The Art of Manliness - Tribal Runners, Weekend Warriors, and Our Changing Relationship to Endurance Sports

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:00:11.180 endurance activities like distance running have existed since ancient times but humans

00:00:16.440 relationship to those pursuits has changed according to time and place in the west we've

00:00:21.420 currently turned endurance sports into a science tracking every metric and chasing personal records

00:00:25.860 through sophisticated technology and personalized training plans but as my guest who spent years

00:00:30.540 studying the running cultures in different societies knows well this modern individualized

00:00:34.940 data-driven approach isn't the only way to pursue the art of endurance michael crawley is a competitive

00:00:40.160 runner social anthropologist and the author of to the limit on the show today we first examine how

00:00:46.020 western athletes have workified running through technology and social media we then look at how

00:00:50.740 other cultures approach running differently including why east african runners emphasize

00:00:54.560 group training over individual goals and how the rara murray people in mexico incorporate spiritual

00:00:59.160 dimensions into the running we enter conversation with how we might rediscover more meaningful

00:01:03.400 holistic ways to approach our own physical pastimes after show's over check out our show notes at

00:01:08.160 aom.is endurance all right michael crawley welcome to the show

00:01:24.240 thank you for having me so you are a social anthropologist and you recently put out a book

00:01:29.280 exploring why humans willingly and some might say i would say this because i'm not an endurance guy

00:01:35.340 needlessly take part in endurance events like marathons and triathlons things like that

00:01:40.980 what led you down that line of research well i guess i've been running for over 20 years now i'm 36

00:01:48.920 so i've been running for most of my life that culminated in in running at a relatively high

00:01:54.120 level i ran for scotland and great britain run a 220 marathon but i suppose i've always been

00:01:59.220 interested in running culture or endurance culture so growing up as a teenager i had a coach who was

00:02:05.200 very good in the 1980s in the northeast of england and back then there was a club called gateshead

00:02:11.080 harriers that produced loads of really good runners olympic medalists commonwealth games medalists

00:02:15.440 but all from from quite a small area of the northeast of england and so he would tell me

00:02:20.640 about you know in the 80s it was very normal to run 100 miles a week if you went to a running club

00:02:25.480 that's just what was expected so i was curious about you know the fact that that's kind of changed

00:02:30.200 and it seems like there's some sort of cultural influence that makes people want to train that

00:02:34.340 hard so that was an area of the uk where there's a lot of working class people it was kind of part of

00:02:38.940 working class culture to do a lot of running so i was interested in cultures of endurance a long time

00:02:43.820 before i even knew what anthropology was i suppose and then you also so you started anthropology and

00:02:48.260 then you've taken this interest in the cultures of endurance and like you didn't you like spend

00:02:52.400 time with ethiopians to figure out why they run the way they do yeah so the the biggest project i've

00:02:57.340 done so far really was in ethiopia so i was there for nearly a year and a half and that was motivated

00:03:02.120 by this kind of curiosity about what it was about ethiopia that that made them produce so many top

00:03:07.420 runners i think we tend to lump ethiopians kenyans and ugandans together as kind of the east africans but

00:03:13.360 we don't know very much about people from ethiopia lots of people had gone to kenya to do research

00:03:18.080 because it was a former british colony and people could speak english and things i really wanted to

00:03:21.800 understand what it was specifically about ethiopia that made runners tick basically so the idea for

00:03:26.500 this new project actually came from ethiopia because what i found there was that people saw

00:03:30.380 running success as something that was collectively produced through practices of kind of living and

00:03:35.080 training together rather than as something that was quite individualistic like i think we sometimes

00:03:39.780 think of running i guess in the west and i learned that people in ethiopia saw energy in quite

00:03:45.480 different ways so if you think about a sport scientist they tend to think of energy as as kind

00:03:50.180 of something that's bounded within an individual body a kind of system of inputs and outputs that you

00:03:54.480 can measure in the lab but in ethiopia people thought about it as a kind of shared substance that

00:04:00.220 meant that it had to be very carefully sort of shared out between people it meant that running had to

00:04:05.260 be something that was communal that was done together and you could see what other people were doing

00:04:08.780 basically so when people would run together they would literally time their footsteps with each

00:04:12.980 other and run in sync with each other which is something that i found quite difficult to replicate

00:04:16.340 yeah that's one of the big takeaways from your book and you explores how in the west we typically

00:04:21.420 take an individualistic approach to running or other endurance events and then in other cultures

00:04:26.340 like ethiopia kenya it's more communal and i hope we can flesh that out but let's talk about just

00:04:31.800 like running in the west and you make a point in the book i thought it was interesting as an

00:04:36.680 anthropologist sometimes you notice people in the popular culture kind of put too fine of a

00:04:42.220 distinction between westerners and non-westerners it's more squidgy than we think but when you ask

00:04:48.220 westerners and by that i mean americans people living in the united kingdom canada things like that

00:04:52.840 when you ask them why they take part in endurance events like running or cycling what are the typical

00:05:01.100 answers you get on why they do it well a lot of people would tend to say something like it allows

00:05:07.680 them to strip things back to the sort of the bare minimum to kind of return to something more simple

00:05:13.100 and profound basically so the ultra runner damien hall who um he he won a race called the spine race in

00:05:19.880 the uk which is a non-stop race on the pennine way which is 268 miles he talked about that in a kind

00:05:26.240 of joking way as an extreme way of battling phone addiction so it is like a way of of getting away

00:05:31.020 from his emails and stripping things back to this kind of this simpler way of being and i think to

00:05:35.800 a certain extent when we put our running shoes on or jump on our bike we are kind of embracing this uh

00:05:40.480 this kind of freedom allowing our minds to wander and all those kinds of things but but then on the

00:05:44.620 other hand as you say there's a tendency to think of these activities in precisely the kinds of

00:05:49.080 terms that we're actually trying to escape so we celebrate individual resilience the drive for

00:05:54.860 productivity we try to quantify as many variables as we can we rank each other rank ourselves against

00:05:59.940 other people and things so endurance sport seems to embody these elements of play but also lots of

00:06:04.800 qualities of work as well so someone like elliot kipchoge the first man to run into two hours for

00:06:09.460 the marathon one of the things he likes to say a lot is only the truly disciplined in life are free

00:06:14.280 which kind of embody it brings these two things together you know this idea that it's you know there's

00:06:18.760 a really kind of contradictory statement that you have to be disciplined in order to be free but it

00:06:22.720 it seems to be that endurance sport brings together work and play in these really interesting ways

