by Ed Ayres
like something a drummer might do—two quick taps on a single beat. That breathing pattern would instantly change the stride-to-breath ratio from five-to-one to two-and-a-half-to-one with no break in the rhythm—something dictated perhaps by an abrupt momentary change of terrain (jumping a log or a gully) that can be achieved without any interruption of optimal oxygen flow. For a guy like me who didn’t have great leg speed (I’d never had great leg speed, even at my peak), the hills and gullies might give me a chance to compete on a more level field (so to speak!) with guys who could always outrun me on flat ground. I thought of Bernd Heinrich, who had set new standards for over-forty-year-olds by running record-breaking fifty-mile and 100-kilometer races on flat courses in Chicago two decades ago. Bernd had to be right around my age. If he were here today, would I have a chance?
A mischievous fantasy came to me: What if, around the next bend in this trail I should suddenly, up ahead, catch a glimpse of Bernd Heinrich? I was pretty sure he still ran. A tiny wave of adrenaline raced through me. How ironic would that be? A few years back, I had come to believe that the most defining attributes of humans are not the power and speed we’ve achieved with our technologies, but the endurance and patience—and capacity for envisioning the path ahead—that had enabled our evolution as persistence hunters. Heinrich was the guy who had started my mind down this “envisioning” path to begin with. Now here I was, not exactly envisioning, but imagining envisioning . . . and then imagining seeing (him, from behind). And it was all based on a memory of first reading (another form of imagining?) what had been written by, and later talking on the phone with (a kind of surrogate seeing?), the guy I was imagining envisioning and then seeing, ahead of me. The brain had come a long and tortuous way on the evolutionary trail, since the time of Homo erectus, or ergaster, or whoever they were who had survived all the dangers and found their way to where we were now. Who were those guys? Now, for the briefest moment, I identified with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. How many hominid hunters had had to be sacrificed to hungry lions or rampaging boars before it all got worked out? The brain was a living, amazing, Rube Goldberg machine! And yet, for all its powers, it was incredibly vulnerable to misfiring; there were hundreds of millions of confused people on this planet whose imaginations had leaked into what they were seeing, or who saw only what they wanted to see, or who remembered what had never happened, because it was what they had once envisioned. And for all its complexity, the brain was curiously limited, as well. I couldn’t quite envision Bernd Heinrich because I didn’t know what colors he’d be wearing, or what his running form looked like. (When I’d coached high-school cross-country decades ago, I’d discovered that I could look across a space of two or three hundred yards and recognize any one of the kids on the team just by his running form, as surely as if I were seeing his face.) So, this fantasy was conceptual, not visual. And even conceptually, it was only a fleeting shadow of a fantasy in any case, because, on a logical level, I knew Bernd couldn’t be up ahead. He hadn’t been in the final list of entrants, which I had studied on the race web site. It was possible that by now he had retired from competition. I knew there were about fifty men in the age sixty to sixty-nine division in this race, but since the climb to South Mountain, I hadn’t seen any of them.
In any case, I knew Bernd Heinrich lived in Vermont, so although his greatest runs had been on flat ground he probably had ample experience running on mountains. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he had long ago become at least as conscious of his breathing as I was. I had the impression, though, that most runners took breathing more or less for granted. It was autonomic—you didn’t have to think about it. If the trail took you to a steeper grade, the strides-to-breath ratio shifted without your being conscious of it at all. As the evolutionary biologist Dennis Bramble was already confirming in his research at the University of Utah, and as I well knew, variable breathing patterns come naturally to the human animal whether you pay attention to them or not.
