Running is the oldest sport known to humanity (setting aside our competitive embrace of sex and fisticuffs). And endurance running is one of the few physical activities in which we humans are demonstrably superior to most earthbound species. In fact, among our bipedal peers, only the ostrich can run a faster marathon—forty-five minutes versus our top marks of just over two hours. And four-legged competition is limited to sled dogs, camels, and pronghorn antelope. Some researchers even suggest that endurance running drove human evolution, with Australopithecus padding shoeless out of Africa’s forests and into its savannas four million years ago, hungry for big game to supplement a diet of shrubs, ants, and termites.
But let’s be honest: Although our mastery of distance running is admirable, it doesn’t come naturally. Footraces can be traced to ancient Egypt, yet the majority of human performance improvement occurred during the past hundred years. There’s a reason for this. For centuries, runners relied on walking and jogging as the centerpiece of their training. Then twentieth-century scientists turned their sights to running physiology, and their findings changed the sport forever. Knowing running’s history is key to understanding the workouts you’ll find in this book, because what sets us apart from other species isn’t human evolution; it’s our skill at innovation. While we may have been born to run, we weren’t born to run well. We learned how to do that.
Running history is a mix of three elements:
There’s no question that human evolution produced adaptations that favor endurance running (we’ll look at some important ones in a minute). But that doesn’t mean that these adaptations created a uniform species of distance runners. The majority of humankind is (take your pick) too tall, too muscular, too squat, too big-boned, too fat, or simply too uncoordinated to achieve much in the way of marathoning without good coaching and lots of training.
And that’s where innovation comes into play. Competitive running can be traced to 3800 BC, yet most performance improvement has taken place in recent history, with world records in the mile and marathon dropping a stunning 20 percent and 30 percent, respectively, during the twentieth century. Evolution didn’t create that improvement. Training innovation did—and most of that innovation continues to echo in the workouts you’ll find in this book.
Finally, without inspirational performances, running wouldn’t have garnered enough interest to compile a history. Would anyone run a marathon if Pheidippides hadn’t run himself to death carrying news of Persia’s defeat by the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon? If Roger Bannister hadn’t broken the four-minute mile in 1954, would more than 1,300 runners have followed suit? Without inspiration, there would be no Olympics, Boston Marathon, or local 5Ks. Instead, there are now fifty million runners in the United States alone, a half-million of whom accomplished in 2012 what Pheidippides couldn’t: They survived a marathon.
Roughly four million years ago, our immediate ancestor in the evolutionary tree (Australopithecus) climbed down from trees and began walking on two legs. The reason for this remains unclear. A couple of million years later, Homo habilis and Homo erectus evolved traits that allowed them to pick up the pace from walking to jogging. A 2004 study by Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, and Dennis M. Bramble, a biologist at the University of Utah, identified some of these traits and the advantages they provided, including:
Lieberman and Bramble conclude: “It is reasonable to hypothesize that Homo evolved to travel long distances by both walking and running.”
That may be true, but a 2008 study by Karen L. Steudel-Numbers, a zoologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Cara M. Wall-Scheffler, a biologist at Seattle Pacific University, attempted to pin down the speed of locomotion for our distance-running forebears and concluded that, most likely, Homo was restricted to long periods of walking combined with surges of slow running. Which begs the question: How did a species of walker-joggers become the fifth-fastest species on the planet at marathoning?
If you want to get a feel for how quickly running performances have improved in recent history, look no further than the mile. In 1855, Charles Westhall of Great Britain posted the first official mile world record of 4:28. Ninety-nine years later, Roger Bannister of Great Britain ran 3:59.4 to break the four-minute barrier. Thirty-five years after that, Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco set the current world record of 3:43.12. And the mile isn’t the only distance where records have plummeted. Since 1900, the men’s world record in the 5000 meters has dropped from 15:29.8 to 12:37.35. The men’s world record in the marathon went from 2:55:18 in 1908 to its current 2:03:23. Women’s records have dropped even more dramatically, but curbs on female participation until the latter twentieth century skew the validity of those comparisons.
So how did we get so fast?
It’s not like runners prior to 1900 hadn’t trained volume. Or run sprints. Or run barefoot. Or eaten all manner of diets. It’s not that outcomes weren’t viewed as important. In ancient Egypt, at the Heb Sed Festival, the pharaoh ran a race around ritual boundary markers to prove his fitness to continue ruling. In ancient Greece, the winner of the Olympic stade (the single race of the original Games, measuring about 200 meters) had his name given to the entire four-year calendar period (the Olympiad) before the next Olympics. And in seventeenth-century England, nobles wagered huge sums on races between their carriage footmen. Footrace outcomes have been important since the time of the pharaohs, yet good high school runners today regularly surpass the world records from one hundred years ago!
