougall author of the bestseller born the run a Harvard Graduate mcdougal was a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press and it's written award-winning articles for the New York Times magazine outside Men's Journal Esquire and other publications he is also an avid runner in search of answers to his question why does my foot hurt mcdougal ran across the terror of Mara Indians in Mexico and the story that ensued formed the basis of Born to Run will meet this best-selling author coming up on Appalachian perspective welcome to Appalachian perspective my guest today is Christopher McDougall author of this year's summer reading book for Appalachian Freshman Born to Run welcome Christopher it's great to have you on campus I bet had a lot of fun thank you good your comments this morning at the convocation we're interesting and inspiring before we get into the book and some of your philosophies and all from that and lessons life lessons that we can take away from that writing tell us a little bit about you where is home where did you go 200 graduate school what you do just a little bit before I live in a place that actually looks pretty similar to Boone its Lancaster County Pennsylvania mm-hmm Amish farm country you ever seen the movie witness it was filmed in the same area originally I'm from Philadelphia and so was I was a city kid my entire life and I got a really lucky break my senior year in high school I was a pretty mediocre basketball player and the crew coach came around recruiting big bodies for the rowing to him and he said you you know big law won't you try out for the team luckily I believe schools are way more interested in big rowers and they are in mediocre basketball players so that got me a crack at Harvard and I think taught me a lesson from that point on which is just half the battle is just turning up he'd just show up and hope for the best and good things happen now what did you study at Harvard I was a psychology major for about three months so I realized it involved math and then I got the heck out of that and switched over to English and enjoyed that so I graduated with a degree in English now at some point you became this reporter for The Associated Press how did that happen and where did you go yeah showing up and hoped for the best I vagabond it around with a bunch of odd jobs for a bunch of years I was the head of a program for Soviet refugees in Philadelphia I taught high school English for a year I did some freelance writing for local papers and a friend of a friend had a job with The Associated Press in Spain so I went to Spain and applied for a job there ended up getting hired in Portugal a country I had never been to a language I didn't speak for an agency I barely had heard of and somehow I got the job my first day on the job civil war broke out in Angola which didn't seem to bother me very much until I realized we cover angle because it's a former Portuguese colony which was news to me so really through the height of incompetence and job lack of preparation I ended up being a peace correspondent in Portugal and then later in Africa but it's good you know it was about learning hard and fast on the job and just trying to swim and not sink did you just have this determination of I'm going to do this because you said you've never done this kind of thing before who you are covering a civil war and determination is an interesting word you know I was in my 20s and it just seemed fun it just seemed cool and why not give it a try mm-hmm at what point did you first become interested in running and see if I have my facts right another article I read not the book but another article that I read about you that you apparently had done some running you got discouraged with that because of health issues you gave it up I think you said you threw in your Nikes right and then later came back but what happened in that first phase what and it cortisone shots and all that sure yeah I think like most people I wasn't a runner I was just a guy who eat a lot of pizza you know so I ran only as a punishment forever I'd done the day before so I think a lot of ASU students are probably the same thing I did you basically run and as punishment that's all I was doing but I was constantly getting hurt and I couldn't figure out why even though I was running only you know three or four miles three or four times a week my heel would hurt my kilise my knee my back something was always aching and I would go to see doctors and they'd look at me and said well you know what do you expect you're like you're like Shrek here you know six foot four 250 pounds of course you're hurt don't run buy a bike but then I heard about the thought of Mota I thought now how is it these guys are 60 years old running in these goofy little sandals like the one I'm wearing today and they're not getting hurt and they're running 150 miles at a time I'm in like by 20s and 30s and I can't run five or 10 miles and that's what really got the wheel spinning and yet you don't like the marathon's I understand marathons are fine my difficulty with what marathons have become is they've turned into this moral imperative where if you start to run and you tell anybody you're guaranteed at people saying to you how do you run a marathon yet how fast you run a marathon have you qualified for Boston just there's this this moral imperative to run fast and run far 26 miles it's really far so my difficulty with the marathon is you know we learned how to swim people aren't saying have you qualify for the Olympics have you swim the English Channel how fast get swim the English Channel swim you do in the water you play around you go off the high dive it's it's playful it's fun and you're