00:06:27.140 why do you think americans and british people people in the west do that like why have they

00:06:32.140 taken something that i think you know maybe a hundred years ago was something just you did for fun

00:06:38.640 just you know it was just something you did maybe for exercise and we started to make it more work

00:06:45.340 like where you're quantifying how many steps you're taking you're looking at your vo2 max you have this

00:06:50.660 very set out program you need to follow in order to you know get ready for a race like why the drive

00:06:56.680 towards workifying recreational endurance sports um i think endurance sport just kind of ends up

00:07:04.900 reflecting the broader culture really i think you know it's just that we with we spend so much time

00:07:11.580 sort of emphasizing things like productivity and and ranking each other based on achievements and

00:07:16.580 things that that we can't help but apply that to anything that we do including endurance sport i

00:07:21.320 guess it seems like if you look back in sort of a bit further back in history endurance sports have

00:07:27.540 tended to become really popular at times of kind of societal change or when there's been broader

00:07:32.520 anxieties about things so at the turn of the the 19th century the most popular sport in the world was

00:07:37.240 walking and it was people walking for six days around places like madison square gardens without

00:07:42.360 sleeping and they would draw these enormous like tens of thousands of people would come and watch that

00:07:46.960 and historians have speculated that it's because people were worried at that point about kind of

00:07:51.440 automation and about the introduction of motor cars and it was a way for humans to be like you know we

00:07:56.860 can still do this there are unique things that we can do as humans that machines can't do so it seems

00:08:01.160 like endurance sport tends to sort of reflect or push back against certain elements of what's happening in

00:08:06.240 the broader culture so i think we can kind of trace those today as well yeah because we're having a lot of

00:08:10.800 change with artificial intelligence digital technology things like that yeah yeah yeah yeah

00:08:16.220 and speaking into pedestrianism like when walking was this huge sport we actually did a podcast on

00:08:21.660 this a long time ago episode number 167 it was with matthew algeo you read a book yeah i read his book

00:08:28.260 yeah yeah great book yeah it's a great book it's really interesting because you wouldn't think

00:08:32.520 endurance walking would be a compelling spectator sport but it was huge like competitors would walk

00:08:38.840 collapse for six days straight and then the winner would get you know the equivalent of a million

00:08:44.380 dollars in today's money so it was a really it was really peculiar yeah absolutely yeah it's um

00:08:50.940 and it's kind of sort of disappeared from the popular consciousness but yeah there was that and

00:08:55.780 then there were dance marathons in the depression era where that was kind of a a huge thing that

00:09:00.240 everyone wanted to watch people dancing and dancing for like you know weeks on end basically on very

00:09:04.300 a little sleep which sort of i guess reflected something of of what was happening more broadly

00:09:09.260 in america with you know ideas of the american dream if you just keep dancing long enough it doesn't

00:09:14.160 matter where you're from but you might eventually make it and become famous or whatever but yeah these

00:09:18.220 things have there's been a few pockets of of real attention on endurance sports and i think we're kind

00:09:24.720 of in one now as well which is interesting yeah and i think social media has only just amplified

00:09:30.240 the popularity of endurance activities you actually write about how social media has changed our

00:09:36.060 relationship with endurance sports like running or triathlons walk us through that how has social

00:09:42.100 media changed how people approach their sport say compared to 20 30 years ago sure yeah so my interest

00:09:51.680 in social media kind of started with this project that i did during covid lockdowns where i was interested

00:09:57.100 in asking people professional athletes how they experienced having to post on social media as part

00:10:02.300 of their contracts basically and what happened was that we're talking about this idea that posting on

00:10:07.760 social media was basically a form of work and it was something that they found quite sort of physically

00:10:12.500 and emotionally draining a lot of the time and that was because it was something that they weren't

00:10:17.660 necessarily trained to do but they needed to do it in order to continue to get paid by the brands that they

00:10:22.080 were working with and what i think is kind of interesting is that the kind of amateur cyclists

00:10:27.020 and runners tend to mimic the kinds of scripts that professional athletes will produce so they'll

00:10:32.900 produce very similar kinds of posts without necessarily knowing that the professional athletes

00:10:36.600 that are posting in that way are doing it without really wanting to so i kind of explored these ideas

00:10:41.660 about presumption this idea that we're both producing and consuming when we use social media that

00:10:46.220 we think that we're kind of consuming something but we're the ones who are actually creating the value for

00:10:51.000 these companies so just basically asking the question of whether we need to think a bit more

00:10:54.020 carefully about how and what kinds of things we post as social media around endurance but i think it

00:10:59.340 tends to amplify particular kinds of messages so ideas about taking personal responsibility about just

00:11:04.920 pushing harder all the time and then you can make it those kinds of messages and it tends to push

00:11:09.960 kind of quick fixes which might not necessarily you know there aren't really many quick fixes for endurance

00:11:16.120 sports so i spoke to a guy called andy berry for the book who holds the record for the most

00:11:20.580 mountains run up and down in the late district in a 24-hour period and he said he went on a podcast

00:11:25.920 and talked about one training session he did and then the next day it was all over social media

00:11:30.060 with you know these posts saying this is the one training session that everyone must do in order to

00:11:35.160 to become a better runner you know this kind of quick fix idea so he when i asked him for training

00:11:41.000 advice and what kinds of training sessions he would recommend he was really reluctant to tell me he was

00:11:45.160 like i can tell you some things but don't put them in your book because people will

00:11:48.160 you know people will grab onto one little thing and really the message that people who do endurance

00:11:52.880 sport need to learn is that it's all about kind of patience and cumulative effort over a really long

00:11:58.140 period of time which isn't it doesn't fit the sort of temporality of of social media very well

00:12:04.080 all the kinds of uh sort of easy messages that people want to pick up there really and then going

00:12:08.920 back to your point that you know in the west we typically have an individualistic approach to

00:12:13.580 everything but you see it in endurance sports where it's just running like a solo activity

00:12:18.140 social media i imagine just amplifies that because when you're doing social media you kind of have to

00:12:24.220 make yourself the main character of the event and you have to kind of think about how can i script

00:12:28.940 this video or this picture so it shows me doing this thing so you start getting very self-reflective

00:12:36.120 about how you present yourself and again it makes it more just about you and the self and the

00:12:42.200 individual as opposed to as we'll talk about here in a minute and other cultures where it's more

00:12:46.160 communal yeah absolutely so i think it does a similar thing in some ways to the kind of wearable

00:12:51.240 technology that has become far more popular where it it's kind of encouraging people to to focus on

