Tribal Runners, Weekend Warriors, and Our Changing Relationship to Endurance Sports
Episode Stats
Summary
In the modern era, we ve turned endurance sports into a science, tracking every metric and chasing personal records through sophisticated technology and personalized training plans. But as my guest who spent years studying the running cultures in different societies knows well, this modern, individualized, data-driven approach isn t the only way to pursue the art of endurance.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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endurance activities like distance running have existed since ancient times but humans
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relationship to those pursuits has changed according to time and place in the west we've
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currently turned endurance sports into a science tracking every metric and chasing personal records
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through sophisticated technology and personalized training plans but as my guest who spent years
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studying the running cultures in different societies knows well this modern individualized
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data-driven approach isn't the only way to pursue the art of endurance michael crawley is a competitive
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runner social anthropologist and the author of to the limit on the show today we first examine how
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western athletes have workified running through technology and social media we then look at how
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other cultures approach running differently including why east african runners emphasize
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group training over individual goals and how the rara murray people in mexico incorporate spiritual
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dimensions into the running we enter conversation with how we might rediscover more meaningful
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holistic ways to approach our own physical pastimes after show's over check out our show notes at
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aom.is endurance all right michael crawley welcome to the show
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thank you for having me so you are a social anthropologist and you recently put out a book
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exploring why humans willingly and some might say i would say this because i'm not an endurance guy
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needlessly take part in endurance events like marathons and triathlons things like that
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what led you down that line of research well i guess i've been running for over 20 years now i'm 36
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so i've been running for most of my life that culminated in in running at a relatively high
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level i ran for scotland and great britain run a 220 marathon but i suppose i've always been
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interested in running culture or endurance culture so growing up as a teenager i had a coach who was
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very good in the 1980s in the northeast of england and back then there was a club called gateshead
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harriers that produced loads of really good runners olympic medalists commonwealth games medalists
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but all from from quite a small area of the northeast of england and so he would tell me
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about you know in the 80s it was very normal to run 100 miles a week if you went to a running club
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that's just what was expected so i was curious about you know the fact that that's kind of changed
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and it seems like there's some sort of cultural influence that makes people want to train that
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hard so that was an area of the uk where there's a lot of working class people it was kind of part of
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working class culture to do a lot of running so i was interested in cultures of endurance a long time
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before i even knew what anthropology was i suppose and then you also so you started anthropology and
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then you've taken this interest in the cultures of endurance and like you didn't you like spend
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time with ethiopians to figure out why they run the way they do yeah so the the biggest project i've
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done so far really was in ethiopia so i was there for nearly a year and a half and that was motivated
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by this kind of curiosity about what it was about ethiopia that that made them produce so many top
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runners i think we tend to lump ethiopians kenyans and ugandans together as kind of the east africans but
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we don't know very much about people from ethiopia lots of people had gone to kenya to do research
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because it was a former british colony and people could speak english and things i really wanted to
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understand what it was specifically about ethiopia that made runners tick basically so the idea for
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this new project actually came from ethiopia because what i found there was that people saw
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running success as something that was collectively produced through practices of kind of living and
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training together rather than as something that was quite individualistic like i think we sometimes
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think of running i guess in the west and i learned that people in ethiopia saw energy in quite
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different ways so if you think about a sport scientist they tend to think of energy as as kind
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of something that's bounded within an individual body a kind of system of inputs and outputs that you
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can measure in the lab but in ethiopia people thought about it as a kind of shared substance that
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meant that it had to be very carefully sort of shared out between people it meant that running had to
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be something that was communal that was done together and you could see what other people were doing
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basically so when people would run together they would literally time their footsteps with each
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other and run in sync with each other which is something that i found quite difficult to replicate
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yeah that's one of the big takeaways from your book and you explores how in the west we typically
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take an individualistic approach to running or other endurance events and then in other cultures
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like ethiopia kenya it's more communal and i hope we can flesh that out but let's talk about just
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like running in the west and you make a point in the book i thought it was interesting as an
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anthropologist sometimes you notice people in the popular culture kind of put too fine of a
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distinction between westerners and non-westerners it's more squidgy than we think but when you ask
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westerners and by that i mean americans people living in the united kingdom canada things like that
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when you ask them why they take part in endurance events like running or cycling what are the typical
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answers you get on why they do it well a lot of people would tend to say something like it allows
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them to strip things back to the sort of the bare minimum to kind of return to something more simple
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and profound basically so the ultra runner damien hall who um he he won a race called the spine race in
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the uk which is a non-stop race on the pennine way which is 268 miles he talked about that in a kind
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of joking way as an extreme way of battling phone addiction so it is like a way of of getting away
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from his emails and stripping things back to this kind of this simpler way of being and i think to
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a certain extent when we put our running shoes on or jump on our bike we are kind of embracing this uh
