> but in order to accelerate, a deer goes anaerobic, while the man remains in an oxygenated jogging zone.
Anaerobic exercise is where you get close to red-lining your body's limits.
The Ironman is arguably one of the most difficult single-day athletic event an individual can participate in. Training for the Ironman (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, 26.2 mile run) requires at least one year of up to 20 to 40 hrs of concentrated training every week. The whole point of the training is to build your body's endurance such that when you do the actual race you do not go anaerobic. Even the people winning the race in 9hr times do not venture into the anaerobic zone while racing. Once you go anaerobic (lactic acid), your ability to complete the race (or even continue) goes seriously downhill. Going anaerobic is also the reason why most people cannot swim more than 100m without training (simply put - their technique is so bad that most of their energy is expended and wasted into fighting the water - so it's like running 100m sprints).
Also, check out the Marathon Monks of Japan. 84km/day for 100 days.
As a three-time ironman finisher (Wisconsin '04, Lake Placid '06/'08) this is spot on. The key is long, slow, boring training, keeping your eyes glued to your HRM to stay <zone 4. It's also why a lot of first time ironman racers don't do as well as they trained for since they tend to get caught up in the moment and go too hard, go anaerobic, and spend the rest of the race paying for it.
A friend of mine who keeps a small flock of sheep as a hobby swears by the run-them-down technique. He doesn't have a sheepdog and sheep can be difficult to catch for a human. But he says that if he is prepared to chase one sheep round the field for 45 minutes or so, then it will give up, even though he can never catch it in a sprint.
If endurance running has significantly affected human evolution, why are there not more pronounced differences between men and women? Anthropological evidence is unequivocal, I thought, about the fact that men hunted far and women gathered nearby. So you would expect men to have evolved much higher endurance running traits that women, if their primary hunting technique was running animals down. Yet many of the modern ultra-distance runners are women, and last I checked my toes were shorter than most men's :-)
Yet bipedalism has effectively made human reproduction a nightmare (due to the orientation of the pelvis with respect to the birth canal). So if there is an evolutionary reason for bipedalism I would expect it to apply at least equally if not more to women. Naively, anyway.
Men and women have a lot more similarities than the males and females of some species, and we'd hardly be the first species where a genetic trait hurt one gender but helped the other.
The same was true 100-150 years ago in the US. The US Army Infantry routinely marched 35-40 miles per day, seven days per week for weeks on end. The cavalry simply could not maintain that pace; it killed the horses.
Keeping track of where your prey has gone suddenly becomes a matter of putting pieces of evidence together to tell a story that is quite a bit more complicated than simply seeing them directly and running them down. If we are going to have physical adaptations, we should also expect cognitive ones.
Still it isn't clear that marathon or any massive repentive excercise is ultimately good for you, but if humans are built for running, it might change my mind a bit towards running.
Everything Art De Vany says could easily be true of the people running recreational marathons today. Many of them are much heavier than the San and the Tarahumara, both in build and in body fat. Many people who run marathons never run more than twenty miles in training, and then run the marathon extremely hard to get the best possible time. Most of the people in an amateur marathon will be in pain for at least a week afterwards. They only say they "hurt" themselves if it takes more than two weeks to recover.
An endurance hunter wouldn't run so hard (because he knows time is on his side) and would take much better care of his body (because he depends on his athletic ability much more than a modern person does.)
There is quite a lot of space between being a couch potatoe and a marathon runner, on both cases probably the extreme is bad for you. Professional athlethes tend to have severe problems, injuries, joints operated once or several times by the time they retire in their forties. It's a hazard of the job, but should try to achieve the same hazards? I wouldn't.
People tend to think that primitive hunter-gatherers had so good health since they were excercising or were on the run all the time, but it isn't necessarily true. Hunter-gatherers actually had leisure times to sit by the fire telling stories, creating art or tools. Some todays tribes actually have lower or the same activity levels than us westeners(some studies: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/01/exercise-and-b...)