00:12:57.240 the individual and on your own data or your own kind of selfie or whatever it is rather than looking

00:13:01.360 outwards towards others yeah yeah and then i mean imagine to the social media where you have to think

00:13:06.280 about not only professional athletes where they have to think about okay i gotta put out this stuff

00:13:12.160 so i can get the sponsorship so i can do my races so in a way it acts as a distraction from the main

00:13:17.920 thing you're trying to do which is run i imagine you can do the same thing to recreational runners

00:13:23.020 where they took up a sport they took up running they took up cycling because they really enjoyed it

00:13:27.360 they found it as an intrinsic good but then if they start adding in social media and maybe they

00:13:32.740 started to do it because they just wanted to share with their friends like here's what i'm doing and it

00:13:36.140 was sort of like a maybe it was like a communal thing like you're just sharing with your other

00:13:40.040 friends who do running as well and you're able to share that with people who live far away from

00:13:44.920 you but then it might turn into something a little bit more because maybe you're getting

00:13:49.300 like some reach outs from brands saying hey if you tag us or just talk about our product in your

00:13:55.360 video we'll give you some money and so it changes the relationship to their sport from one of like

00:14:02.360 intrinsic worth and value to something like well i gotta do this so i can get something else get money or

00:14:08.800 whatever yeah yeah exactly and then you you see a lot of the videos will be someone's kind of propped

00:14:13.880 up their phone on a tree or something and then they're going and running past it and making sure

00:14:17.520 they time themselves running past it right so that they can capture the image that they can then go

00:14:21.620 and post on social media and i just wonder you know the act of doing that is that improving the

00:14:26.180 experience of of that run or is it just interrupting it and yeah exactly what you're saying you know it

00:14:31.040 changes the reason for doing it which i think is really really kind of important and with an

00:14:35.480 endurance sport as well people get injured an awful lot because you're doing a huge amount of running

00:14:38.940 or a huge amount of cycling so you end up what happened when i spoke to the professional athletes

00:14:44.320 was that they said sometimes the highest performing posts were the ones where they're talking about

00:14:47.940 being really vulnerable or about being injured because they're actually more relatable than the

00:14:52.200 ones about where they talk about being able to run you know a 13 minute 5k or something like that

00:14:56.760 that most people can't comprehend so they end up focusing on the moments of kind of

00:15:00.940 you know vulnerability and injury and things which can be quite yeah again quite draining for

00:15:05.100 people to have to be that vulnerable on social media i guess yeah because you're just then you

00:15:08.960 start getting questions from everybody they want to like pry further well tell me more yeah and then

00:15:13.200 sooner or later you're spending five or six hours you're right on uh on instagram which is what the

00:15:17.420 the runners that i spoke to you said they were often doing yeah yeah they don't want to do that

00:15:20.520 i imagine a lot of runners are introverts and so having to do that it's just like oh geez i don't

00:15:25.720 want to just drain it yeah so you mentioned the tracking devices the data wearable you know the

00:15:32.280 smart watches apple watches whoops things like that and how that's also changed our relationship

00:15:38.780 to endurance sports and just sports in general in the west walk us through that what's the history

00:15:44.100 that like when did americans british people people in the west start using data to improve their

00:15:52.220 running times well the history goes back quite a long way so if you if you look back 100 years in

00:15:58.680 the 1920s there was a finnish runner called pavo nermi who was a industrial sort of training college

00:16:05.740 basically and he came up with the idea of running with a stopwatch in his hand and at the time that

00:16:11.060 was unheard of basically he would run with a stopwatch in his hand in races and uh and people

00:16:15.380 were really critical of that cartoons at the time depicted him as like a stopwatch with his limbs made out

00:16:20.280 of industrial chimneys and as this kind of stiff-limbed robot who was crushing his opponents

00:16:25.440 into the ground as well the way that it was put in an article at the time so it shows that these kind

00:16:29.780 of worries about people merging with machines or about the kind of dehumanizing effects of technologies

00:16:34.120 goes back you know a century basically but i think what i've traced in the book is the fact that i think

00:16:39.740 we can say that there's been a a relative explosion of the use of these kinds of tracking devices just in

00:16:45.320 the last sort of 10 years so what i did was i basically used a whole load of different things

00:16:50.160 so i used a woot band i used a garmin watch i used super sapiens live glucose monitoring i did some

00:16:57.580 home blood tests where you post off a little vial of blood to a company to get it tested and things

00:17:01.800 because i was interested in sort of experiencing them myself these things are marketed by the companies

00:17:07.240 as explicitly performance enhancing which i think is interesting so they're marketed as giving us

00:17:11.740 this kind of privileged insight into our bodies and ourselves which made me wonder whether we

00:17:17.120 because the other thing is they're not actually particularly accurate so if you wear multiple

00:17:21.680 devices that measure heart rate variability for example you'll normally find that there's quite a

00:17:26.360 big discrepancy between them so if we're giving a lot of our agency away to these devices it might

00:17:30.140 not actually be particularly beneficial and rather than kind of giving ourselves new insights i wonder

00:17:35.780 whether we're actually kind of blunting our ability to learn how to feel things sort of for

00:17:40.220 ourselves or through intuition or something like that so one of the things i did for that chapter

00:17:44.720 was i took all these different kinds of devices to a guy called charlie spedding who was the last

00:17:49.340 british olympic medalist in the marathon who happens to live two streets away from me and i said you know

00:17:55.480 if this if all this stuff had been available in the 80s would you have used it and he said he would

00:17:59.880 have used one or two things but very selectively so he'd have used heart rate monitors for maybe one

00:18:04.840 kind of run so that he could get a kind of baseline for it but then he would put it away for a while

00:18:09.980 and then use it again because he wouldn't want to become dependent on it and he told me a story

00:18:14.380 about going down to do a training session one night driving through to to gateshead warming up just not

00:18:20.320 feeling right and basically putting his tracksuit back on driving home again driving through the next

00:18:24.940 night to do the session again and being really proud of the decision to not do it and what he said

00:18:30.820 to me was you know i really wouldn't have wanted to watch making that decision for me because

00:18:34.200 he needed to know that he was able to make that kind of decision and he kind of drew a line between

00:18:38.580 that and when he got his olympic medal and being able to make the right kinds of decisions about what

00:18:44.940 to do in the heat of the moment in a race he was like if you give that kind of agency away to a watch

00:18:49.500 or some sort of device you're not going to be building that kind of trust in yourself to know