If you’re looking for an explanation, look no further than the twentieth-century embrace of exercise physiology and its methods. Over the course of a single century, a series of training innovations transformed our species from just another plodding mammal into a bipedal endurance machine.
Archibald V. Hill was a runner-turned-physiologist whose early-twentieth-century experiments heralded the age of aerobic and anaerobic training. Hill’s experiments linked lactic acid to anaerobic energy production, showed the importance of VO2 max in performance, and proved that athletes could not only absorb more training stress than previously thought, they could thrive on it.
Paavo Nurmi, the “Flying Finn,” erupted onto the international running scene in 1920. He eventually set twenty-two world records (from 1500 meters to twenty kilometers), earned nine Olympic gold medals, and won 121 races in a row. Nurmi intuited the benefit of even-paced racing and carried a stopwatch during training and racing to stay on pace. He also practiced “terraced training,” in which he ran various distances (including sprints) that were alternated with rest periods.
In the 1930s, Gösta Holmér mixed unstructured surges and sprints with less-intense continuous running in a workout called fartlek (or “speed play”). Fartlek emphasized both aerobic and anaerobic elements of training. As coach of the Swedish cross country team, Holmér created this new training approach after suffering lopsided losses to Nurmi’s Finnish squads in the 1920s.
In the late 1930s, German coach Woldemar Gerschler, influenced by cardiologist Hans Reindell, introduced a workout that alternated multiple repetitions over short distances (designed to elevate the heart rate to 180 beats per minute) with rest “intervals.” During the rest interval, pressure inside the heart increased momentarily from returning blood, stretching the heart’s ventricles. A three-week experiment on three thousand subjects produced an average increase of 20 percent in heart volume, as well as an accompanying increase in cardiac output (the amount of blood pumped by the heart). Interval training immediately resulted in huge drops in the 400- and 800-meter world records. In the decades to come, Emil Zátopek (with workouts of up to 60 repetitions of 400 meters) and Mihaly Igloi (who introduced multiple sets of intense repetitions with short rest intervals) used variations of interval training to produce world records and world record-holders.
Arthur Lydiard conducted a famous “experiment of one,” with himself as guinea pig, that resulted in a system of training emphasizing aerobic “base training” and periodization. Periodization broke training into phases: a conditioning base phase in which all athletes ran 100 miles per week; a strength phase (hills); a four-week anaerobic phase; and a race phase. New Zealand athletes coached by Lydiard were a dominant force in the 1960s and 1970s.
“Take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism, say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better,” said Bill Bowerman, as quoted in Kenny Moore’s book, Bowerman and the Men of Oregon. “Stress. Recover. Improve. You’d think any damn fool could do it.” Only runners hadn’t. With his hard-easy approach to training, Bowerman coached thirty-one Olympic athletes and twenty-four NCAA champions, won the NCAA track and field championship four times, and brought jogging to the United States. He also handcrafted shoes (using his wife’s waffle iron to create the soles), which he marketed with Phil Knight as co-founder of Nike.
Jack Daniels didn’t invent the tempo run, but he wrote the book on it—or at least the book that popularized it. Daniels’ Running Formula (1998) recommends “threshold (T) pace” to raise lactate threshold (the intensity level at which anaerobic energy production begins to negatively affect performance). He suggested running tempo and cruise intervals (he did introduce the latter workout, even though he borrowed the name from a swimming workout championed by Dick Bower) at a “comfortably hard” effort, representing a pace that can be maintained for roughly an hour.
Innovation provided the training breakthroughs that made better performance possible. But it was inspiration that recruited a talent pool of hungry young runners looking to share in the fruits of those innovations. The influence and star power of runners like Nurmi, Zátopek, Bannister, Ron Clarke of Australia, Peter Snell of New Zealand, Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia, Kip Keino of Kenya, and Jim Ryun of the United States ensured that there’d be no lack of future stars from all corners of the globe.
And when Frank Shorter won the 1972 Munich Olympic Marathon, he started the running boom, which grew a tiny, niche activity into a sport with millions of participants, all eager to experience a level of fitness that had never before been possible in human history. Joan Benoit’s 1984 victory in the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon—completing an aggressive quest for female endurance running equality that had stepped out of the shadows two decades earlier, in 1967, with Kathrine Switzer’s first-ever official women’s finish at the Boston Marathon—confirmed that women would not be left behind in the fitness revolution.
While inspiration won’t make Olympians out of all of us, it can make a better runner out of you, as long as you’re willing to learn from history and embrace both the evolution that created your human form and the innovation that unleashed its potential. Better running isn’t a guess. And it isn’t a gimmick. It’s not a fad or a get-fit-quick scheme. To borrow a phrase from Sir Isaac Newton, better running is a matter of “standing on the shoulders of giants.” The road to your human endurance success has been paved. Now all you have to do is run it.