Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

  “When tracking an animal, one attempts to think like an animal in order to predict where it is going,” Louis says. “Looking at its tracks, one visualizes the motion of the animal and feels that motion in one’s own body. You go into a trancelike state, the concentration is so intense. It’s actually quite dangerous, because you become numb to your own body and can keep pushing yourself until you collapse.”

  Visualization … empathy … abstract thinking and forward projection: aside from the keeling-over part, isn’t that exactly the mental engineering we now use for science, medicine, the creative arts? “When you track, you’re creating causal connections in your mind, because you didn’t actually see what the animal did,” Louis realized. “That’s the essence of physics.” With speculative hunting, early human hunters had gone beyond connecting the dots; they were now connecting dots that existed only in their minds.

  One morning, four of the renegade Bushmen—!Nate, !Nam!kabe, Kayate, and Boro/xao—woke Louis up before dawn to invite him on a special hunt. Don’t eat any breakfast, they warned him, and drink all the water you can hold. Louis downed a mug of coffee, grabbed his boots, and fell in behind the hunters as they marched off across the savannah in the dark. The sun rose until it was broiling over their heads, but the hunters pushed on. Finally, after walking nearly twenty miles, they spotted a clutch of kudu, an especially agile form of antelope. That’s when the Bushmen started to run.

  Louis stood there, confused. He knew the standard Bushman bow-hunting drill: drop to your belly, creep into arrow range, let fly. So what the hell was this all about? He’d heard a little about persistence hunts, but he ranked them somewhere between an accident and a lie: either the animal had actually broken its neck while fleeing, or the story was out-and-out baloney. No way these guys were going to catch one of those kudus on foot. No way. But the more he said “No way,” the farther away the Bushmen got, so Louis quit thinking and started running.

  “This is how we do it,” !Nate said when a panting Louis caught up. The four hunters ran swiftly but easily behind the bounding kudu. Whenever the animals darted into an acacia grove, one of the hunters broke from the group and drove the kudu back into the sun. The herd would scatter, re-form, scatter again, but the four Bushmen ran and swerved behind a single kudu, cutting it out of the herd whenever it tried to blend, flushing it from the trees whenever it tried to rest. If they had a doubt about which one to chase, they dropped to the ground, checked the tracks, and adjusted their pursuit.

  As he gasped along behind the band, Louis was surprised to find !Nate, the strongest and most skilled hunter of the renegade Bushmen, hanging back with him. !Nate wasn’t even carrying a canteen like the other hunters. Nearly ninety minutes into the pursuit, Louis discovered why: when one of the older hunters tired and dropped out, he handed his canteen to !Nate. !Nate drank it dry, then traded it for a half-full one when a second runner dropped out.

  Louis staggered along behind, determined to see the hunt through to the end. He was bitterly regretting his choice of heavy bush boots; the Bushmen traditionally wore light, giraffe-skin moccasins, and now had on thin, flimsy sneakers that let their feet cool on the fly. Louis felt the way the kudu looked; he watched it weave drunkenly … its front knees buckled, straightened … it recovered and bounded away … then crashed to the ground.

  So did Louis. By the time he got to the fallen kudu, he was so overheated he’d stopped sweating. He pitched facedown into the sand. “When you’re focused on the hunt, you push to the limits. You’re not aware you’re exhausted,” Louis later explained. In a way, he’d triumphed; Louis had managed to cross over and run as hard as if he were the one being pursued. Where he failed was not knowing to check his own footprints; because it’s so easy to become numb to your own vital signs, the Bushmen learned long ago to periodically check their own tracks. If their prints looked as bad as the kudu’s, they’d stop, wash their faces, hold a mouthful of water and slowly let it trickle down their throats. After the final swallow, they’d walk and check their tracks again.

  Louis’s head was pounding and his dry eyes were going blurry. He was barely conscious, but still alert enough to be really scared; he was lying in the desert in 107- degree heat, and he knew he had only one chance to save his life. He fumbled for his belt knife and reached toward the dead kudu. If he could slash it open, he could suck the water from its stomach.