not pushed to go too far too fast that's what happens with running with the marathon I mean the reason why a lot of people get discouraged and get hurt it's because they're trying to run 26 miles instead of a mile 1/2 mile they're not going out with their friends and enjoying it they're all about what's their time on their watch and can they run 26 miles I think we should pull back from that competitive instinct pull back from that corporatization of running and get back to what kids do kids don't care if they do one mile or 10 miles they're out there having a good time that's why probably the marathon make it playful and I'm all for it so you want to remove where you removed the competition from it you're still running for yourself but does not think the competitive part to it competition comes later competition comes after competence nobody who's winning the Boston Marathon wakes up and decides I got to a marathon in four months it's a lifetime of training that gets you to the point where now you can compete to win my difficulty is that people feel the urge or the desire or the need to go fast before they've learned how to run properly so well you know you jump off a diving board you know I better learn how to dive properly before you start going off the cliffs in Acapulco so you gave up running for a while you just said no more of that right well what how'd you feel at that point in time what led you back I read in the book where you were saying I think it was where you were saying about you had you looked around you realized that animals run dogs on pavement kangaroos in the jungle and those and that analogy with their feet and then why not humans right again you sometimes get this tunnel vision where what you do in 21st century America you sort of believe is when everyone has done throughout history and everyone's why you realize no it hasn't always been this way running shoes our brand-new invention they've only been around since in 1970s so what was happening during all those years and all those countries before the invention of the modern running shoe people were running how are they possibly doing it Native Americans from running 50 to 100 miles at a time that was the Apache triathlon was to run 50 miles engage in hand-to-hand combat steal a bunch of horses and ride back I think that was a day at the office for an Apache so how is it they're getting away with that in moccasins and we're told that we need to have these cushion motion controlling shoes so then I started looking around at the rest of the animal kingdom and when you put in that perspective you realize there's only one other animal on planet Earth that wear shoes and that's because we grab them by the leg and hammer to their feet so what makes humans so uniquely fragile that we need these cushion motion controlling running shoes now I'm not saying that you don't need protection a little bit of protection for your feet that's good technology where we got into trouble was when we started to get into the area of Correction where we try to control what the foot does and elevate the foot and support the arch and the rest of that no other animal on planet earth wears these kinds of things and they seem to do really well they only get running injuries and we do so that's what really got the wheels turning in the first place this morning in your convocation address you talked about this group of people climbing grunts right tell us about those it tell us about what they do and your experience with them I have to recommend another book called the wild trees by Douglas Preston I came across this book by chance loved it and introduced me to a world I'd never heard of four and these are a mature tree explorers these are guys one of the greatest tree explorers in the world is a supermarket manager but he punches off the clock and he goes off into the redwood forest and he's got a little laser cider and a cider and climbing equipment and what he's trying to locate is the oldest biggest tallest tree on the planet some of these things are three hundred and fifty feet tall the only way you can find out if it's 350 feet is if you get up there and drop a tape measure down so I became interested in this world and what's so fascinating about them is very few of these people actually make a living by this and the only ones who do are just basically the landscapers tree toppers the rest of them are just out there for fun out there for obsession and passion and enjoyment and I just love the fact that there are guys out there spending their weekends deep in the forest risking their lives at the top of the trees just because it's the challenge interesting story interesting also you said this morning and I think in my quote is is correct here the more certain something is the more likely it is to be blown up sure and you related that to asking young people in any all of us young and more senior in years I think to know when the time is to come for you to speak up and gave an example and all that well you share that again because you know it's the hardest thing in the world to go against what everybody tells you it's not a question of courage it's a question of conviction do you know your rights and you know we like to look back at certain times in our history like world war two and we'd like to think that they were stuff against the Nazis well you didn't know what was going on the only people who were telling you in Germany was going on were the Nazis so your entire perspective of the world was being shoved at you by the people who are trying to control your knowledge of what was happening so to stand up to something like that took a tremendous amount of questioning his skepticism and conviction