For me, though, the act of breathing on the run was no longer always autonomic. In learning about aerobic metabolism, I had taken at least two bites from the apple of knowledge since those innocent days of high school and college cross-country. The first occurred when I reviewed an article my younger brother, Alex, wrote for Running Times in 1982, about the impact of aerobic running on the human brain. He approached the subject with an academic’s curiosity, summarizing the findings of more than a hundred studies that had been done on the effects of physical exercise on mental capacity. Not surprisingly, the studies yielded intriguing evidence that aerobic exercise, in particular, correlated strongly with improved capacity for cognitive activity, memory, and judgment. “The world’s most valuable natural resource is not gold, or oil, or uranium,” the article began, “It’s oxygen.” It continued, “Ancient peoples believed that breath contained not only the secret of life, but the secret of the soul. ‘God formed man of the dust of the ground,’ the Old Testament tells us, ‘and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’”1
A few paragraphs later, I came upon one of those observations that made me wonder how something so obvious could come as such an epiphany. “The same circulatory system is responsible for transporting oxygen to both the muscles and the brain,” Alex wrote. “This . . . makes body and mind inseparable.”2 He went on to cite a wide range of studies in which performances on mental tests of all kinds, under all sorts of conditions, had improved significantly with aerobic exercise. Math students, people with low IQs, artists who relied on highly stimulated imaginations, and senile patients in a VA hospital—all showed remarkable physical and mental improvements when oxygen delivery was increased. It strongly corroborated what President Kennedy had argued in his call for Americans to get serious about getting fit.
My second bite of this knowledge came as a result of my work with environmental scientists and their analyses of what they called the “carrying capacity” of the earth. This work would later be encapsulated by the concept of the “ecological footprint”—the idea that each living person uses a quantifiable amount of the earth’s air, water, land, and biological productivity to get through life. One day, when I was pondering what that really meant, it struck me that a person who achieves a smaller footprint doesn’t just use less, but also gets more out of what he or she uses. “Resource efficiency,” you might call it. For a long-distance runner, a smaller footprint meant not only not trashing the trail, the way an all-terrain vehicle would; it meant more ground covered per breath of air taken.
It took me a while to grasp the full significance of that. When we published our first articles on the Tarahumara, in 1977, our interest in the subject was more about the adventure than the science. Alex, who had just joined us as a senior editor, contacted a man named Jonathan Cassel, who had trekked into Mexico’s remote Sierra Madre and spent several months living with one of the last of our planet’s “primitive” tribes—a people for whom running long distances over some of the earth’s most forbidding terrain was not only a principal means of sustenance, but the heart of their social and spiritual life. I think what Cassel told us may have been our first introduction to the concept of persistence hunting. When Alex asked Cassel, “Why do the Tarahumara run?” Cassel explained, “It’s a matter of survival. If they don’t run, they don’t eat.” He described the Tarahumara territory: the vast reaches of the Barranca del Cobre, a meandering canyon as big as the Grand Canyon and two thousand feet deeper. “There’s no cover and concealment in the territory, and without that you can’t have much animal or bird life. High up on the plateaus, there are some rabbits. A few wild turkeys, but not plentiful. You have no firearms . . . so when they spot a deer or a wild turkey, they run that particular animal or bird down.”3
“Running down a wild turkey sounds like an impossible feat,” Cassel mused. “[But] the bird is heavy, and after a flight he tires very quickly and must land, and by the time he lands the Tarahumara are almost there. He takes off again
, and three or four of these takeoffs and he’s too tired to get off the ground and they kill him with a rock.”4
That year, we published three articles about the Tarahumara, all based on interviews with Cassel. In May 1984, we published a fourth article on the tribe, by John Annerino, recounting the adventure of Annerino’s wilderness-running friend Dave Ganci. I don’t know whether either Annerino or Ganci was aware of what Cassel had done seven years earlier, but Annerino wrote, of Ganci, “He wanted to be the first Arizonian, if not chavochi (white man) to run with a Tarahumara.” At five feet, ten inches, and 157 pounds, Ganci was “built very much like a Tarahumara Indian,” and he was tough. He made his way to the rim of the Barranco del Cobre (Copper Canyon), and after an arduous trek he found a Tarahumara who could be a translator for him and another (a man Ganci estimated to be in his late fifties), who agreed to run with Ganci from the bottom of the canyon back to the rim, a distance of about twenty-five miles up an unrelenting, treacherous incline. The two natives ran lightly ahead, barefoot, repeatedly getting far ahead but then slowing to let Ganci catch up. A mile from the top, Ganci found himself getting dizzy, took a bad fall, and was knocked unconscious—he must have hit his head on a rock. He was carried to the rim by the two Tarahumara, who were shy and polite when he regained his senses, but couldn’t hide being somewhat amused by the whole experience. Then, while Ganci lay contemplating the nature of his existence, the Indians said good-bye and started the run back down to wherever it was they lived—bringing their outing to a total of fifty miles on rocks, without running shoes, water bottles, or a single day of planning.5
Annerino’s story was fascinating and entertaining, but only seemed to deepen the mystery of men (and women, and children) going ultra-distances not as exceptional individuals of their kind, but just as people doing what everyone of their tribe does. Since the Tarahumara’s “kind” is the same as our kind, whoever or wherever we may be, this sort of phenomenon was bound, sooner or later, to attract the interest of anthropological and evolutionary scientists.