  “NO!” !Nate stopped Louis. Unlike other antelopes, kudus eat acacia leaves, which are poisonous for humans. !Nate calmed Louis, told him to hold on a little longer, and took off running: even though !Nate had already hiked twenty miles and run fifteen, he was able to run twelve more miles to bring Louis back some water. !Nate wouldn’t let him drink it. First, he rinsed Louis’s head, then he washed his face, and only after Louis’s skin began to cool did !Nate allow him tiny sips.

  Later, after !Nate had helped him back to camp, Louis marveled at the ruthless efficiency of the persistence hunt. “It’s much more efficient than a bow and arrow,” he observed. “It takes a lot of attempts to get a successful hunt by bow. You can hit the animal and still lose it, or scavengers can smell blood and get to it before you do, or it can take all night for the poison on the arrow tips to work. Only a small percentage of arrow shots are successful, so for the number of days hunting, the meat yield of a persistence hunt is much higher.”

  Louis found out only in his second, third, and fourth persistence hunts how lucky he’d gotten in the first; that debut kudu dropped after only two hours, but every one after that kept the Bushmen on the run for three to five hours (neatly corresponding, one might note, to how long it takes most people to run our latter-day version of prehistoric hunting, the marathon. Recreation has its reasons).

  To succeed as a hunter, Louis had to reinvent himself as a runner. He’d been an excellent middle-distance athlete in high school, winning the 1,500- meter championship and finishing a close second in the 800, but to hang with the Bushmen, he had to forget everything he’d been taught by modern coaches and study the ancients. As a track athlete, he’d drop his head and hammer, but as an apprentice Bushman, he had to be eyes high and tinglingly alert every step of the way. He couldn’t zone out and ignore pain; instead, his mind was constantly tap-dancing between the immediate—scratches in the dust, sweat on his own forehead—and the imaginary, as he played mental war games to think one step ahead of his prey.

  The pace wasn’t too fierce; the Bushmen average about ten minutes a mile, but many of those miles are in soft sand and brush, and they occasionally stop to study tracks. They’d still fire the jets and take off at a sprint, but they knew how to keep trotting afterward and recover on the run. They had to, because a persistence hunt was like showing up at the starting line without knowing if you were running a half marathon, marathon, or ultra. After a while, Louis began to look at running the way other people look at walking; he learned to settle back and let his legs spin in a quick, easy trot, a sort of baseline motion that could last all day and leave him enough reserves to accelerate when necessary.

  His eating changed, too. As a hunter-gatherer, you’re never off the clock; you can be walking home after an exhausting day of collecting yams, but if fresh game scuttles into view, you drop everything and go. So Louis had to learn to graze, eating lightly throughout the day rather than filling up on big meals, never letting himself get thirsty, treating every day as if he were in a race that had already started.

  The Kalahari summer cooled into winter, but the hunts continued. The Utah-Harvard docs would turn out to be wrong about one part of their Running Man theory: persistence hunting doesn’t depend on killer heat, because the ingenious Bushmen had devised ways to run down game in every weather. In the rainy season, both the tiny duiker antelope and the giant gemsbok, with its lancelike horns, would overheat because the wet sand splayed their hooves, forcing their legs to churn harder. The four-hundred-pound red hartebeest is comfortable in waist-high grasslands, but exposed and vulnerable when the ground parc
hes during dry winters. Come the full moon, antelopes are active all night and tired by daybreak; come spring, they’re weakened by diarrhea from feasting on green leaves.

  By the time Louis was ready to head home from the bush and begin writing The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, he’d gotten so accustomed to epic runs that he almost took them for granted. He barely mentions running in his book, focusing more on the mental demands of the hunt than the physical. It was only after a copy of Nature magazine fell into his hands that he fully appreciated what he’d seen out there in the Kalahari, and grabbed the phone to dial Utah.

  Know why people run marathons? he told Dr. Bramble. Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science; space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human—which means it’s a superpower all humans possess.

  “Then why do so many people hate it?” I asked Dr. Bramble as he came to the end of the story of Louis and the Bushmen. “If we’re all born to run, shouldn’t all of us enjoy it?”