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this kind of freedom allowing our minds to wander and all those kinds of things but but then on the
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other hand as you say there's a tendency to think of these activities in precisely the kinds of
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terms that we're actually trying to escape so we celebrate individual resilience the drive for
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productivity we try to quantify as many variables as we can we rank each other rank ourselves against
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other people and things so endurance sport seems to embody these elements of play but also lots of
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qualities of work as well so someone like elliot kipchoge the first man to run into two hours for
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the marathon one of the things he likes to say a lot is only the truly disciplined in life are free
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which kind of embody it brings these two things together you know this idea that it's you know there's
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a really kind of contradictory statement that you have to be disciplined in order to be free but it
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it seems to be that endurance sport brings together work and play in these really interesting ways
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why do you think americans and british people people in the west do that like why have they
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taken something that i think you know maybe a hundred years ago was something just you did for fun
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just you know it was just something you did maybe for exercise and we started to make it more work
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like where you're quantifying how many steps you're taking you're looking at your vo2 max you have this
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very set out program you need to follow in order to you know get ready for a race like why the drive
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towards workifying recreational endurance sports um i think endurance sport just kind of ends up
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reflecting the broader culture really i think you know it's just that we with we spend so much time
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sort of emphasizing things like productivity and and ranking each other based on achievements and
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things that that we can't help but apply that to anything that we do including endurance sport i
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guess it seems like if you look back in sort of a bit further back in history endurance sports have
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tended to become really popular at times of kind of societal change or when there's been broader
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anxieties about things so at the turn of the the 19th century the most popular sport in the world was
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walking and it was people walking for six days around places like madison square gardens without
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sleeping and they would draw these enormous like tens of thousands of people would come and watch that
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and historians have speculated that it's because people were worried at that point about kind of
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automation and about the introduction of motor cars and it was a way for humans to be like you know we
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can still do this there are unique things that we can do as humans that machines can't do so it seems
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like endurance sport tends to sort of reflect or push back against certain elements of what's happening in
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the broader culture so i think we can kind of trace those today as well yeah because we're having a lot of
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change with artificial intelligence digital technology things like that yeah yeah yeah yeah
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and speaking into pedestrianism like when walking was this huge sport we actually did a podcast on
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this a long time ago episode number 167 it was with matthew algeo you read a book yeah i read his book
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yeah yeah great book yeah it's a great book it's really interesting because you wouldn't think
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endurance walking would be a compelling spectator sport but it was huge like competitors would walk
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collapse for six days straight and then the winner would get you know the equivalent of a million
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dollars in today's money so it was a really it was really peculiar yeah absolutely yeah it's um
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and it's kind of sort of disappeared from the popular consciousness but yeah there was that and
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then there were dance marathons in the depression era where that was kind of a a huge thing that
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everyone wanted to watch people dancing and dancing for like you know weeks on end basically on very
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a little sleep which sort of i guess reflected something of of what was happening more broadly
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in america with you know ideas of the american dream if you just keep dancing long enough it doesn't
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matter where you're from but you might eventually make it and become famous or whatever but yeah these
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things have there's been a few pockets of of real attention on endurance sports and i think we're kind
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of in one now as well which is interesting yeah and i think social media has only just amplified
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the popularity of endurance activities you actually write about how social media has changed our
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relationship with endurance sports like running or triathlons walk us through that how has social
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media changed how people approach their sport say compared to 20 30 years ago sure yeah so my interest
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in social media kind of started with this project that i did during covid lockdowns where i was interested
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in asking people professional athletes how they experienced having to post on social media as part
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of their contracts basically and what happened was that we're talking about this idea that posting on
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social media was basically a form of work and it was something that they found quite sort of physically
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and emotionally draining a lot of the time and that was because it was something that they weren't
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necessarily trained to do but they needed to do it in order to continue to get paid by the brands that they
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were working with and what i think is kind of interesting is that the kind of amateur cyclists
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and runners tend to mimic the kinds of scripts that professional athletes will produce so they'll
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produce very similar kinds of posts without necessarily knowing that the professional athletes
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that are posting in that way are doing it without really wanting to so i kind of explored these ideas
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about presumption this idea that we're both producing and consuming when we use social media that
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we think that we're kind of consuming something but we're the ones who are actually creating the value for
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these companies so just basically asking the question of whether we need to think a bit more
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carefully about how and what kinds of things we post as social media around endurance but i think it
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tends to amplify particular kinds of messages so ideas about taking personal responsibility about just
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pushing harder all the time and then you can make it those kinds of messages and it tends to push
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kind of quick fixes which might not necessarily you know there aren't really many quick fixes for endurance
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sports so i spoke to a guy called andy berry for the book who holds the record for the most
