Running

• 1. Introduction

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  Running is one of the few sports a person can do with nothing but their own body and open ground. It has been called the world's most accessible sport. Yet behind that simplicity sits a strange piece of deep history. Researchers hypothesize that the ancestors of humankind developed the ability to run long distances roughly 2.6 million years ago, probably to hunt animals. The oldest records of competitive racing reach back to the Tailteann Games in Ireland and to the first recorded Olympic Games in 776 BCE. So what exactly happens in the body during a single stride? Why do some footstrikes break runners down while others spring them forward? And how did a survival skill become a euphoric pastime that millions chase for the feeling alone? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. Born To Chase

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  Australopithecus, an ape-like early ancestor of humans, could walk upright on two legs, and from that ability human running is thought to have evolved at least four and a half million years ago. The leading explanation is persistence hunting: following and chasing an animal until it is too exhausted to flee. Prey that runs to collapse succumbs to what one researcher, Sears, in 2001 called chase myopathy. Bramble and Lieberman, writing in 2004, argued that distinctly human features were shaped by exactly this kind of running. The nuchal ligament, abundant sweat glands, the Achilles tendons, big knee joints, and muscular glutei maximi all read as adaptations for endurance pursuit. The case was first built from comparative physiology and the natural running habits of animals, with added support from observing modern hunting practices, recorded by Carrier and colleagues in 1984. Scientific study of the Nariokotome skeleton, by Walker and Leakey in 1993, gave the Carrier theory further evidence. The same anatomy that once ran prey into the ground is the anatomy every modern runner carries to the starting line.

• 3. Festivals And Footraces

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  Competitive running grew out of religious festivals in places like Greece, Egypt, Asia, and the East African Rift. The Tailteann Games, an Irish festival in honor of the goddess Tailtiu, date back to 1829 BCE and rank among the earliest records of competitive running. The origins of the Olympics and of Marathon running stay shrouded in myth, though the first recorded games took place in 776 BCE, the same point from which running in Ancient Greece can be traced. The Greeks even tied running to the divine. One account suggests the sun, moon, earth, stars, and heaven were called gods because, always moving and running, they were runners by nature, named Theontas. Running was not for men alone. The mythical Atalanta forced her suitors to beat her in a race or forfeit their lives, and she was unbeatable. Only Hippomenes won, helped by the goddess Venus, also called Aphrodite, who gave him golden apples to throw so Atalanta would stoop to gather them. The Roman writer Ovid, in Metamorphoses, has Venus describe the start: the pair crouched low and shot forward, skimming the sand with flying feet, light enough to run on waves and never wet their sandals. Women raced in earnest at the Heraean Games, held just before the Ancient Olympic Games. The historian E. Norman Gardinier described maidens running a course of 500 feet, one-sixth shorter than the men's stadium, with hair down their backs, a short tunic just below the knee, and the right shoulder bare. Winners received crowns of olive, a share of the heifer sacrificed to Hera, and the right to set up their statues in the Heraeum.

• 4. Anatomy Of A Stride

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  Footstrike is the moment a plantar portion of the foot first touches the ground, and it begins the running cycle in a body already moving. Runners land in one of three common ways: forefoot, midfoot, or heel strike, defined by whether the ball, the ball and heel together, or the heel makes first contact. As the foot lands, the hip extends out of the maximal flexion it held during the previous swing, the knee flexes to absorb force, and the ankle sits slightly in front of the body. Midstance arrives when the working leg is in knee flexion directly beneath the trunk, pelvis, and hips. Here propulsion takes over, as the hip extends, the knee extends, and the ankle moves into plantar flexion. The push continues until the leg is stretched behind the body and toe-off launches it forward. The swing phase then returns the limb home. Initial swing answers the propulsion with hip and knee flexion, midswing brings the limb back under the trunk, and terminal swing extends the knee toward the front of the body until the foot meets the ground again. Each leg mirrors the other, so when one side drives through toe-off the other recovers toward footstrike. Between them comes a flight phase, when neither foot touches the ground, the airborne signature that separates running from walking.

