Man is the supreme long distance runner on the planet.
There are really only two things which set man apart within the animal kingdom: our intellect and long distance running.
In nearly every other aspect we are biologically bested by our house pets and utterly eclipsed by the best nature has to offer. Our cats jump longer, our dogs sprint faster, our birds fly higher, our fish swim deeper. Tortoises and koi outlive us, mice and rabbits are more fecund, lizards and spiders can regrow limbs. Man’s vision, olfaction, audition, gustation, and somatosensation are nothing to brag about. Our branch of evolution has exchanged raw physicality for refined minds.
But when it comes to long distance running, we still reign supreme. Our elite athletes can sustain faster speeds for longer than the best nature has to throw at us and even the average weekend warrior is competitive. Our closest friends the dog and the horse are fittingly our greatest rivals for endurance running. Although cooperative canid hunters can sprint faster than humans, over distances as short as a mile or two, man can catch and overtake domestic dogs, wolves, and African wild dogs. So too can migratory ungulates–a favored prey of the social carnivores–gallop faster than humans sprint and maintain credible speed over great distances. But even they will fall to the sheer endurance of men who can run twice as far during a morning marathon than horses can stride in a day.
Long before our brains and hands propelled us to the Moon and back, it was determination and our feet that secured our evolutionary niche: we are the apes who run down our prey in the hot sun. Our physical ability to dissipate heat efficiently and specialized fibers in our legs were our trademark long before our brains grew large enough to arm us with more than sharpened sticks. But over time we started to throw those sticks and stones, to fling them with levers and slings, then shoot them with bows and then fire them from cannons. And soon we would launch ourselves in the air with the same principles we learned when flinging sticks, and rocket ourselves into space as reliably as we can fire a bullet from a gun.
But we don’t just use our weapons to hunt our prey, we turn them on each other. Our physical ability to efficiently shed heat is more evolved than our mental ability to shed hate and our moral fiber is not yet as refined as our muscle fibers. But we are evolving.
The 2013 Boston Marathon is a symbol of all that is right with man’s evolving brain. Tens of thousands of peaceful people gathering to compete in a social and physical activity that welcomes all ages and nations to stand together, professional and amateur, old and young, men and women faced with the same challenge: to overcome their own mental and physical limitations, to better their best, and only tangentially consider their rank versus others. Even though distance running is arguably the pinnacle of physical achievement for men triumphing over themselves and over nature, there is little fame or money and poor public appreciation of just how special marathons are in relation to who man is among the beasts.
But fame and money aren’t needed or wanted out there on the pavement. Marathons are rather unique in their cosmopolitan nature. The vast majority of participants are recreational and everyone competes together. Devoid of specialized equipment and little in the way of rules, marathons are run on every continent. A sexangenarian running the race pushing his disabled son in a wheelchair runs alongside an Olympic medalist Kenyan woman and a mother-daughter team celebrating their victory over cancer.
That’s why the attack on the Boston Marathon is even more asinine than it was evil. I can’t imagine worse publicity, worse imaging, for whatever cause or statement that the bomber is attempting to make.
Attacking a peaceful sporting event with amazingly fit people competing for self betterment, in front of a stand of flags of many nations celebrating unity and harmony of all mankind, just feet from what had to be the highest concentration of physicians and medical professionals on the planet at that moment, with thousands of other first responders on site in a large urban city with the emergency capacity to rapidly handle such a scenario. The bomber wasn’t only vile, they are amazingly stupid.
In a year from now there will be resilient amputees crossing the line of the next Boston Marathon and no one will give one shit about evil in the hearts of a few, they will rejoice in the enduring spirit of sport. Then, as now, we will witness thousands of triumphs of the human spirit. Once again the youngest and oldest will meet on the streets of Boston, some in wheelchairs or standing on prosthetic legs, and they will run. They will endure. Some will carry with them the shrapnel from a crude bomb and all will carry the images and memory of yesterday. But 26.2 miles later they will stride past the flags of many nations and prove to themselves and the world that our morals can be as strong as our muscles, that we can shed hate as well as we shed heat, and that our ability to fling sticks and rocks and shrapnel at each other will never diminish our ability to endure, to prosper, and to succeed.
The enduring image of the 2013 Boston Marathon is not the terror intended by the bomber. It is the sea of humanity that flooded back into the void left by the bomb. The men and women who saved lives on those streets and who will rebuild them in the coming months and years. Boston, the Marathon, and America were not diminished by the bomber, rather they were the proving ground for yet another generation of heroes.
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This is definitely one of your best posts of all time.
I would still like to see humans run the Iditarod and pull the sled themselves,I think dogs got us beat with that.
Anyways I do hope they catch the bomber,I can’t think of a reason they would want to bomb a marathon then their being a lot of people there and would be on television. They don’t obviously care about what kind of people they hurt.