and courage what we've seen recently in our own time is look what happened in Walsh in the past few years we were content to let certain people run the subprime mortgage business and the investment bond business why because these are the best and brightest either the smartest financial minds in the country they know what they're doing it turns out they don't know what they're doing they blew it up that's why I think we are this opportunity now in life where anybody who is telling us something you gotta say to them prove it prove it and I was just thinking because of the anniversary of September 11th you know imagine you're on that fourth plane you're flying over Pennsylvania and you're getting information from the ground that terrors have taken about other planes if there is a more chaotic uncertain moment of your life it's that moment and all of your life you're always told in an airplane you sit down and you wait until you're told what to do these people had a life-or-death split-second decision are they going to think for themselves are they going to do what they are trained to do and they thought for themselves it is a talent that can't be taught I think it's a behavior which can be practiced particularly now you're at a university you're learning a lot but if they keep that little skepticism at anytime a professor tells them something and saying you know prove it how do you know this in my small area now I came with running shoes I was brought up to believe these things are the best you open any running magazine you talk to any sports medicine doctor they always say before you start running go to a specialty store be fitted for these specialty shoes and no one ever said prove it and turns out there is no proof so I realized what a ridiculous comparison is between heroes on an airplane and some mouthy journalists talking about running shoes but I hope that there's some kind of connection there about this idea of looking for proof and questioning what you're told well I think it's certainly as connection there and in challenging young people and challenging all people to do what you think is right speaking up for yourself and for your fellow man if I mankind that's that's an important lesson of anything more important that she emphasized this morning to get across to to the students at Appalachian State that was a great point and certainly well delivered I guess that is the point of a liberal arts education it's to learn it's a question and to find out how we know things right well so you ran for a while you stop you started back how did you really get to the Terramax more Indians how did you get there and then what you learn from that luckily I was stupid enough to not realize that the way a culture remains reclusive is by being really hard to find and then like not answering questions when people show up that didn't dawn on me before I went looking for them I had been in Mexico on another magazine assignments I was there trying to locate the families of these pop singers who had vanished true stories bizarre story so it was while I was researching that story that I heard about this tribunal non-indians and these guys are 60 70 80 years old and running 150 200 miles at a time I thought how is this possible so I went down into the copper canyons to look for them it was a pretty grueling trip and then when actually arrived there and located thought Omata they wouldn't talk to me they would basically say nothing which is pretty discouraging but they did tell me that there was a guy they called the white horse he said go find the white horse go find caballo Blanco maybe he'll talk to you and I went charging off and searching his white horse guy thinking it maybe was a joke it's just a gag get me out of here but the white horse exists and he is an American who's been living down in the canyons for about 15 years now and he was trying to get his arms around something much more complex than I had even thought in the first place because besides running long distances the table Ramada are also remarkable because everything we're struggling with in the world heart disease crime violence warfare hypertension they are immune from they don't suffer from any of those West difficulties so what he where the flying out is what's the cause and effect between lack of crime and running long distances lack of warfare and suicide and running long distances that's what he was after so by finding caballo Blanco I I got a window into that world and to me it's been life-changing because in a very simplistic way give me back the use of my legs you know I'm able to now get out and exercise and have fun the way I could when I was five years old and that had didn't lost me for for more than half my life well the the time the Vitara mammarra indians are are they healthier wait what do you find in their life that's different than what we may have here in America in some places you know I thought a lot about what makes them different and I think essentially they're just doing what we humans have done for most of our existence which is move first feed seconds we're we are movement creatures if you take any animal out of the wild and you put it into a zoo or what happens it has mood disorders and eating problems and sexual dysfunctions you get a very moody panda bear in there it doesn't want to reproduce you take the pan out of the cage and stick it back in the jungle it's gonna thrive and survive and I think that's what happened to us as humans we have very physical movement oriented bodies get rid of a brain that is devoted to conserving energy at all costs unfortunately at this point in our existence the brain is winning the battle we've found fantastic ways to never