Are we born to run? - Christopher McDougall

running you know it's basically just right left right left yeah I mean we've been doing it for two million years so it's kind of arrogant to assume that I've got something to say that hasn't been said and performed better a long time ago but with the cool thing about running as I've discovered is that something bizarre happens in this activity all the time case in point a couple of months ago if you saw the New York City Marathon I guarantee you you saw something that no one has ever seen before an Ethiopian woman named derartu tulu turns up at the starting line she's 37 years old she hasn't won a marathon of any kind in eight years and a few months previously she had almost died in childbirth the Arthur Tolu was ready to hang it up and retire from the sport but she decided she'd go for broke and try for one last big payday in the marquee event the New York City Marathon except bad news for dr. to loose some other people had the same idea including the Olympic gold medalist and Paula Radcliffe who is a monster the fastest woman marathon or in history by far only ten minutes off the men's world record Paula Radcliffe is essentially unbeatable that's her competition the gun goes off and I mean she's not even an underdog she's like under the underdogs but the under underdog hangs tough and 22 miles into a 26 mile race there is derartu tulu up there with the lead pack now this is what something really bizarre happens Paula Radcliffe the one person who is sure to snatch the big paycheck out of director to lose under underdog hands somebody grabs her leg and starts to fall back so we all know what to do in this situation right you give her a quick crack in the teeth your elbow blades for the finish line draw to tulu ruins the script instead of taking off she falls back and she grabs Paula Radcliffe says come on come with us you can do it so Paula Radcliffe unfortunately does it she catches up with the lead pack and is pushing toward the finish line but in she falls back again and the second time for arc to tulu grabs or tries to pull her and paula radcliffe at that point says I'm done go that's a fantastic story and we all know how it ends she loses a check but she goes home was something bigger and more important except direct with Hulu ruins the script again instead of losing she blazes passively pack in wins wins a New York City Marathon goes home with a big fat check it's a heartwarming story but if you drill a little bit deeper you've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there you know when you have two outliers and one organism it's not a coincidence when you have someone who is more competitive and more compassionate to anybody else in the race again it's not a coincidence you show me creature with webbed feet and gills somehow waters involved some with that kind of heart there's some kind of connection there and the answer to it I think can be found down in the copper canyons of Mexico where there's a tribe a reclusive tribe called the Tarahumara Indians now the tabla mata are remarkable for three things number one is they have been living essentially unchanged for the past of 400 years when the conquistadors arrived in North America you had two choices you can either fight back and engage or you could take off the mines and the Aztecs engaged which is why there are very few mines and Aztecs doTERRA Mata had a different strategy they took off and hid in this labyrinthine networking kind of spider webbing system of canyons called the copper canyons and there they've remained since the 1600s essentially the same same way they've always been the second thing remarkable but about the Tarahumara is deep in the old age 70 and 80 years old these guys aren't running marathons they're running mega marathons they're not doing 26 miles they're doing a 100 150 miles at a time and apparently without injury without problems the last thing that's remarkable about the tyro Mata is all the things that we're really talking about today all the things that we're trying to come up using all our technology and brain power to solve things like heart disease and cholesterol and cancer and crime and warfare and violence and clinical depression all this stuff that thought about done what you're talking about they are free from all of these modern illness so what's the connection again we're talking about outliers there's got to be some kind of cause and effect there well there are teams of scientists at Harvard and the University of Utah that are been their brains and trying to figure out what the tamada have known forever they're trying to solve those same kind of mysteries and once again a mystery wrapped inside of a mystery perhaps the key to doctor to Lu and the total mata is wrapped in three other mysteries which go like this three things if you have the answer up here and take the microphone because nobody else knows the answer and if you know it then you are smarter than anybody else on planet earth mystery number one is this two million years ago the human brain exploded in size Australopithecus had a tiny little pea brain suddenly humans show up you know Homo erectus big old melon head to have a brain of that size you need to have a source of condensed caloric energy in other words early humans are eating dead animals no argument that's a fact the only problem is the first edged weapons only appeared about 200,000 years ago so somehow for nearly two million years we are killing animals without any weapons now we're not using our strength because we are the biggest sissies in the jungle yeah every other animal stronger than we are they have