Perhaps you missed this bit in the linked article:
“(A few animals can match that under special circumstances. Huskies can trot up to 100 kilometers in Arctic conditions when forced to by people. But in warmer climes—no way.)”
They just *had* to say “forced to”. *sigh*
Yeah the dogs are so forced, they have to be made to smile when they run.
retrieverman recently posted..Is it self aware?
Dogs don’t smile. That’s them shedding heat, consistent with the hypothesis. Of course, there’s little “forcing” going on with sledding, man has accomplished the motivation through selective breeding. I think the point the author was making is that dogs do not endurance run to such a level on their own, nor is it much of a contest between man and dog. Of course canids and ungulates CAN endurance run, that’s the whole point. The issue is comparative excellence. Given the dynamics of snow, I don’t think man would stand a chance if it was man versus dog, just given the weight issue over snow. Over hard-pack even in such a climate, I think man would be competitive.
Snow-shoe runners in the fur-trading days were famous for their speed and relentless endurance in the snow. The aboriginals even out-competed Europeans who brought skis to North America. Or at least written accounts verify this.
I always found it odd Nordic skiiers see snow-shoeing as inefficient when historical documents glorify the aboriginal snow-shoe runners.
Maybe people are too fat to run nowadays. I don’t know.
Dave recently posted..The Sheep and the Wolverine
I know I’m too fat to run!
Actually, dogs are not very good long distance runner in warmer climates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZVJHmpHH-lA
The dog in the video ran about 150 kilometers (or 93 miles), but he was doing it in deep snow. He wouldn’t be able to do the same during the summer.
Dave recently posted..The Sheep and the Wolverine
That was well worth reading. I hope you don’t mind that I linked to it on my blog.
Human feet are strange things. We are out of a primate, great ape heritage where the hind legs have thumbs on them. That big toe is a severely modified great ape thump. I can still pick up a few things with my toes and Miley likes getting toe massages from me. But they are useless for climbing.
The fact that we’re bipedal is even more bizarre.
Bipedal marathon runners aren’t that common in mammalian lineages. We may be the only ones ever to have existed.
The closest we might get to another mammal moving like us are kangaroos, jumping mice, “kangaroo rats,” which aren’t rats, and spring hares, which aren’t hares.
retrieverman recently posted..Is it self aware?
I watched a show once about theories as to how humans evolved to walk erect, since it’s basically a uniquely bizarre thing for a primate to do.
One of the main lynchpins was how our foot-thumb became basically the support for our entire stance (and therefore become useless as a thumb).
Dinosaurs/birds are a good candidate for bipedal endurance running. Extremely efficient respiration, lightweight, excellent at developing weird structures for heat regulation (feathers, crests, etc) and novel limb morphologies, they have those muscular tails that can power their locomotion, and we keep discovering new ones that we never thought could have or should have existed and are always learning that they were more refined, efficient, and brilliant than we knew before.
Yes, and of course winged migrations are an apt foil to endurance running. There are birds that can maintain flight for more than a week!
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1656/447
Of course this is flight, and the dynamics are much different and the techniques man uses to hunt birds have nothing to do with running them down! Flight is not running, but the bio-mechanics of endurance exercise are parallel.
Unless you are a prairie grouse; or a turkey.
Dave recently posted..The Sheep and the Wolverine
I wouldn’t be surprised if the other big running bipeds, eg, red kangaroos, emus, and ostriches, could outdistance H sapiens in an endurance run…though not after being speared. Anybody know?
Nope. It’s all got to do with how efficiently we cool ourselves. Ostriches and emus are excellent sprinters, as are biped marsupials, but only over the short term. If they could sweat as much as we could, perhaps, but they can’t. They loose all their heat through their respiratory and skin (think: ears).
The Wikipedia article on “Endurance Running Hypothesis” had this:
Our abilty to sweat gives amazing advantages, and the subcutaneous fat for energy storage does as well. Even when in shape, we have some fat stores that our close primate cousins like chimps do not.
But our “runners” in marathons not only have to be specially conditioned, but also have to pace themselves. The “runners” aren’t exactly running, as in, with much emphasis on real speed. Not for the whole length of the race at least.
And a lot of the longest marathons are well timed so as to not exactly be in the hottest months. The Boston Marathon was in this April month; the NYC Marathon is in November.
Kelpies through selective breeding and conditioning, work a lot of long hours moving huge mobs in very warm conditions. They are made for it.
I wonder how long it takes Arabian wolves to run down their prey? Deserts get cool at night and they might be primarily night or crepulscular hunters, but given the environment there must surely be times where they have to do some endurance work in the heat?
You have to remember the prey too.
During the heat of day, no one is moving. Not even the herbivores. That’s why they can relax during the hottest parts of the day– no one is moving.
Except reptiles. And humans.
Dave recently posted..The Sheep and the Wolverine