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mountains run up and down in the late district in a 24-hour period and he said he went on a podcast
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and talked about one training session he did and then the next day it was all over social media
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with you know these posts saying this is the one training session that everyone must do in order to
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to become a better runner you know this kind of quick fix idea so he when i asked him for training
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advice and what kinds of training sessions he would recommend he was really reluctant to tell me he was
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like i can tell you some things but don't put them in your book because people will
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you know people will grab onto one little thing and really the message that people who do endurance
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sport need to learn is that it's all about kind of patience and cumulative effort over a really long
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period of time which isn't it doesn't fit the sort of temporality of of social media very well
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all the kinds of uh sort of easy messages that people want to pick up there really and then going
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back to your point that you know in the west we typically have an individualistic approach to
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everything but you see it in endurance sports where it's just running like a solo activity
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social media i imagine just amplifies that because when you're doing social media you kind of have to
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make yourself the main character of the event and you have to kind of think about how can i script
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this video or this picture so it shows me doing this thing so you start getting very self-reflective
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about how you present yourself and again it makes it more just about you and the self and the
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individual as opposed to as we'll talk about here in a minute and other cultures where it's more
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communal yeah absolutely so i think it does a similar thing in some ways to the kind of wearable
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technology that has become far more popular where it it's kind of encouraging people to to focus on
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the individual and on your own data or your own kind of selfie or whatever it is rather than looking
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outwards towards others yeah yeah and then i mean imagine to the social media where you have to think
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about not only professional athletes where they have to think about okay i gotta put out this stuff
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so i can get the sponsorship so i can do my races so in a way it acts as a distraction from the main
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thing you're trying to do which is run i imagine you can do the same thing to recreational runners
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where they took up a sport they took up running they took up cycling because they really enjoyed it
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they found it as an intrinsic good but then if they start adding in social media and maybe they
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started to do it because they just wanted to share with their friends like here's what i'm doing and it
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was sort of like a maybe it was like a communal thing like you're just sharing with your other
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friends who do running as well and you're able to share that with people who live far away from
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you but then it might turn into something a little bit more because maybe you're getting
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like some reach outs from brands saying hey if you tag us or just talk about our product in your
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video we'll give you some money and so it changes the relationship to their sport from one of like
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intrinsic worth and value to something like well i gotta do this so i can get something else get money or
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whatever yeah yeah exactly and then you you see a lot of the videos will be someone's kind of propped
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up their phone on a tree or something and then they're going and running past it and making sure
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they time themselves running past it right so that they can capture the image that they can then go
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and post on social media and i just wonder you know the act of doing that is that improving the
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experience of of that run or is it just interrupting it and yeah exactly what you're saying you know it
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changes the reason for doing it which i think is really really kind of important and with an
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endurance sport as well people get injured an awful lot because you're doing a huge amount of running
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or a huge amount of cycling so you end up what happened when i spoke to the professional athletes
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was that they said sometimes the highest performing posts were the ones where they're talking about
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being really vulnerable or about being injured because they're actually more relatable than the
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ones about where they talk about being able to run you know a 13 minute 5k or something like that
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that most people can't comprehend so they end up focusing on the moments of kind of
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you know vulnerability and injury and things which can be quite yeah again quite draining for
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people to have to be that vulnerable on social media i guess yeah because you're just then you
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start getting questions from everybody they want to like pry further well tell me more yeah and then
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sooner or later you're spending five or six hours you're right on uh on instagram which is what the
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the runners that i spoke to you said they were often doing yeah yeah they don't want to do that
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i imagine a lot of runners are introverts and so having to do that it's just like oh geez i don't
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want to just drain it yeah so you mentioned the tracking devices the data wearable you know the
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smart watches apple watches whoops things like that and how that's also changed our relationship
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to endurance sports and just sports in general in the west walk us through that what's the history
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that like when did americans british people people in the west start using data to improve their
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running times well the history goes back quite a long way so if you if you look back 100 years in
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the 1920s there was a finnish runner called pavo nermi who was a industrial sort of training college
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basically and he came up with the idea of running with a stopwatch in his hand and at the time that
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was unheard of basically he would run with a stopwatch in his hand in races and uh and people
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were really critical of that cartoons at the time depicted him as like a stopwatch with his limbs made out
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of industrial chimneys and as this kind of stiff-limbed robot who was crushing his opponents
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into the ground as well the way that it was put in an article at the time so it shows that these kind
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of worries about people merging with machines or about the kind of dehumanizing effects of technologies
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goes back you know a century basically but i think what i've traced in the book is the fact that i think
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we can say that there's been a a relative explosion of the use of these kinds of tracking devices just in
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the last sort of 10 years so what i did was i basically used a whole load of different things
