to move at a speed faster than a walk, never having both or all the feet on the ground at the same time.
The Oxford English Dictionary
Around 4.2 million years ago, our ancestors came down from the trees and went for a bimble. Australopithecus was likely the first known bipedal species of hominid, possessing the ability to both swing from the trees and also to walk in much the same manner as we do today.
Australopithecus afarensis at the Natural History Museum, Vienna. Wolfgang Sauber, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Quite why our ancestors did this is open to debate. It could have been a combination of many factors but it is likely that a changing climate and therefore habitat would have been a big driver in this evolutionary twist, when an arboreal environment would have been replaced by that of savannahs. I’ll not dwell too much on the origins of our species as it is as convoluted as it is fascinating but I can’t move on without mentioning diet: our early ancestors are believed to have been more gatherer than hunter, going by dental evidence and other factors such as jaw structure and thickness. One thing’s for certain, though: learning to stand and move on two legs freed these early hominins to develop tools.
Around 2 million years ago, our ancestors stopped clumsily lurching about and became rather good runners. Fossil records suggest that the genus homo were the first hominins to exhibit all the characteristics of a biped designed to run. When you consider humans, you don’t automatically think about our running prowess. That’s because we tend to associate running with speed and that’s something we simply do not possess. We are slow. Let’s throw some perspective on this:
Have a look at some paces:
Okay, so the fastest recorded Parkrun time I could find was 13min 48s set by a chap called Andy Baddeley back in 2012. To achieve that time, Andy’s average pace would have had to have been around 2.8min km-1 .
That’s pretty fast, right? Well, no. Not really. Let’s compare Andy’s pace with that of the fastest land mammal, the cheetah. So I’m going to go with one of the fastest recorded speeds for our feline friend rather than the higher, estimated value, and to be even more conservative, I’m going to round it down to the nearest 10km which gives me a speed of 90kph. That’s fast for something that doesn’t have a engine. A little bit of nifty number-crunching gives our cheetah an average pace of 40s km-1 .
So that’s your faster-than-average human measured against your average cheetah. You can see why as a running species we regard ourselves as unremarkable. Hold that thought for a split second, and then ditch it because I’m about to introduce you to a third runner who will hopefully convince you that we are extraordinary runners. Please welcome to the start line, Scott Jurek.
Scott is one of my all-time favourite ultrarunners. In 2010, he was placed 2nd in a 24 hour world championship endurance running event. In that 24 hours, Scott banged out a total distance of just over 265km. That’s the equivalent of running from London to Brighton, then back up to London before heading back down to Brighton again – in a day! Scott’s average pace for that little endeavour was 5.4min km-1 .
It’s Saturday which means only one thing: Parkrun!
| PARKRUNNER | PACE | FINISH TIME (mm:ss) |
| Andy | 2.8min km-1 | 13:48 |
| Scott | 5.4min km-1 | 27:00 |
| Cheetah | 0.7min km-1 | 03:20 |
So the above Parkrun table is just for a bit of fun. The temptation, however, for me to go off on a data hunt, and calculate the point at which Andy and the cheetah would collapse if they attempted to maintain their average pace during a race against Scott, is very real.
We may not be fast but by ‘eck can we run!
This brings me nicely onto the topic of persistence hunting, the means of despatch being chase myopathy: a condition brought about through stress and exhaustion, resulting in acute muscle breakdown, collapse, and death. Simply put, you chase your quarry until it keels over and dies. And here’s where it gets really clever: quadrupeds cannot regulate their breathing whilst on the fly. As they propel themselves forwards, at the termination of that movement their internal organs smack up against the diaphragm thus expelling the air from the lungs. Once they push off from the back legs and extend their front legs ready to repeat that motion, their internal organs slide backwards, and, like a pair of bellows, air is drawn into the lungs. Another quadrupedal design that lends itself well to chase myopathy is that our furry, four-legged friends pant to cool themselves down. They can’t pant whilst running for the reasons already mentioned above, so if they are forced to run for a considerable amount of time they will overheat and eventually collapse through heat exhaustion. Just watch a cheetah in slow-motion and you’ll get an idea of the mechanics involved. Cheetahs are fast and powerful but they have to be good because they cannot sustain that amount of speed and effort for long.
On the other hand, we can regulate our breathing because our lungs and diaphragm are above our organs and not in front of them. We can even hold our breath whilst running, though I wouldn’t advise it! And we sweat to cool down. I would also imagine that being hands-free meant early hominins would have been able to carry some fuel/fluids with them. So we are well-equipped to keep going and going… and going.
It pains me to hear folk talk of poorly-designed joints, weak ankles and delicate feet. If you actually have a look at how we are designed, it quickly becomes evident that we are amazing feats of bioengineering. The devil’s in the detail. Take the bones of the foot, for example: there are twenty-six bones in one foot. Twenty-six! Your feet comprise just over a quarter of all the bones in your body. I’m being conservative when I say twenty-six as there are really twenty-eight if you include the tibia and fibula of the lower leg, which give rise to the ankle bones. All of these bones are held in place by a complex network of tendons and ligaments, and over a hundred muscles. Each and every one with a highly specialised purpose. There are other types of soft tissue, again, all highly specialised. You’ve probably heard of the plantar fascia? A thick, fibrous band of tissue that pretty much runs the length of the underside of your foot. It’s job? To keep the tension on your arch when you flex your toes thus protecting the muscles in the sole of the foot, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s job was to remind you of it’s presence by screaming for attention after a long, hard run.
I’ll stop waxing lyrical about the amazingly complex foot, and mention the other bits of our bodies that hint at runners by design, such as the Achilles tendon, the largest and strongest tendon in the human body whose name comes from the Greek myth describing how mama Thetis dunked her son, Achilles, into the protective waters of the river Styx. The only bit of him that wasn’t washed with these magical waters was the bit where she had a hold of him – his heel – which is why you might describe your main weakness as your ‘Achilles heel’.
Bringing up the rear, there’s our rather impressive backside. It seems fitting that the largest muscle in the human body responsible for keeping us upright, and slaying those ascents, would have a name fitting of a Roman gladiator. Enter the arena, Gluteus Maximus!
Up at t’other end, you’ve got the ligamentum nuchae (nope, that’s not the village where our gladiator, Gluteus Maximus, was born). Easier to remember as the nuchal ligament. It’s job is to stop your head from lolling about when the rest of your body is moving, and you’ll find it attached to the base of your skull and the bottom of your neck. It’s not your average ligament, either, because this one is stretchy. Tendons and ligaments tend to be rigid so that they can ‘ping’ energy, if you catch my drift. Imagine a trampoline that’s been pulled way too taught. It’s hardly going to give, but you, on the other hand, are going to get up close and personal with the clouds if you attempt to bounce on it. The nuchal ligament is not unique to us. It is also found in quadrupeds but it is unique to runners, and we are the only species of great ape that possess it. This stretchy ligament keeps your head effectively independent of the rest of your body whilst you run, otherwise your noggin would twist from side-to-side with the pendulous movement of your torso as you drive forwards. That’s not going help with those gastrointestinal issues oft experienced towards the latter stages of an ultra.
There are lots of other subtle tweaks in our physiology that hint at our runner’s heritage but I hope I’ve given you enough to whet your appetite, and perhaps given you a different perspective on running.