00:18:53.800 your body for a start but also to trust your own kind of decision making processes i guess

00:18:57.700 yeah so what these devices promise like the whoop or the aura ring you know you wear these things and

00:19:03.820 it can tell you based on data they collect like your heart rate variability so hrv if that is high

00:19:11.560 actually high hrv is good it means you're like not stressed looks at your sleep it looks at you know

00:19:16.960 just your activity it gives you what's called like a readiness score so you can you wake up and like oh

00:19:22.020 it'll tell you you are you could hit a pr today on your runtime you can go hard but i and i've used

00:19:28.020 these devices too and i found that it was yeah it was really weird so one thing i noticed too

00:19:33.120 there's differences between like how these things measure sleep even your heart rate and then sometimes

00:19:39.100 you'd wake up and it would say like your readiness score is is lousy but then you know you kind of check

00:19:45.160 in with yourself and you're like actually i feel pretty good i feel like i could go hard today and so i

00:19:50.700 would just ignore it and i had a great workout i imagine there's people who just they lived their

00:19:55.160 lives particularly like recreational runners who lived their lives by their what these devices tell

00:19:59.520 them and they're probably they're probably leaving stuff on the table as a consequence yeah i think

00:20:06.120 so definitely but i yeah i definitely had experiences where what the watch was saying and how i felt were

00:20:10.820 really out of line with each other sometimes a very very high hrv score as well can indicate that

00:20:15.820 you're extremely stressed so there's this thing of like it's really high that's really good is not

00:20:20.680 necessarily always the case but most people just assume that really high means really good

00:20:24.460 one of the interesting things so i i asked people about this when i was doing the interviews about

00:20:28.420 social media as well and i talked to some athletes who were sponsored by hrv monitors and they would

00:20:34.460 they said you know if we go to the world championships or the olympics or something you take

00:20:38.120 it off for the four or five days before the race because you don't want it telling you that your

00:20:41.680 readiness score is low but also if you're running an olympic final 1500 meters in the evening

00:20:46.860 your readiness score isn't going to be through the roof because you're going to be stressed

00:20:49.800 because you're about to run the olympic 1500 meter final so but that doesn't mean that you're

00:20:53.940 not ready so there's yeah these kind of professional athletes they understand it with a level of nuance

00:20:59.440 that i think is you know it's important to bring that level of nuance to to interacting with these

00:21:04.300 things really yeah and but the recreational runner might not they might think well you know this

00:21:09.280 professional said this is what they use i'm gonna use it all the time but without that nuance that the

00:21:13.580 professional takes to the device exactly yeah yeah yeah i i've done weight lifting and hrv actually

00:21:20.320 doesn't have play much of a role in anaerobic activities like weight lifting so if you've had

00:21:25.800 a crappy hrv or high hrv it doesn't really affect strength-based sports based on the research i've read

00:21:30.960 but there are devices in weight lifting that monitor things like that can tell you how fast the bar is

00:21:39.080 moving um so that you can use that information to be like well uh the bar's moving fast then i can

00:21:46.140 you can use these calculations to figure out what your pr is for that day the highest amount of weight

00:21:51.460 you could lift that day and i thought it was kind of interesting it was useful to play around with

00:21:56.640 that because you got some interesting information but again it doesn't really tell you much that you

00:22:01.460 already don't know you know the device tell you the bar is moving fast like well i know it's moving

00:22:06.080 i felt it go up fast and so i don't know how much like how useful it was compared to just listening

00:22:12.780 to your body yeah it reminds me of the one of the biggest agents for kenyan athletes is a guy called

00:22:19.500 joss hermans he was a very good dutch runner in back in the 70s and he was the world record holder

00:22:24.740 for 10 miles running and they did a special new kind of muscle biopsy on his leg to see what kind

00:22:30.060 of muscle fibers he had and things and they came back two weeks later and said it turns out from the

00:22:33.760 muscle biopsy that you you're probably really good at running pretty fast for a long time and he was

00:22:37.780 like well yeah i know that because i regularly run fast for a long time so it's like whether it's

00:22:44.220 actually teaching you anything new is a big question i think yeah again and what these devices do it makes

00:22:50.240 running your sport more work like you have data how you can improve yourself and then also just

00:22:55.220 reinforces the individuality of the sport because all of this data that you're getting is going to be

00:23:00.640 unique to you yeah so i mean if you want to try to run with the group it'd be hard to coordinate that

00:23:06.720 if everyone's using these devices because one guy would be like well my hrv is great today so i'm

00:23:11.580 going to go hard and then your buddy's like well mine's crappy so i'm gonna go slow so you wouldn't

00:23:17.160 be able to sync up with a group yeah and i've had this with people who just run based on their heart

00:23:22.960 rate as well you know people who go out and say i'm going to go for a run today but i'm not going to

00:23:26.660 let my heart rate go over 160 and you'll be running along with them feeling good and you want

00:23:31.040 to push a little bit up a hill because it feels good to do that and they're kind of looking at

00:23:34.700 their watch saying oh no you know i've got to slow down so you can't it yeah it means it it makes it

00:23:39.400 hard to run with other people basically if you're you can't all run according to the same sort of

00:23:43.340 heart rate zone so i think there's important things to think about there there's a good anecdote

00:23:47.860 from one of the top coaches of kenyan athletes who also coaches some european runners and he said

00:23:52.200 if he gave to a group of kenyan runners and a group of european runners the same training session

00:23:56.500 where he said you know you've got to run three minutes per kilometer for an hour or something

00:23:59.700 like that the european runners if they didn't think they could do it they would all decide what pace

00:24:04.280 they could run for an hour and do it on their own whereas the kenyan runners would go as a group and 0.55

00:24:08.700 they'd run at three minutes per kilometer until they couldn't do it anymore so it's kind of two

00:24:12.280 different ways of approaching two different ways of valuing things i guess yeah one of which is is far

00:24:18.020 more communal than the other we're gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors

00:24:21.580 and now back to the show okay so yeah we've basically in the west we've really we've workified

00:24:30.260 running with data with technology with our approach to training we've made it very individual but every

00:24:36.960 now and then there's the you know westerners kind of get fed up and think oh i just i want to bring

00:24:41.460 back the joy into running into my cycling i mean what they'll often do is they'll look to non-western

00:24:48.120 or indigenous cultures to figure out how to get back to a more natural or simple way of running

00:24:54.240 and christopher mcdougall's book born to run is often the gateway into this approach of you know

00:25:01.100 quote-unquote natural running for those who aren't familiar with this book what's the basic thesis of

