For Humans, Slow And Steady Running Won The Race
by Christopher Joyce
July 19, 2010
Charlie Riedel/AP Feet On The Ground: Barefoot runners tend to land on the balls of their feet rather than on their heels the way most shoe-runners do. Rick Roeber went shoeless in 2003 and has clocked more than 13,000 barefoot miles since.
July 19, 2010
Imagine for a moment how our earliest ancestors felt when they came down from the trees and stood on two legs.
"Hey, now we can carry stuff!" they might have thought. They paid a price, though: On the ground it was a tiger-eat-monkey world, and two legs were slower than four.
Video: Running With And Without Shoes
But one prominent biologist, Harvard anthropology professor Dan Lieberman, says not so fast. Humans invented something better than speed: endurance running. It allowed us to hunt faster animals, and that changed the course of evolution.
"How long a run do you think you can ..." Lieberman's voice trails off as he examines my "running form." We're standing next to the Charles River as other joggers pass by in the drizzle. "That's about a mile and a half," he offers, pointing down toward a distant bridge.
Lieberman looks like a human greyhound, and he's already run three miles this morning. Lieberman studies running and how it makes humans unique. Even when he's running a marathon, he's thinking about how the body does it.
"Sometimes I do kind of bizarre things when I'm running," he says as we start off at a leisurely trot. "You know, move my arms in funny ways just to think about it, and I get these strange looks and realize I probably should not be doing this in public."
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