move our bodies at all and the body is suffering you look at the thought of Mata and other cultures which are still moving the whole day becomes oriented around moving the body which means then you're eating falls into place you know if you're gonna go for a 20-mile run you're not even a pound and a half a pasta for lunch if you're sleeping better you're more relaxed it stresses down you're doing as a community so essentially I think they are just living the way the human animal has always really been created to live we've always and barefoot right do you run barefoot yourself I do I do and I never thought I would when I was research the book the only barefoot runner I knew is barefoot Ted you read the book you know a guy drinks his own urine and I pushed and my my character summary right there I never thought I'd follow in his footsteps but I found over time that the question is not about what you're wearing on your foot it's what you're doing with your foot and the best way to learn how to run properly is take the shoe off same way if you want to learn how to juggle something take the gloves off get that sensory input remove the blindfold take the shoe off like taking off your blindfold in addition to the running witching it was certainly strengthen heart and cardiac health there what other things health-wise did you learn from this triumphant superhumans you know that's the thing about it is that you can sort of see the connection between lack of heart disease and running I get that part but I didn't get the social benefits and when I started to realize is that if this is what we are uniquely capable of doing running long distances then maybe other things are true as well you can't run long distances and try to run another animal to death for food unless the whole group is out there together collaborative collaboratively and what you start to find is that maybe by restoring that natural function we start to get other benefits as well psychological social governmental what about their health habits their their eating habits what can you say that is that's something that you learned that's a good thing to do beside this one experience we're down at the bottom of the canyons and we've been out there for a week at that point and I was pretty dehydrated and hungry and we just discovered that we're now gonna have to hike back up out of this gigantic Canyon and go looking for this white horse guy and I was pretty trashed I didn't think I could make it and this guy named Hill says hey I got something for you I mean scoops up this cup and he said yeah I have a drink of this right it looked like a fish eggs in a cup and he said no no you like it it's it's got a and that name rang a bell there was an explorer from the 1800's named Carl Lou Holtz who had been down in the copper canyons with the tunnel my life and he had written about this stuff called it's got a he said I was the bottom of a mountain and I was exhausted and thought about a woman gave him some it's got a and suddenly a new energy flooded through my veins I think I'd it's good enough for him I'll try it and I did drink it and I don't know if it was psychosomatic or if it was actually physiological but I started to feel much better and I look up that mountain with no difficulty so where did that drink it is Chia chia seeds and chia you see one of the big cash crops of the Americas the Mexican state of Chiapas is named after Chia it's the Mayan word for power and chia seeds you know if you have a chia pet you are one step away from how to be having chia seeds little black seeds I prefer to soak them in water and the little sort of gel up but you can eat them in any form at all and nutritionally they are incredibly calorically dense I can't tell if the brew some feelings from the chia seeds or from the haagen-dazs I just two hours before that but nevertheless I do feel a physical boost from these seeds I've started trying that you know I don't put it in water that way that's right on cereal in the mornings right you know as we talked while ago off-camera you know I don't really know if that's what's making a difference but psychologically and that were there psychological or physical but it does make a difference right you know it's not just scooped like you said in water was this this mixture in water yes yeah it was soaked in water and one thing about chia seeds is they will soak up to like ten times their weight in water so they actually do look like like little fish eggs but that's again it's a really healthy way to both get nutrition and to rehydrate mm-hmm so the tribe itself that you learn from from eating things eating habits you know and from running you know I had I had taken the name of that book and sort of said this tribe born to run but am i hearing you say it's more than that all of us in the human race that we have sort of born to run there has been this anthropological mystery for a long time which is how did our heads get so big where our brains get so big because our brains so couple 30% of our caloric energy goes straight to the brain but here's the problem two million years ago you had early humans with no projectile weapons so if they were actually gonna get enough caloric energy they had to be killing other animals but if we didn't have weapons how are we killing these other animals we weren't chasing them bashing with a rock so what were we doing and the evolutionary theory is what we were doing is what's known as persistence hunting you go out on a hot day with a bunch of your buddies you pick out an antelope and you chase that handle up until it runs into heat exhaustion we are uniquely advantage in the fact that like you and I more than most people are free of hair