Oh I agree, but most Marathon runners are doing 1 Marathon a year, if that. For many people a Marathon is a once-in-a-lifetime thing that they do and move onto the next challenge or goal. That list is ridiculous, you could make a list of worst-case risks for any activity and not do it.
The top athletes in any sport won the genetic lottery to be well-adapted for that sport. Basketball players don't train to get that tall... It's not reasonable to compare their training and competition volumes with average people. Even a full time professional Marathon runner only competes a few times a year.
Incidentally, if you show up to a Marathon (or a half-Marathon or even a 10k) and look around you, you'll see that 99% of the crowd look perfectly ordinary. If you saw them (us!) in street clothes, you wouldn't think they were anything unusual, certainly not super-athletes. A Marathon is not at all out of reach for the average person.
I think the ability of any person to jog a marathon even after being couch potato for long periods of life shows how well genetically predisposed people are for running.
Karno has amazing endurance and recovery but he's not a competitive Marathon runner - his best Marathon time is 3:00:30, compare that to Haile Gebrselassie in 2:03:59. Geb competes once every couple of months on average.
When you say professional athletes, are you referring to those exclusively in endurance sports? Surely you cannot directly compare runners with tackle football players, etc.
As I understand him, DeVany is against long, constant-paced runs, of which marathons are the most extreme example. He likes short, varied sprints, as in competitive sports.
Chasing prey across mixed terrain likely had more pacing variety than a marathon. Just navigating around plants and rocks could provide more rhythmic variation than a modern marathon on a paved course. The optimal chase may have also involved trying to drive the prey to a convenient final resting location, so some of the chase would involve overtaking the prey from different angles at different times.
Just because we may be adapted to long distance running doesn't mean it will necessarily boost your, or my, quality of life or life expectancy. By either measure we're a lot better off now than we were when we had to run down our own food.
Another good book is Why We Run: A Natural History, by Bernd Heinrich, a biologist who studied insect physiology, wrote many books about natural history, and held several American ultrarunning records. The book is half memoir and half natural history, and it's a quick and fascinating read.
And yet all this research and hypothesizing doesn't end with grabbing one of these super marathon runners, taking him to the wide open plains of Utah, and asking him to bring back a dead antelope.
"grabbing one of these super marathon runners, taking him to the wide open plains of Utah, and asking him to bring back a dead antelope."
you might need a tracker for when the antelope goes over the horizon/out of sight. Most ong distance runners would be clueless about tracking prey. Maybe the tracker can drive/cycle alongside the runner in a hypothetical experiment.
"darting the antelope first and attaching a radio direction beacon"
well, If you don't want to model how much the hunter recovers during periods of relative rest ( slower-than-running-time-spent-in-tracking this would be additional resting time for the prey as well I suppose) you could do it that way.
Does anyone in HN know of what kind of mathematics would be needed to set up a simulation like this?equations for rates of exhaustion/ speed loss over time etc?
You can easily model something like this with regular old ordinary differential equations in Mathematica or MATLAB. The hard part would be gathering the data to design realistic equations.
It seems that Mr. Hawks, the critic toward the end, is somewhat confused about evolution, expecting traits to disappear once they become no longer useful.
His second assertion, from the finding that toe length does not affect walking, strikes me as completely nonsensical even considering the above confusion.
I thought that was strange too. But even more strange is his job description: "researches the acceleration of human evolution since the advent of agriculture".
Acceleration? I was under the impression that once the food problem was solved, evolution slowed dramatically. In fact I thought it had basically stopped thousands of years ago, apart from obvious things like "impotence is selected against", or "luxury evolution" like selecting against extreme ugliness.
It makes no sense. Tools and farming remove selection pressure per se, and if that's gone we just stay as we are, not slowly "revert", or whatever he's imagining.
One of the basis of evidence for this about spear use is very misleading. We have no idea how long humans have been using wooden spears since they don't preserve. But since chimps do, it is possible we have been for millions of years. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02...