In August 1984, three months after we published Annerino’s article, the first scientist to articulate what we now know as the “running man” theory of human evolution published an article in the journal Current Anthropology titled “The Energetic Paradox of Human Running and Hominid Evolution.”6 The author was David Carrier, a graduate student of the University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble. At the time, the idea was given little credence by academics, who argued that running ability could hardly have been an advantage for early humans on the Darwinian field of battle, when other animals were so much faster and more powerful. But Carrier was lucky; instead of being thrown to the academic wolves by Dr. Bramble, he eventually convinced Bramble that the persistence-hunting hypothesis made sense.7
I lifted my eyes briefly off the ground ahead to look around at the ancient ridge I was traversing and tried to imagine chasing a wild turkey. Would the bird be accommodating enough to follow the trail, so I’d at least have a chance, rather than fly off across the rubble of the ridge? Even with that half-second of looking away, I stumbled; I caught my balance but knew there was no way I could run over this ground if there were no trail. And the Sierra del Cobre might be even rougher, though the rocks there wouldn’t be hidden by leaves. It would involve far steeper climbs, of the sort that can make even a highly trained runner feel the bear on his back. Or maybe in Copper Canyon the metaphor for anaerobic distress should be a mountain lion on your back.
What Alex and I—and apparently Jonathan Cassel and John Annerino, too—had not thought to ask, in any of our articles, was that most fundamental of questions: How do the Tarahumara breathe? How do they run up higher-than-Grand-Canyon walls so easily? Or more specifically, how do they get oxygen from the air to their muscles—and get rid of metabolic waste—with such extraordinary efficiency? It was a question we hadn’t ever really examined in our own running, either. Like most other runners we knew, we assumed optimal breathing just came naturally. As naturally as breathing!
The only advice I’d ever heard regarding how runners should breathe was offered by a yoga guru I once read about, who stated that runners should breathe only through the nose. I restrained an impulse to tell him, “I’d like to see you get off your mat and try it!” To take in the sheer volume of air needed to run any faster than a slow walk, you have to open your mouth. And granted, that’s not something that requires instruction. Joan Benoit recalled a similarly funny experience some years ago after her Olympic Marathon victory in 1984. When she was in junior high school, she tested in the ninety-fourth percentile for fitness, according to the criteria used by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. “The teachers told me my rating would be higher if I knew how to breathe properly while running,” she wrote in her book Running Tide. “I got the last laugh on that score.” In the Olympic Marathon, she said, she breathed the same way she had in junior high.8
But while our magazine staff didn’t ask questions about breathing, the Utah scientists David Carrier and Dennis Bramble did. In their research comparing the anatomical features of mammals that are primarily walkers with those that are built for running, they eventually made a highly revealing discovery: While quadrupeds like antelope, horses, or cats are locked into a pattern of respiration that allows just one stride per breath, we two-legged creatures are anatomically capable of taking two or three or more strides per breath—just as I’d been doing on this trail. Years later, Bramble’s explanation of this phenomenon would be misquoted in a popular book, in a garbled passage suggesting that we humans are great endurance runners because we can take multiple breaths per stride (allowing us to “pant to our heart’s content,” as the author wrote)—the very opposite of what Bramble had actually found and of what I thought any experienced runner must know.9 Yet, no one seemed to notice (in any of the reviews or blogs I read) the garbled description of how we breathe. Was I somehow misconstruing what I’d read? I contacted Bramble, describing some of my own multiple-strides-per-breath patterns and asking if he’d been misquoted. He replied that he had. “The runners we tested ran exactly as you describe,” he wrote to me.10 I could only conclude that the reason for the book’s many readers not questioning the quote was that most runners do, indeed, assume that their breathing is autonomic and that no questions need to be asked.