  Dr. Bramble began his answer with a riddle. “This is fascinating stuff,” he said. “We monitored the results of the 2004 New York City Marathon and compared finishing times by age. What we found is that starting at age nineteen, runners get faster every year until they hit their peak at twenty-seven. After twenty-seven, they start to decline. So here’s the question—how old are you when you’re back to running the same speed you did at nineteen?”

  All righty. I flipped my notebook to a blank page and started jotting numbers. It takes eight years until you run your best time at age twenty-seven. If you get slower at the same rate you got faster, then you’d be back at your nineteen-year-old time by age thirty-six: eight years up, eight years down. But I knew there was a twist involved, and I was pretty sure it had to be whether we fade away as quickly as we improve. “We probably hang on to our speed a little longer once we get it,” I decided. Khalid Khannouchi was twenty-six when he broke the marathon world record, and was still fast enough at thirty-six to finish in the top four at the 2008 U.S. Olympic trials. He’d lost only ten minutes in ten years, despite a ton of injuries. In honor of the Khannouchi Curve, I bumped my answer up to forty.

  “Forty—,” I started to say, until I saw the smile creasing Bramble’s face. “Five,” I hastily added. “I’ll guess forty-five.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Fifty?”

  “Nope.”

  “It can’t be fifty-five.”

  “You’re right,” Bramble said. “It can’t be. It’s sixty-four.”

  “Are you serious? That’s a—” I scribbled out the math. “That’s a forty-five-year difference. You’re saying teenagers can’t beat guys three times their age?”

  “Isn’t that amazing?” Bramble agreed. “Name any other field of athletic endeavor where sixty-four-year-olds are competing with nineteen-year-olds. Swimming? Boxing? Not even close. There’s something really weird about us humans; we’re not only really good at endurance running, we’re really good at it for a remarkably long time. We’re a machine built to run—and the machine never wears out.”

  You don’t stop running because you get old, the Dipsea Demon always said. You get old because you stop running….

  “And it’s true for both genders,” Dr. Bramble continued. “Women show the same results as men.” That makes sense, since a curious transformation came over us when we came down from the trees: the more we became human, the more we became equal. Men and women are basically the same size, at least compared with other primates: male gorillas and orangutans weigh twice as much as their better halves; male chimps are a good one-third bigger than females; but between the average human him and the average human her, the difference in bulk is only a slim 15 percent. As we evolved, we shucked our beef and became more sinuous, more cooperative … essentially, more female.

  “Women have really been underrated,” Dr. Bramble said. “They’ve been evolutionarily shortchanged. We perpetuate this notion that they were sitting around waiting for the men to come back with food, but there’s no reason why women couldn’t be part of the hunting party.” Actually, it would be weird if women weren’t hunting alongside the men, since they’re the ones who really need the meat. The human body benefits most from meat protein during infancy, pregnancy, and lactation, so why wouldn’t women get as close to the beef supply as possible? Hunter-gatherer nomads shift their camps by the movements of the herds, so instead of hauling food back to camp, it made more sense for the whole camp to go to the food.

  And caring for kids on the fly isn’t that hard, as American ultra-runner Kami Semick demonstrates; she likes to run mountain trails around Bend, Oregon, with her four-year-old daughter, Baronie, riding along in a backpack. Newborns? No problem: at the 2007 Hardrock 100, Emily Baer beat ninety other men and women to finish eighth overall while stopping at every aid station to breast-feed her infant son. The Bushmen are no longer nomadic, but the equal-partners-in-hunting tradition still exists among the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo, where husbands and wives with nets pursue the giant forest hog side by side. “Since they are perfectly capable of giving birth to a child while on the hunt, then rejoining the hunt the same morning,” notes anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who’s spent years among the Mbuti, “mothers see no reason why they should not continue to participate fully”

  Dr. Bramble’s picture of the past was taking on clarity and color. I could see a band of hunters—young and old, male and female—running tirelessly across the grasslands. The women are up front, leading the way toward fresh tracks they spotted while foraging, and hard behind are the old men, their eyes on the ground and their minds inside a kudu skull a half mile ahead. Crowding their heels are teens eager to soak up tips. The real muscle hangs back; the guys in their twenties, the strongest runners and hunters, watching the lead trackers and saving their strength for the kill. And bringing up the rear? The Kami Semicks of the savannah, toting their kids and grandkids.