• 5. The Footstrike Debate

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  Heel striking is generally tied to higher rates of injury and impact, and the reason is mechanical. Pressure from a heel strike travels through bone for shock absorption rather than through muscle. Bone cannot disperse force easily, so the load passes into ligaments, joints, and bones up through the lower extremities and into the lower back. The body answers with abnormal compensations, including internal rotation of the tibia, knee, and hip, and over time those compensations raise the risk of injury in the joints and muscles involved. A mid or forefoot strike behaves differently. It lets the triceps surae work as a lever, absorbing force through muscle acting eccentrically rather than through the skeleton. That landing also attenuates shock properly and stores energy that returns as reflexive plantarflexion, so the strike that absorbs the blow can also help push the runner forward. The picture is not tidy. Even among elite athletes, self-selected footstrike varies, and heel strikers are common in longer-distance events. Mid and forefoot striking grows more frequent in the elite fields, especially among the faster racers and the winners. That leaves a genuine puzzle: how do heel-striking elite distance runners sustain such high paces with a technique thought to be inefficient and injurious?

• 6. What Elite Runners Do

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  Biomechanical studies of elite runners point to increased hip function, hip use, and stride length over recreational runners. Higher speeds bring greater ground reaction forces, and elite distance runners must absorb those forces to hold pace over long distances. They do it through longer strides driven by more hip flexion and extension, shorter ground contact time, and more energy spent on propulsion. Pushing harder in the horizontal plane means less impact in the vertical plane. Even the gap between world-class and national-level 1500-metre runners has been linked to more efficient hip joint function, where a greater range of hip flexion and extension allows greater acceleration and speed. Stride length still needs some knee flexion held through terminal swing, because excessive knee extension at that point brakes the body and pushes runners toward heel striking and higher impact. Elite runners tend to keep a degree of knee flexion at footstrike and midstance, first to absorb impact eccentrically in the quadriceps, then to contract concentrically and add force at toe-off. Recreational runners do the opposite, lengthening their stride through knee extension instead of hip flexion. That choice brakes hard with every step and slows the rate and efficiency of knee extension at toe-off. The fastest human footspeed on record reflects what efficient mechanics can reach: 44.7 km/h, recorded by Usain Bolt as the average speed between the 60th and 80th metre of a 100-metre sprint.

• 7. The Body On The Run

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  Even people who have already had a heart attack are 20% less likely to develop serious heart problems if they run or do other aerobic activity more often. Running in humans is associated with improved health and life expectancy, with benefits that include weight loss, improved cardiovascular and respiratory health, reduced total blood cholesterol, stronger bones, a possibly stronger immune system, and better self-esteem. The metabolic math is concrete. A person of average weight burns roughly 100 calories per mile run, and the body keeps burning at an elevated rate for a short time after the run ends. The mind shifts too. Many runners describe an elated, euphoric state called a runner's high, and running is frequently recommended as therapy for people with clinical depression and those coping with addiction. In animal models, running increases the number of newly created neurons in the brain, a finding with implications for aging, learning, and memory, and a study in Cell Metabolism has linked running to improved memory and learning. There is a ceiling, though. While an optimal dose of vigorous aerobic exercise may lower cardiovascular disease and extend life, an excessive dose such as marathons might do the opposite, with effects associated with cardiotoxicity.

• 8. Where Running Happens

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  Road racing alone drew over 7.7 million people in America in 2002, a sign of how far running spread after the running boom of the 1970s, when as many as 25 million Americans were running or jogging, roughly one tenth of the population. As a sport, running splits into events divided by distance, sometimes with added obstacles like those in steeplechase and hurdles. Track events run on an oval and break into sprints, middle and long distance, and hurdling. Road running covers measured courses from 5 kilometres up through half marathons and marathons, open to scores of runners and wheelchair entrants. Cross country crosses open or rough terrain of grass, mud, woodland, hills, flat ground, and water. Vertical running climbs, whether over natural features in fell running, trail running, skyrunning, and mountain running, or up human structures in tower running, which sends athletes up the steps of buildings like the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. The distances carry their own history. The first 13 editions of the Ancient Olympic Games featured only the stadion race, run from one end of the stadium to the other. Modern sprints trace to imperial measures, with the 100 metres descended from the 100-yard dash, the 200 metres from the furlong, and the 400 metres from the quarter-mile. The 880-yard half-mile fathered the 800 metres in 1830s Britain, and the 1500 metres grew from three laps of a 500-metre track common in continental Europe in the 1900s. Human physiology sets the boundary that shapes all of it: near-top speed cannot hold for more than thirty seconds or so before lactic acid builds and leg muscles begin to lose oxygen.