fangs they have claws they have nimbleness than speed you know we think Usain Bolt as fast Usain Bolt and get his ass kicked by a squirrel okay we're not fast that that would be an Olympic event turn a squirrel loose whoever catches the squirrel you get a gold medal so no weapons no speed no strength no fans no claws how we killing these animals mystery number one mystery number two women have been the Olympics for quite some time now but one thing is remarkable about all women sprinters they all suck they're terrible there's not a fast woman on the planet and there never has been the fastest woman to ever run a mile did it in 415 I could throw a rock and hit like a high school boy who can run faster in 415 for some reason you guys are just really slow but but you get to the marathon we were just talking about you guys have only been allowed to run the marathon for 20 years because prior to the 1980s medical science said that if a woman tried to run 26 miles does anyone know what would happen if you try to run 26 miles why you were banned from the marathon before the 1980s what's that here uterus would be torn yes you would have torn reproductive organs uterus would fall out literally flat and buddy now I've been to a lot of marathons and I've yet to see any a so so I'm in 20 years that women have been allowed to run the marathon in that very short learning curve you guys have been gone from you know broken organs up to the fact that you're only 10 minutes off the male world record then you go beyond 26 miles into the distance that medical science also told us will be fatal to humans when Philippa T's died when he ran 26 miles you get the fifty and a hundred miles and somebody it's a different game you can take a runner like Ann tracing or Nikki Kimball or Jenn Shelton you put them in a race of 50 or 100 miles against anybody in the world it's a coin toss who's gonna win I'll give an example a couple years ago Emily bear signed up for a race called the hardrock 100 which tells you all you need to know about the race they give you 48 hours to finish this race well Emily Baer 500 runners she finishes an eighth place in the top ten even though she stopped at all the aid stations to breastfeed her baby during the race and yet be 492 other people the last mystery so why is it that women get stronger as distances get longer okay the third mystery is this at the University of Utah they started tracking finishing times for people running the marathon and what they found is that if you start running the marathon the age 19 you will get progressively faster year by year until you reach your peak at age 27 and then after that you succumb to the the the rigors of time and you get slower and slower until eventually you're back to running the same speed you are at age 19 so about seven years eight years to reach your peak and then gradually you fall off your peak until you go back to the starting point you would think it might take that maybe eight years to go back to the same speed maybe ten years no it's 45 years 64 year-old men and women are running as fast as they were at age 19 now I defy you to come up with any other physical activity and please don't say golf something that actually is hard wear geriatrics are performing as well as they did as teenagers so you have these three mysteries is there one kind of piece in the puzzle which might wrap all these things up you gotta be really careful anytime someone looks back in prehistory and tries to give you some sort of global answer because it being prehistory you know you can say where the hell you want you with it but I'll submit this to you if you put one piece in the middle of this jigsaw puzzle suddenly it all starts to form a coherent picture if you're wondering why it is that the town Ramada don't fight and don't die of heart disease why a poor Ethiopian woman in dr. tulu can be the most compassion and yet the most competitive and why we somehow were able to find food without weapons perhaps it's because humans as much as we like to think of ourselves as masters of the universe actually evolved as nothing more than a pack of hunting dogs maybe we evolved as a hunting pack animal because the one advantage we have in the wilderness it's not our fangs another clause in our speed the only thing we do really really well is is sweat we're really good at being sweaty and smelly better than any other mammal on earth we can sweat really well but the advantage of that that it's a little bit of a social discomfort is the fact that when it comes to running under hot heat for long distances we're superb we're the best on the planet you take a horse on a hot day and after about five or six miles that horse has a choice it's either gonna breathe or it's gonna cool off but it ain't doing both we can so what if we evolved as hunting pack animals what if the only natural advantage we had in the world was the fact that we can get together as a group go out there on an African savanna pick out an antelope and why was a packed and run that thing to death that's all we could do we could run really far or on a hot day well that's true a couple other things had to be true as well the key to being a part of a hunting pack is the word pack if you go out by yourself and you try and chase an antelope I guarantee you there's gonna be two cadavers out there in the savanna you need a pack to pull together you need to have those 64 65 year olds have doing this for a long time to understand which antelope you're actually trying to catch you know the herd explodes and the gathers back again those expert trackers are got to be part of the pack that can't be 10 miles behind