00:25:06.300 born to run so born to run it's a book about the rara murray in mexico also known as the tarahumara

00:25:14.160 which is the name that the the spanish gave them and mcdougall basically interweaves this narrative of

00:25:19.160 a 50 mile trail race featuring some rara murray runners and some top american ultra runners with this

00:25:26.740 kind of narrative about the fact that humans are born to run this idea that endurance running is an

00:25:32.460 important part of our evolutionary history because we basically used it as a technique for hunting

00:25:37.640 called persistence hunting basically where we would have chased animals to exhaustion over kind

00:25:42.460 of many hours of determined running so like i i found the book extremely compelling when i first read

00:25:48.380 it i read it in a couple of days like a lot of other people have and his argument is basically that

00:25:52.860 the rara murray are what he calls a near mythical tribe of stone age super athletes and that we can

00:25:58.760 therefore see in them some kind of representation of our kind of ancestral past so this is a view

00:26:05.320 that's shared by a lot of people so he writes that if scott durek could win the race that he describes

00:26:10.080 in eureka he wouldn't just be beating anolfo and silvino who are his main sort of rara murray rivals

00:26:15.680 but he'd be demonstrating that he was the best of all time so i think there's a problem because

00:26:20.480 these representations kind of reinforce ideas about the differences between kind of so-called savages and

00:26:27.440 supposedly civilized people or between kind of like westerners and and kind of non-westerners and

00:26:32.940 the rara murray therefore come to represent humanity as a whole in this kind of pristine

00:26:36.540 and supposedly like physically superior state right it's the myth it's the myth of the noble savage that

00:26:42.080 rousseau popularized yeah yeah yeah basically but something you point out too is that one of the

00:26:47.860 critiques you make of mcdougall's thesis all right so these these runners they represent sort of like

00:26:52.660 man at its best if it's like the edenic state of man if we run like them and approach running the way 1.00

00:26:57.820 they do all of us everyone could be these high performing athletes but one of the critiques you

00:27:02.860 make is that mcdougall while he lionizes these indigenous runners he takes a very western view of

00:27:12.580 the tribe which misses the broader context which you try to dig into can you flesh that out a little bit

00:27:19.500 for us yeah well i guess i just argued that he he focuses mainly on some things that the rara murray

00:27:26.720 themselves wouldn't have thought were that important so he spends a lot of time focusing

00:27:30.500 on the fact that they wear very rudimentary sandals to run in rather than running shoes and so there was

00:27:35.520 the whole argument that that was a far more natural way of running and that kind of spawned this whole

00:27:40.740 interest in barefoot running shoes and a whole market for uh for like vibram shoes and things that kind

00:27:46.860 mimicked being barefoot so what i've tried to do is um kind of rather than focusing on things like that

00:27:53.960 i tried to focus on the kind of cultural sort of reasons why people run so basically what people

00:27:59.580 would say is that there was this really important kind of spiritual dimension to running in rara murray

00:28:04.420 culture so god who's referred to as onuroame uh basically likes it when people bet a lot of money

00:28:11.340 on the running races and he likes it when the music that accompanies the runners is performed really well

00:28:16.160 and that the running goes on for a really long time so the music's important because it's that the

00:28:20.840 emotion of running is supposed to be very important and basically if people are able to run or dance for

00:28:26.740 really long periods of time god is thought of as having a tendency to reward that through making it

00:28:31.680 rain and through through causing people to have a kind of prosperous future basically so running has this

00:28:37.140 very spiritual importance where it also has this symbolic idea that through running or dancing you're

00:28:44.000 kind of stamping down any bad vibes keeping them down below and you are literally kind of keeping

00:28:48.700 the world turning by running so i think those kinds of sort of cultural reasons for running are

00:28:54.580 for me anyway that those kinds of explanations are more interesting than the evolutionary ones yeah

00:29:00.400 or even like the technique like what gear you use to run yeah i think that's that's interesting

00:29:05.380 point that you know the book focuses really on like oh what kind of stuff are they using to run or

00:29:09.980 how is their form when they run and i mean i i remember when that book came out and the whole

00:29:15.400 barefoot running thing was a craze i guess it was probably 15 years ago i'll admit i bought a pair of

00:29:20.880 those vibram five finger shoes and you just look goofy well the guy silvino who was third in the race

00:29:28.280 that chris mcdougall describes i spent a lot of time with him when i went out to to mexico and he took

00:29:32.580 me running and he was just what he was wearing trail shoes because he says you know it's more comfortable

00:29:36.900 to run in these than it is to run in uh in sandals that are made out of car tires yeah yeah yeah when

00:29:42.700 you actually talked to him i was like why do you run in the car tire sandals it's like well it's all

00:29:46.620 we can afford if we if i could if i had the money i would buy i'd have a good pair of shoes

00:29:51.400 yeah so i kind of it's kind of tongue-in-cheek in the book but i was saying that going to the

00:29:57.400 rara murray and focusing on the shoes is a bit like writing a book about french cooking and focusing

00:30:01.300 on the spoons that they're using to stir things with rather than the recipes and the kind of

00:30:05.440 ideas behind it and stuff so i think yeah there's just there's more interesting things going on i

00:30:09.700 think yeah and so going to their their culture of running like why they run so it's a spiritual

00:30:14.460 practice for them like there's actually existential stakes going on when they run and i mean the other

00:30:20.620 thing you talk about too it's these races that they run these long distance races how long are the

00:30:25.240 races again so sometimes they're as long as people can keep going for basically so the format is

00:30:32.420 it's like a about a five kilometer loop and you have two teams normally and they throw a ball they

00:30:38.480 refer to it as throwing but it's kind of like sort of scooping it with their foot a wooden ball that

00:30:42.920 goes around the loop and sometimes the races are over a predetermined number of loops but more often

00:30:47.960 it's just basically keep going around the loop until one team gets lapped or all of the members of

00:30:53.460 one of the teams give up so i heard stories about these races that go on for like 180 kilometers

00:30:58.160 wow which is yeah a long time that is a long time and they're highly competitive so like they're

00:31:03.760 betting lots of money on these things but you talk about even though they're highly competitive

00:31:09.080 the competition actually makes it cooperative can you walk us through that idea yeah so often the

00:31:16.380 teams will be from kind of competing villages or from yeah from from the surrounding area people

00:31:21.960 that you know but you don't know that well and then the villages will normally bet lots of money and

00:31:27.560 other things like horses on the person who's from their own village so it's a way of and people