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so i used a woot band i used a garmin watch i used super sapiens live glucose monitoring i did some
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home blood tests where you post off a little vial of blood to a company to get it tested and things
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because i was interested in sort of experiencing them myself these things are marketed by the companies
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as explicitly performance enhancing which i think is interesting so they're marketed as giving us
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this kind of privileged insight into our bodies and ourselves which made me wonder whether we
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because the other thing is they're not actually particularly accurate so if you wear multiple
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devices that measure heart rate variability for example you'll normally find that there's quite a
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big discrepancy between them so if we're giving a lot of our agency away to these devices it might
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not actually be particularly beneficial and rather than kind of giving ourselves new insights i wonder
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whether we're actually kind of blunting our ability to learn how to feel things sort of for
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ourselves or through intuition or something like that so one of the things i did for that chapter
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was i took all these different kinds of devices to a guy called charlie spedding who was the last
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british olympic medalist in the marathon who happens to live two streets away from me and i said you know
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if this if all this stuff had been available in the 80s would you have used it and he said he would
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have used one or two things but very selectively so he'd have used heart rate monitors for maybe one
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kind of run so that he could get a kind of baseline for it but then he would put it away for a while
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and then use it again because he wouldn't want to become dependent on it and he told me a story
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about going down to do a training session one night driving through to to gateshead warming up just not
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feeling right and basically putting his tracksuit back on driving home again driving through the next
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night to do the session again and being really proud of the decision to not do it and what he said
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to me was you know i really wouldn't have wanted to watch making that decision for me because
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he needed to know that he was able to make that kind of decision and he kind of drew a line between
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that and when he got his olympic medal and being able to make the right kinds of decisions about what
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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
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or some sort of device you're not going to be building that kind of trust in yourself to know
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your body for a start but also to trust your own kind of decision making processes i guess
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yeah so what these devices promise like the whoop or the aura ring you know you wear these things and
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it can tell you based on data they collect like your heart rate variability so hrv if that is high
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actually high hrv is good it means you're like not stressed looks at your sleep it looks at you know
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just your activity it gives you what's called like a readiness score so you can you wake up and like oh
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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
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these devices too and i found that it was yeah it was really weird so one thing i noticed too
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there's differences between like how these things measure sleep even your heart rate and then sometimes
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you'd wake up and it would say like your readiness score is is lousy but then you know you kind of check
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in with yourself and you're like actually i feel pretty good i feel like i could go hard today and so i
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would just ignore it and i had a great workout i imagine there's people who just they lived their
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lives particularly like recreational runners who lived their lives by their what these devices tell
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them and they're probably they're probably leaving stuff on the table as a consequence yeah i think
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so definitely but i yeah i definitely had experiences where what the watch was saying and how i felt were
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really out of line with each other sometimes a very very high hrv score as well can indicate that
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you're extremely stressed so there's this thing of like it's really high that's really good is not
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necessarily always the case but most people just assume that really high means really good
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one of the interesting things so i i asked people about this when i was doing the interviews about
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social media as well and i talked to some athletes who were sponsored by hrv monitors and they would
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they said you know if we go to the world championships or the olympics or something you take
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it off for the four or five days before the race because you don't want it telling you that your
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readiness score is low but also if you're running an olympic final 1500 meters in the evening
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your readiness score isn't going to be through the roof because you're going to be stressed
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because you're about to run the olympic 1500 meter final so but that doesn't mean that you're
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not ready so there's yeah these kind of professional athletes they understand it with a level of nuance
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that i think is you know it's important to bring that level of nuance to to interacting with these
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things really yeah and but the recreational runner might not they might think well you know this
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professional said this is what they use i'm gonna use it all the time but without that nuance that the
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professional takes to the device exactly yeah yeah yeah i i've done weight lifting and hrv actually
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doesn't have play much of a role in anaerobic activities like weight lifting so if you've had
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a crappy hrv or high hrv it doesn't really affect strength-based sports based on the research i've read
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but there are devices in weight lifting that monitor things like that can tell you how fast the bar is
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moving um so that you can use that information to be like well uh the bar's moving fast then i can
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you can use these calculations to figure out what your pr is for that day the highest amount of weight
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you could lift that day and i thought it was kind of interesting it was useful to play around with
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that because you got some interesting information but again it doesn't really tell you much that you
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already don't know you know the device tell you the bar is moving fast like well i know it's moving
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i felt it go up fast and so i don't know how much like how useful it was compared to just listening
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to your body yeah it reminds me of the one of the biggest agents for kenyan athletes is a guy called
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joss hermans he was a very good dutch runner in back in the 70s and he was the world record holder
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:50:21.440
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00:50:25.520
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