“But there’s a problem,” Dr. Bramble said. He tapped his forehad. “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.”
— Christopher McDougall
“After all, what else did we have going for us? Nothing, except we ran like crazy and stuck together. Humans are among the most comunal and cooperative of all primates; our sole defense in a fang-filled world was our solidarity, and there’s no reason to think we suddently disbanded 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…it also made them better people.”
— Christopher McDougall
“If you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they gallop.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then work on light. Make it efforthless, like you don’t give a shit how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go. When you’ve practiced that so long, that you forget you’re practicing, you work on making it smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one – you get those three, and you’ll be fast.”
— Christopher McDougall
“The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other.”
— Christopher McDougall
“He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn’t just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we’re meant to be.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Imagine your kid is running into the street and you have to sprint after her in bare feet,” Eric told me when I picked up my training with him after my time with Ken. “You’ll automatically lock into perfect form–you’ll be up on your forefeet, with your back erect, head steady, arms high, elbows driving, and feet touching down quickly on the forefoot and kicking back toward your butt.”You can’t run uphill powerfully with poor biomechanics,” Eric explained.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Vigil couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you got, being patient and forgiving and undemanding.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up,” Bannister said. “It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
— Christopher McDougall
“…there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you’ve got, being patient and forgiving and… undemanding…maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.”
— Christopher McDougall
“If you don’t think you were born to run you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.”
— Christopher McDougall
“The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit.”
— Christopher McDougall
“There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.”
— Christopher McDougall
“The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.”
— Christopher McDougall
“But yeah, Ann [Trason] insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn’t get it because they’d never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6 jeans: get on the scale, get depressed, get your headphones on, and get it over with. But you can’t muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.”
— Christopher McDougall
“We say the rarajipari is the game of life, Angel said. You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can’t control it. You can only adjust.”
— Christopher McDougall
“We run when we’re scared, we run when we’re ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.”
— Christopher McDougall
“You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running or you wouldn’t live to love anything else.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy – but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Don’t fight the trail, take what it gives you. If you have a choice between one step or two between rocks, take three.”
— Christopher McDougall
“-The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other but to be with each other. -The Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their strength with some of his own.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow.” Ken Mierke says. “So they’re just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You’ve got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last.”-The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold–your hard-breathing point–during your endurance runs.”
— Christopher McDougall
“We wouldn’t be alive without love we wouldn’t have survived without running maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else. And like everything else we love-everything we sentimentally call our ‘passions’ and ‘desires’-it’s really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run.”
— Christopher McDougall
“You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else…We were born to run; we were born because we run”
— Christopher McDougall
“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by,” Kerouac wrote. “Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”
— Christopher McDougall
“Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck off a naked foot.”
— Christopher McDougall
“But you can’t muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.”
— Christopher McDougall