and by this absence of hair we don't have fur and pelt so we vent heat by perspiration most animals then heat by respiration so there comes a certain point where they can either get in oxygen or cool off but they can't do both at the same time we can and that gives us advantage so there is a very strong anthropological theory there for most of our existence the only natural advantage we had in a wild we're not strong we're not fast we can't swim very well the one thing we can do that no other creature can do is run really far on a really hot day very interesting do you the Born to Run and and I like that that discussion in that point the people that we talk to sometimes say I can't run I'm clumsy one foot doesn't get in front of the other and they just you don't know whether that's an excuse or whether there's something real to that from your experience what about that we're about people that say you know I can't do that I'm just not I'm not wired that okay I say lowest common denominator I mean I had sports medicine doctors look me in the face and say why are you doing this you are not meant to run look at the size you should not be running and by the impact bad for human bodies especially when they're that size so if anybody was professionally judged to be not able to run it was me and I've perfectly happened hearing that because I didn't particularly want to do it either you know it's like being told you can't be punched in the face anymore fine but what I found is if you change the perspective if you learn how to run properly what you can do by just jogging your bare feet and secondly if you remove all the pressure don't try and run a marathon don't try and run fast just go as far and as fast as you feel like then it becomes pleasurable again after you know you're back in the running mode now you've written the book traveling around doing speaking engagements on it how is your life changed from a person that was an Associated reporter for The Associated Press now best-selling author you know you blew the top off all the rankings in terms of that with New York Times bestseller list for months how's life changed you know not that much be honest yesterday morning before I came here I was mowing the lawn and putting an addition on the chicken house so it's basically the same stuff I was doing before I not sure how to package this into advice to anybody else but a long time ago I decide I really like living this way and researching things and writing about them and I've been able to sort of pursue that ever since and so the one big difference is that I do have this this advantage now where if I've got something I'm interested in I can now actually get people to return my phone calls and that's been super cool the Dan Lieberman at Harvard professor of anthropology there it's still amazing that I can there's like pick up the phone call I mean they'll call me right back and we'll talk about stuff so that's been great is it as I become more interested in this I can find more people to talk to about it so it has had some life adjusting experiences say you live do you live on a farm when you mentioned a chicken addition and yeah so so far as an acre do you farm not really I mean no goofball hobby farm next to a real farmers if I say i farm they'll run me out of town so you know we had like chickens ducks turkeys and things like that you know the city kid my entire life and about ten years ago we started to just sort of look out in the country and we found this place surrounded by Amish farmers and that's been an adventure on its own when I was working in the book I was putting a lot of time working by myself in the back of the house Amish farmers often will need a ride someplace that he can't drive themselves so any farmer that needed a ride you know anything not to work anymore so I found myself immersed in this new world so as I was writing about one world I was also living another one it's been cool I just really like it out there a lot and it makes me think that you know maybe there's something to this that we are of the earth and getting back to it's just such a calming and rewarding way to be what's what's next in your life is there another book being thought about when I was working on Born to Run one of the difficulties of writing it was I thought you are never gonna have a story like this again you blow this pal you ruined your only opportunity but since then I've come across another story another narrative and another bit of anthropology that locks in with it that I think is as good as this and so I'm pretty heavily involved in that now so having involved actually four months or overdue already on the deadline but so I'm working on that and I'm hoping it can broaden the discussion beyond running into lots of other forms of moving and exercise so that's what I'm focused on next well thank you very much and thank you for being a guest on Appalachian perspective but more importantly thank you for being part of Appalachian State today and for a couple of days here it means a lot to have you on campus I'll come back here anytime I'm having a really good time right well we're honored to have you here and we have we'll be behind you watching for the next book it's a secret title here right but we look forward and hope you would get your back on campus very soon I hope so thank you thank you you

Channel: Appalachian State University

Views: 11,864

Keywords: Appstate, app state, asu, appalachian state university, Christoper McDougall, Chancellor Kenneth Peacock, Born to Run, college, book, distance running, boone, nc, north carolina, hot hot hot

Id: oTH86sS1Gww

Length: 29min 37sec (1777 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2011