00:31:31.840 will talk about the races for like weeks in the run-up to them so it becomes a real kind of focal

00:31:36.100 point for the communities and people will talk about the races for like weeks in the run-up to them so

00:31:41.200 it becomes a real kind of focal point for the communities and it brings people together and then

00:31:45.780 beyond just the so that you have the teams of runners that are normally sort of six people but it's not

00:31:50.620 just them that are running a lot of the time you get the other villages running alongside them for

00:31:54.900 for portions of the race large parts of the race obviously are overnight and it's dark and so people

00:31:59.660 run with torches that are set on fire you have musicians that run parts of the loops with everybody

00:32:06.240 playing musical instruments to kind of keep the morale up and things so basically it's just this

00:32:10.620 focal point that brings the whole of the community together and where these kind of big outpourings of

00:32:15.720 energy are kind of seen as something that is beneficial to the whole community basically all right so it's a

00:32:22.060 group activity it's not you're just running by yourself do the people who take part in these long

00:32:26.100 races do they train for them like a an american would train for a marathon no absolutely not so

00:32:32.160 silvino would he took me for a run but we ran really far down into this valley and we went to have a cup of

00:32:38.320 tea with his brother and then we ran all the way back again so even just taking an anthropologist to see

00:32:43.460 what running is like here wasn't really seen as a good enough reason for him he needed to do something

00:32:47.400 as well as the running and if he had a load of spare energy and time he would rather use it to

00:32:52.420 do something like uh chop some wood or you know go and make some money than he would training but i

00:32:59.180 mean i suppose it depends on how you think about training but the everyday life for a lot of raramuru

00:33:03.840 people involves quite a lot of slow jogging or walking to get around places but just training for the sake

00:33:09.060 of training basically doesn't happen yeah if you gave them like a six-month program they'd be like

00:33:14.700 this is weird what are you talking about exactly yeah yeah yeah i'm curious has tourism or interest

00:33:21.080 in the raw marine how they run has it affected their running culture in traditions because i think

00:33:26.780 you see this happen in other cultures where you know westerners go there and they say oh wow look at

00:33:32.220 this cool you know exotic culture um and they start visiting it and then the cultures they pick up on it

00:33:39.240 like oh these americans like it when we do this and so we'll just play up this one thing so you know

00:33:45.820 because it becomes like a money-making thing has that happened at all do they like play up for like

00:33:50.440 the westerners who read born to run and like okay yeah we'll give them some haraches and we'll take 0.96

00:33:55.740 them on a race uh yeah so there are lots of races that are organized that are what the raramuri refer

00:34:00.420 to as marathonists as opposed to rarohipuri which is the game with the ball so marathonists is just it

00:34:06.240 doesn't mean marathons it just means any race that is just a normal kind of trail race and the the

00:34:10.680 number of those has really exploded since born to run was written because there's a lot of interest

00:34:14.560 in running but people don't tend to organize rarohipuri because that's kind of a separate

00:34:19.000 cultural practice i suppose so what's happened is that the raramuri runners ended up running more

00:34:23.940 of these kind of conventional races to the detriment of the rarohipuri but people did say i talked to a

00:34:30.260 lot of kind of old people who used to do a lot of running when they were younger and they said the

00:34:34.820 culture of the rarohipuri is going down anyway because people because of things like the

00:34:39.880 introduction of the cell phone and other kinds of forms of entertainment running for two days at a

00:34:45.320 time and spending two weeks preparing for it and and things just isn't a priority for as many people

00:34:51.360 anymore people go away to work and things so there was already a kind of decline in the kind of

00:34:55.560 traditional running practices which is a shame but it's just kind of i think it's what happens

00:34:59.880 yeah okay so this is one example of a culture that you know westerners might look to like oh

00:35:06.000 this is inspiration but we kind of missed the mark and missed the mark on sort of the existential

00:35:10.800 reasons why these people run in the communal aspect another group of people that westerners look

00:35:16.620 to for inspiration we've been talking about them throughout this conversation are eastern africans

00:35:20.460 kenyans ethiopians when you do this research when you talk to westerners

00:35:24.980 what do westerners think these endurance athletes in eastern africa do differently and like what are

00:35:31.160 they trying to emulate well that's a good question i think a lot of the assumptions about why kenyans

00:35:37.860 and ethiopians are so good come down to kind of genetics and altitude so people just assume that

00:35:42.240 they're particularly good because of factors that are sort of beyond their control either that or they

00:35:47.240 say you know they're really good because they're coming from impoverished backgrounds so they kind of have

00:35:51.380 to be good right so and i think both of those ways of thinking about it are quite deterministic they're

00:35:55.760 just like you know well you know they're very very poor which naturally leads them to be very good at

00:36:00.120 running or they just they have this genetic advantage which naturally makes them good runners and i think

00:36:05.000 both of those explanations kind of just downplay a lot of the hard work and expertise that runners in

00:36:09.800 ethiopia and kenya have so you know people are aware of the kind of group training dynamic that exists in ethiopia

00:36:17.140 and kenya but i don't think people really put it into practice that often and it's yeah it tends to

00:36:22.640 be that people assume that people are good because they did things like running to and from school out

00:36:26.500 of necessity and things like that none of those there might be some truth to the idea that there's

00:36:32.160 some kind of genetic explanation for success of east african athletes but they've tried a lot of

00:36:37.320 scientists have tried really hard to find the kind of the secret there and they've so far completely

00:36:42.880 failed so i i would i would say that the explanations are probably more to do with particular kinds of

00:36:48.320 expertise that exist in those places all kind of cultural values i want to dig deeper into this idea

00:36:54.240 of their communal aspect to running and you talked about a little bit but but what does that look like

00:36:59.860 all right so in the west we have our own individual running programs that we follow when east africans 0.69

00:37:07.240 decide they're going to get into running how do they approach training well so a lot of people when

00:37:13.480 they first start they find somebody else who's already a runner and kind of just try to join in

00:37:18.200 with them in the forest or or something and so they they're passing on information directly from one

00:37:23.980 person to another or through practice basically through following following somebody else people

00:37:28.440 were quite skeptical about a kind of scientific approach to running so they would um i remember one runner

00:37:34.140 saying you know a doctor doesn't understand running because they don't run if if your mind and your

00:37:39.240 legs are not integrated you can't understand running so they would really not trust a kind of abstract 0.97

00:37:43.960 sport scientist approach but i do think that the approach that they have it can be described as

00:37:48.920 scientific just in a slightly different way so they're they're kind of continually experimenting with