In the years before this JFK, the main thing I knew about quadruped running was that animals that didn’t have bare skin, and that couldn’t sweat the way humans did, would more easily overheat. That had been a central hypothesis of the running-man theory: The persistence hunter chased the animal over the hot African savanna until it became overheated and had to stop. And if the animal was big, with a higher volume-to-surface ratio than we skinny humans have, it would overheat even faster. I had not yet heard about Bramble’s observation that humans have more flexible patterns of respirations than quadrupeds. But as I shifted from the road-racing of my twenties to primarily mountain trail running in my middle years, I became more conscious that on irregular terrain my breathing was not at all regular, and that its variability might offer the opportunity for deliberate improvements in the delivery of oxygen to the muscles. There were plenty of physiological precedents: Someone who is panicking may hyperventilate, but if persuaded may also be able to deliberately slow his respiration. People who practiced meditation were known to be able to deliberately slow their heart rates. And neuroscientists had even begun to demonstrate how someone with a prosthetic limb could actually move it by deliberately thinking about moving it. What we had assumed to be biological limits could be transcended more than I’d ever dreamed. It seemed clear to me, then, that to get the greatest possible distance per unit of oxygen taken in, I needed to listen, not just to my body in the general sense suggested by the Sheehan mantra, but to my breathing, and get a feel for the efficiency of the various patterns I was hearing, because learning to interpret that biofeedback would gradually—perhaps over months—help me go farther per breath as I b
ecame more practiced.
So, right there was that second sweet bite of the apple of metabolic edification. The inhalation of oxygen might be a given—a gift to all who are alive, whether awake, asleep, or oblivious—but it is also, beyond that, an art by which that gift can be made greater. I began noticing, as I ran on the trails near my home in Virginia (and occasionally chased a deer for a few seconds until it got smart and left the trail), that as I listened to my breathing I was also playing songs in my head—classic rock from the 1960s and ’70s, mostly, but sometimes tunes I couldn’t identify or perhaps was making up as I ran. I wondered if the long, rhythmic runs of the persistence hunters might have played a role in the origins of chanting, or singing, or even of music itself. In 1982, a writer at Oxford University Press, Herbert Mann, had sent us an article revealing that Mozart had done a fair amount of running in his day and had even participated in at least three races (in the fifteen to twenty kilometer range) near his native Salzburg, Austria. Not knowing quite what to make of this revelation, we published the article with this teaser at the top of the page:
Scholarly research reveals that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the little-known runner who competed in several road races in 18th-century Austria, was also an accomplished musician.11
Nineteen years later, in preparation for this JFK 50 Mile, I was running up a particularly steep hill on the Blue Ridge of Virginia and heard myself gear down like a mountain bike rider, from a two-to-one to a one-to-one stride-to-breath ratio (rare for me, except on a steep climb), with an audible emphasis on the out breath:
Out, In,
Out, In,
and the sound I was hearing was:
Hoo, hah,
Hoo, hah,
and then it struck me that what I was hearing was uncannily like what I would hear from a group of highly oxygenated US Marines getting psyched for the start of the Marine Marathon or Army Ten Mile—or the start of the JFK 50 Mile, just two hours ago: