Barefoot Running

Running:

As close as to a weaving woman's breast the bar
of warp is drawn, when accurately she passes
shuttle and spool along the meshing web
and holds to her breast one weighted bar, so close
in second place Odysseus ran: his feet
came sprinting in the other's tracks before
the dust fell, and on Aias' nape he blew
hot breath as he ran on. All the Akhaians
cheered for Odysseus, the great contender
and called to him as he ran with laboring heart.
But entering the last hundred yards, Odysseus
prayed in his heart to the grey-eyed one, Athena:

"Hear me, goddess: come, bless me with speed!

-The Iliad, Book 23, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

Another thing that I have been doing lately is running barefoot. This is something that came from my sister, whose running has lately come to embrace marathons. A few years ago in New York, she studied with Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen. His thesis is that humanity evolved to hunt through long-distance running, pacing prey to exhaustion. Running therefore should come as naturally to us as it does to wolves, loping over the hills.

The key secret hit me like a thunderbolt. It was so simple, yet such a jolt. It was this: everything I’d been taught about running was wrong. We treat running in the modern world the same way we treat childbirth—it’s going to hurt, and requires special exercises and equipment, and the best you can hope for is to get it over with quickly with minimal damage.

Then I meet the Tarahumara, and they’re having a blast. They remember what it’s like to love running, and it lets them blaze through the canyons like dolphins rocketing through waves. For them, running isn’t work. It isn’t a punishment for eating. It’s fine art, like it was for our ancestors. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man.

Odysseus is an interesting example of that ethic from the ancient Greek. Reading his description in the Iliad, he is the last of the heroes we would think of as likely to win contests for speed: he is shorter than the other heroes, for one thing, and somewhat older than many.

To the Greeks it seemed natural that he should nevertheless be a great runner. In the Homeric period of literature, there is an emphasis on what later Greeks would call "essential nature." Odysseus' essential nature is to be a troublemaker -- that is what the name "Odysseus" means. He is therefore wily in strategy and counsel, speedy with his glib tongue and, when necessary, his feet. This is why, when the Trojan scout Dolon comes down to spy upon the Greek camp, Odysseus is one of the two Greeks who is wary enough to spot him, and speedy enough to catch one of Troy's fastest runners.

Mr. McDougall has the opposite physical problems: he is six-foot-four, and weighs over two hundred pounds. When asked about whether that suggests that he isn't built for running, he scoffs. "I bought into that bull for a loooong time.... so many doctors are reinforcing this learned helplessness, this idea that you have to be some kind of elite being to handle such a basic, universal movement."

My own experience has been that my feet have toughened up nicely over the last few months, so that running is easy on sand, concrete, grass, or any other surface except superheated summer blacktop. It is more pleasant than any running I can remember having done, except when I used to run over Burnt Mountain -- and that was only because the surroundings were so much more beautiful, and so much better suited to my own essential nature.