00:37:53.920 different kind of environments with the balancing of different kinds of environments within ethiopia

00:37:59.080 they're constantly experimenting with training practices in a way that i think is scientific but in a kind of

00:38:04.000 citizen scientist kind of way they're kind of learning through doing things and one of the

00:38:09.300 things that i think they've learned is that basically in order to improve you need to be

00:38:12.820 running with other people so that's the main thing that they kept saying to me you know if you run on

00:38:16.720 your own that's just for health if you want to improve you've got to run with other people all the

00:38:20.540 time and that's something that they've learned through basically doing it i think how do you think

00:38:25.160 running with other people improves your running like you've talked about you're sharing the energy

00:38:31.680 but but tell us more about that so in harder training sessions people would run in a single

00:38:36.700 file line and they would think about it in far more like the way we think about velodrome cyclists

00:38:43.180 this idea that you know somebody's in somebody else's slipstream and they're using a hell of a lot less

00:38:47.840 energy to do that they just really believed that you would be able to do more harder running run

00:38:52.880 quicker whilst expending less energy if you're within that group environment basically so there's a real

00:38:59.160 taboo against training on your own if i occasionally went for a run in the forest on my own it was like

00:39:03.500 that was as bad as eating in a restaurant on your own which is also really really kind of frowned

00:39:08.200 upon in ethiopia but it was i guess it so it's also a reflection of the kind of broader cultural

00:39:13.060 values but people really thought you know you really just can't improve unless you're with other

00:39:17.580 people because they're going to they kind of pull you on they pull you to a new level basically

00:39:21.180 yeah and i'm sure everyone's experienced that when you work with a group like you push yourself

00:39:27.080 more because you want to keep up with the group and there's something like i mean i think you talk

00:39:31.460 about this emil durkheim the sociologist came with the idea of collective effervescence where when you're

00:39:37.240 with a group you somehow are able to push yourself more because you kind of feed off the energy of

00:39:43.260 everyone else yeah and he so he talks about kind of i guess like religious experiences and things like

00:39:49.060 that as well that there's clearly some kind of energy that is greater than the sum of all its parts when

00:39:54.140 loads of people come together to do a particular thing and i think that ethiopian runners they've

00:39:58.380 experienced that often enough in their training that they just do it all the time and yeah it's

00:40:02.900 become taboo to train on your own basically well how do the ethiopians transition from this like

00:40:07.500 group running where you're pushing each other and pulling each other and doing things together

00:40:13.640 like how does that transfer to race day where it becomes an individual thing that's a good question

00:40:20.360 so the group that i train with was a professional group that were managed by a guy a scottish guy

00:40:26.000 called malcolm anderson who is one of the agents and so they all train in a group in addis together

00:40:31.700 but he was really careful to not send athletes from the same group to this to the same race basically

00:40:37.560 so you try to make sure that people didn't have to compete against people that they trained with

00:40:41.940 and so that meant that competition with people were able to see competition as something slightly

00:40:45.860 different where they they were able to sort of change their mindset a little bit that's interesting

00:40:50.440 but people who would race in training were seen as a real problem that had to be dealt with

00:40:54.960 one specific training kind of speed sessions which people would do maybe once every couple of weeks

00:41:00.460 like really really fast running those were seen as opportunities to practice more competitive

00:41:04.880 kinds of running but it was seen as important to really limit that because otherwise people would

00:41:11.320 exhaust themselves basically so yeah people were quite careful about reining in competitive instincts

00:41:16.940 until they needed to be unleashed basically have you seen any westerners go to ethiopia they catch

00:41:23.920 this idea that running is a communal group activity have you seen them take that idea and bring it back home

00:41:31.460 to the west it's quite hard to do that in some ways so i would i've tried to bring groups of people

00:41:37.600 together in when i was training in edinburgh and things like that but i think it also relies on

00:41:41.740 the being a group of people who are roughly the same level or there being enough people who are

00:41:45.740 willing to train hard enough to sustain that often it's the case that there's only a few people who

00:41:51.940 are running at a similar level to you and even if you try to bring them together they've all got their

00:41:56.280 own coach and they've all got slightly different ideas about what they want to do and it's a bit like

00:42:00.200 herding cats i have tried it but it's difficult what do you think you know given current trends of

00:42:05.740 technology commercialization social media where do you see endurance sports heading in the next decade

00:42:12.600 that's a really good question i'm not actually it's hard to say i think in some ways these things

00:42:18.520 kind of yo-yo back and forth so you get the kind of super shoes these kind of really big thick

00:42:23.260 spring-loaded shoes that people are really into at the moment and then you have the kind of barefoot

00:42:28.080 running shoes which are exactly the opposite so things might continue to yo-yo back and forth

00:42:31.600 but i think you could also see this kind of datification thing just going to a real extreme

00:42:36.460 so there are already companies developing kind of ai training programs so you could imagine an ai kind

00:42:43.920 of taking all your hrv data and your gps data and all that kind of thing and crunching all those numbers

00:42:49.760 and coming up with what would be kind of the optimum i suppose for your for your own particular

00:42:55.460 physiology and and things but for me that would be a kind of dystopian outcome everybody training on

00:43:01.140 their own and being told what to do by an ai rather than an actual coach so my whole competitive

00:43:06.400 running career i had the same coach and he would always say if i would try to schedule a training

00:43:10.280 session for a time when which was more convenient for me where he couldn't make it he was always

00:43:14.420 very resistant to that he'd be like no i need to be able to look into the whites of your eyes and

00:43:17.600 see how tired you are and we need to be able to chat about you know how your day has been and that

00:43:22.220 kind of peripheral stuff because that's also important and i think if we do go fully into this kind of

00:43:27.140 training by the numbers i think that would be a shame for me but yeah yeah i mean it also goes

00:43:34.020 to this question and you talk about this in the book in relation to the super shoes that are allowing

00:43:39.540 runners to you know i didn't like it was like we broke the two hour marathon record because of these

00:43:45.540 shoes yeah and the female world record for the marathon is now under 210 which is incredibly fast 1.00

00:43:50.880 yeah yeah and something you talk about is people don't talk about the athlete that broke you know

00:43:58.580 who actually did the running like i don't even know the name of the person yeah but like i i know about

00:44:03.760 the shoe the technology behind the shoe and something you talk about is this technology might

00:44:09.100 be subsuming or taking over the humanity of the sport yeah and i think it's a bigger problem than

00:44:16.500 previous technological developments in footwear because it's such a big leap i talked to some