you need to have the women and the adolescents there because the two times in your life you most benefit from animal protein is when you are a nursing mother and developing adolescent it makes no sense to have the antelope over there dead and people who want to eat it 50 miles away they gotta be part of the pack you need to have those 27 year-old studs at the peak of their powers ready to drop the kill I need to have those teenagers there who should learn in the hole all involved the pack stays together another thing has to be true about this pack this pack cannot be really materialistic you can't be holding all your crap around trying to chase the antelope you can't be a pissed-off pack you can't be bearing grudges like I in case that guy's antelope he's you know it pissed me off Lemke's his own antelope the pack has got to be able to swallow its ego be cooperative and pulled together what you end up with in other words is a culture remarkably similar to the Tarahumara a tribe that has remained unchanged since the Stone Age it's a really compelling argument that maybe the third rule Mata are doing exactly what all of us had done for 2 million years that it's us in modern times it sort of gone off the path you know we look at running as this kind of alien foreign thing you know this this punishment you got to do because he ate pizza the night before but maybe something different maybe we're the ones who have taken this this natural advantage we had and we spoiled it how do we spoil it well how do we spoil anything we try to cash in on it right we try to can it and package it and make it better and sell it to people and what happened was we started creating these fancy cushioned things which can make running better called called running shoes the reason I get personally pissed off at running shoes because I bought a million of them and I kept getting hurt and I think if anybody in here runs and I've had two conversation with power we talked for 2 minutes backstage and she's talking about plantar fasciitis you talked to a runner I guarantee within 30 seconds the conversation turns to injury so if humans evolved as runners that's our one natural advantage then why are we so bad at it why do we keep getting hurt curious thing about running and running injuries is that the running injury is new to our time if you read folklore and mythology any kind of myths any kind of tall tales running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor it's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain Geronimo used to say that my only friends are my legs I only trust my legs that's because an Apache triathlon used to be you run 50 miles across the desert engage in hand-to-hand combat steal a bunch of horses and slap leather for home ok Geronimo was never saying oh you know something my Achilles I'm tapering I got take this week off or I need a cross train I didn't do yoga I'm not ready you know humans ran and ran all the time we are here today we have our digital technology all of our science comes from the fact that our ancestors were able to do something extraordinary every day which is just rely on their naked feet and legs to run long distances so how do we get back to that again oh I would submit to you the first thing is get rid of all the packaging all the sales all the marketing get rid of all the stink and running shoes stop focusing on urban marathons which you know if you do for hours you saw it but if you three three nine point five nine you're awesome because you qualify for another race we need to get back to that sense of playfulness and joyfulness and I would say nakedness that has made the thought of LaMotta one of the healthiest and serene cultures in our time so what's the benefit so what so you know you'd burn off the haagen-dazs from the night before but maybe there's another benefit there as well you know without getting a little too extreme about this but imagine in a world where everybody could go out the door and engage in the kind of exercise that's gonna make them more relaxed more serene more healthy burn off stress where you don't come back into your office a raging maniac anymore we don't go home with a lot of stress on top of you again maybe there's something between what we are today and what the turbo model have always been I don't say let's go back to the copper canyons and live on corn and mice which is the total models preferred diet but you know maybe there's somewhere in between and if we find that thing you know maybe there is a big fat Nobel Prize out there because if somebody could find a way to restore that natural ability that we all enjoyed for most of our existence up until the 1970s or so the benefits social and physical and and political and and mental could be astounding so what I've been seeing today is there is kind of a growing subculture of barefoot runners people who have gotten rid of their shoes and what they have found uniformly is you get rid of the shoes you get rid of the stress you get rid of the injuries and the ailments and what you find is something that thought about I've known for a very long time that this could be a whole lot of fun I've experienced it personally myself I was injured all my life and then in my early forties I got rid of my shoes and my have gone away too so hopefully it's something we can all benefit from and I appreciate you guys listening to this story thanks very much

Channel: TED-Ed

Views: 47,206

Keywords: \Christopher McDouggal\, run, running, marathon, TED, TEDx, TEDxPennQuarter, TED-Ed, \TED, Ed\, TEDEducation, anthropology

Id: jB7xaaV8Rus

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2013