  After all, what else did we have going for us? Nothing, except we ran like crazy and stuck together. Humans are among the most communal and cooperative of all primates; our sole defense in a fang-filled world was our solidarity, and there’s no reason to think we suddenly disbanded during our most crucial challenge, the hunt for food. I remembered what the Seri Indians told Scott Carrier after the sun had set on their persistence-hunting days. “It was better before,” a Seri elder lamented. “We did everything as a family. The whole community was a family. We shared everything and cooperated, but now there is a lot of arguing and bickering, every man for himself.”

  Running didn’t just make the Seris a people. As Coach Joe Vigil would later sense about his own athletes, it also made them better people.

  “But there’s a problem,” Dr. Bramble said. He tapped his forehead. “And it’s right up here.” Our greatest talent, he explained, also created the monster that could destroy us. “Unlike any other organism in history, humans have a mind-body conflict: we have a body built for performance, but a brain that’s always looking for efficiency.” We live or die by our endurance, but remember: endurance is all about conserving energy, and that’s the brain’s department. “The reason some people use their genetic gift for running and others don’t is because the brain is a bargain shopper.”

  For millions of years, we lived in a world without cops, cabs, or Domino’s Pizza; we relied on our legs for safety, food, and transportation, and it wasn’t as if you could count on one job ending before the next one began. Look at !Nate’s wild hunt with Louis; !Nate sure wasn’t planning on a fast 10k immediately after a half-day hike and a high-speed hunt, but he still found the reserve energy to save Louis’s life. Nor could his ancestors ever be sure that they wouldn’t become food right after catching some; the antelope they’d chased since dawn could attract fiercer animals, forcing the hunters to drop lunch and run for their lives. The only way to
survive was to leave something in the tank—and that’s where the brain comes in.

  “The brain is always scheming to reduce costs, get more for less, store energy and have it ready for an emergency,” Bramble explained. “You’ve got this fancy machine, and it’s controlled by a pilot who’s thinking, ‘Okay, how can I run this baby without using any fuel?’ You and I know how good running feels because we’ve made a habit of it.” But lose the habit, and the loudest voice in your ear is your ancient survival instinct urging you to relax. And there’s the bitter irony: our fantastic endurance gave our brain the food it needed to grow, and now our brain is undermining our endurance.

  “We live in a culture that sees extreme exercise as crazy,” Dr. Bramble says, “because that’s what our brain tells us: why fire up the machine if you don’t have to?”

  To be fair, our brain knew what it was talking about for 99 percent of our history; sitting around was a luxury, so when you had the chance to rest and recover, you grabbed it. Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life; we’ve taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure. And what happens when you drop a life-form into an alien environment? NASA scientists wondered the same thing before the first space flights. The human body had been built to thrive under the pressure of gravity, so maybe taking away that pressure would act as an escape-trajectory Fountain of Youth, leaving the astronauts feeling stronger, smarter, and healthier. After all, every calorie they ate would now go toward feeding their brains and bodies, instead of pushing up against that relentless downward pull—right?

  Not by a long shot; by the time the astronauts returned to earth, they’d aged decades in a matter of days. Their bones were weaker and their muscles had atrophied; they had insomnia, depression, acute fatigue, and listlessness. Even their taste buds had decayed. If you’ve ever spent a long weekend watching TV on the sofa, you know the feeling, because down here on earth, we’ve created our own zero-gravity bubble; we’ve taken away the jobs our bodies were meant to do, and we’re paying for it. Nearly every top killer in the Western world—heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, hypertension, and a dozen forms of cancer—was unknown to our ancestors. They didn’t have medicine, but they did have a magic bullet—or maybe two, judging by the number of digits Dr. Bramble was holding up.