00:44:21.700 biomechanists about this and they say the interesting thing about the the shoes with the spring in is that

00:44:27.620 they improve everybody but by different degrees so some studies have like some people improving one

00:44:33.120 percent and some people improving eight percent in a particular shoe so it seems to be it comes down

00:44:37.480 to the combination of the particular biomechanics of the person and the footwear which means that i think

00:44:42.700 more than other technological improvements you could see the outcome of races being determined by the

00:44:49.080 particular shoes that athletes had on and the slower athletes might end up winning the race because

00:44:53.980 they've got a particular shoe on and it just happens to fit with the way that they run better and i think

00:44:58.580 that's that's a problem because yeah it's potentially changing results but then when you get the coverage

00:45:04.480 that both of the men's and women's world records were broken just while i was writing uh the book and

00:45:09.880 all the coverage was about the shoes and the the only questions that they asked the athletes were

00:45:14.200 about the shoes as well so you end up learning nothing about tigis de sefer who was the ethiopian

00:45:19.140 woman who broke the world record or kelvin kiptum uh kenyan athlete if it becomes about the shoes then

00:45:25.040 we're even less likely to learn the stories of athletes from countries like ethiopia and kenya which

00:45:30.080 for me seems yeah be better to spend more time learning about them and what makes them tick and what they

00:45:36.780 think about things than just reading about shoes all the time yeah i think this goes back to rousseau i

00:45:42.700 think wrote an essay about this talking about how technology advancements in technology tend to

00:45:48.900 downplay virtue and like things like courage and generosity because like you can just rely on the

00:45:55.900 technology to do that thing for you you know if you have a better military technology you know a missile

00:46:01.900 to get your enemy like does it do you still need courage anymore that was kind of his thing and i

00:46:08.120 think you can kind of see the same sort of thing with this running it's like well if you have this

00:46:11.360 shoe or this data that gives you all this information like is there any role for human grit or human

00:46:19.180 resilience or whatever you want like those just very human virtues when you have the technology that

00:46:24.820 can do it for you yeah and those are all things that that also aren't measured by the kinds of

00:46:29.640 wearable technology that we use now to make decisions about how to train right so you can

00:46:34.680 have all the data on hrv and how many watts you're producing and your heart rate and all that kind of

00:46:39.580 thing but it's not telling you about your emotional state or kind of how competitive you're feeling on

00:46:44.740 that particular day there are whole loads there's so many of the things that are important for doing

00:46:48.120 well in endurance sport still can't be captured by anything like that so we're missing a lot of

00:46:52.580 information i think if we give too much up to those things right so i mean based on your research and

00:46:58.000 your own personal experience do you have any advice for people who are listening to this and

00:47:01.540 they're endurance athletes and maybe they feel sort of burnt out about how they've approached their

00:47:07.680 endurance sport because they've gotten really into the quantification and they just get really

00:47:13.680 obsessed with technique and programming anything they can do to inject a bit more joy and meaning or

00:47:21.980 even spirituality into the running yeah i mean i think one of the things i think it's interesting

00:47:28.000 about the kind of evolutionary theories we've talked about is that what people tend to pick up on when

00:47:32.140 they think about hunter-gatherer lifestyles and things is they pick up on the things that can be

00:47:35.480 marketed so things like chia seeds and barefoot running shoes or they get hold of the paleo diet and

00:47:41.100 that's that's the thing that is going to transform things for them and we tend to emphasize the things

00:47:45.960 that are particularly kind of compatible with our own culture or compatible with capitalism or whatever

00:47:50.520 one of the things i think we can learn from people like the rara murray or from hunter-gatherers is

00:47:55.140 that endurance activities have basically been embedded in our everyday lives as part of just

00:47:59.020 our normal way of doing things for a really long time so when we finish recording this i'm gonna put

00:48:04.660 my running shoes on with my jeans and jog to the to school to pick my daughter up and then jog to

00:48:09.380 nursery to get my son and then push a pram up a hill and that's like that's kind of most of the

00:48:13.660 training i'll do today it's only like a couple of miles but it means that i'll get there in a way

00:48:17.920 better mood than i would have done if i'd sat in traffic and it's just it's i think building

00:48:21.760 things into your everyday life in a way that may sometimes make life a little bit harder but also

00:48:26.720 i think can reduce stress and make things more interesting as well and i'm not sure about

00:48:31.680 spiritual but i do think there's something important about the ritual of some of these

00:48:35.520 endurance events particularly longer kind of ultra marathons and things i think a lot of the sort

00:48:41.380 of interest in data and really looking drilling into times and all that kind of stuff is often with

00:48:46.340 road running and track running and things and once you get into the longer ultra distance races

00:48:50.400 that's where things start to get a little bit in some ways a little bit more interesting where people

00:48:55.260 start to talk about it as a form of ritual that really there's a liminal period that people go

00:48:59.680 through where they're really struggling and where their mindset is sort of transformed in some

00:49:03.420 interesting way and at the end of it they come back with a completely new perspective on the rest of

00:49:07.820 their lives lots of people talk about that but it's kind of one guy i spoke to referred to it as

00:49:13.160 doing a kind of factory reset on themselves you know that after they've done an event like that

00:49:17.740 it just kind of flicked a switch for their mental health and for their way of looking at the rest of

00:49:21.680 their life that was really really useful so i guess yeah trying something a bit more extreme

00:49:27.660 where it's pushing you into places where you're a bit less comfortable that kind of thing does seem

00:49:33.160 to be a way of transforming the way you look at the rest of your life sometimes well michael it's been

00:49:38.120 a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your work so i'm still on

00:49:42.760 x at the moment at mph crawley and i'm mike crawl on instagram if people are interested in the more

00:49:48.840 academic work best place to find that would be the durham university website just google durham

00:49:53.960 university michael crawley i guess fantastic well michael crawley thanks for your time it's been a

00:49:57.140 pleasure thank you very much enjoyed it my guest is michael crawley he's the author of the book

00:50:02.120 to the limit it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere check out our show notes at

00:50:06.140 aom.is slash endurance where you find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic

00:50:10.280 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at

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00:50:25.520 over the years about pretty much anything you think of and if you haven't done this already i'd

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00:50:40.080 until next time's brett mckay reminding you to listen to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into

00:50:44.360 action

00:50:44.780 thank you

00:50:58.520 we'll see you next time

00:50:59.060 you

The Art of Manliness - November 20, 2024

Tribal Runners, Weekend Warriors, and Our Changing Relationship to Endurance Sports

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