Quotes by Christopher McDougall

You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else…We were born to run; we were born because we run

Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by,” Kerouac wrote. “Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.

He was onto something. Something huge. It wasnt just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what were meant to be.

Imagine your kid is running into the street and you have to sprint after her in bare feet, Eric told me when I picked up my training with him after my time with Ken. Youll automatically lock into perfect form--youll be up on your forefeet, with your back erect, head steady, arms high, elbows driving, and feet touching down quickly on the forefoot and kicking back toward your butt.You cant run uphill powerfully with poor biomechanics, Eric explained.

Vigil couldnt quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you got, being patient and forgiving and undemanding.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, Bannister said. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesnt matter whether youre a lion or a gazelle - when the sun comes up, youd better be running.

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.

The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit.

Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck off a naked foot.

The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.

We say the rarajipari is the game of life, Angel said. You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You cant control it. You can only adjust.

You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running or you wouldnt live to love anything else.

Dont fight the trail, take what it gives you. If you have a choice between one step or two between rocks, take three.

But theres a problem, Dr. Bramble said. He tapped his forehad. And its right up here. Our greatest talent, he explained, also created the monster that could destroy us. Unlike any other organism in history, humans have a mind-body conflict: we have a body built for performance, but a brain thats always looking for efficiency. We live or die by our endurance, but remember: endurance is all about conserving energy, and thats the brains department. The reason some people use their genetic gift for running and others dont is because the brain is a bargain shopper.

After all, what else did we have going for us? Nothing, except we ran like crazy and stuck together. Humans are among the most comunal and cooperative of all primates; our sole defense in a fang-filled world was our solidarity, and theres no reason to think we suddently disbanded our most crucial challenge, the hunt for food. I remembered what the Seri Indians told Scott Carrier after the sun had set on their persistence-hunting days. It was better before, a Seri elder lamented. We did everything as a family. The whole community was a family. We shared everything and cooperated, but now there is a lot of arguing and bickering, every man for himself. Running didnt just make the Seris a people...it also made them better people.

If you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals cant pant while they gallop.

Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if thats all you get, thats not so bad. Then work on light. Make it efforthless, like you dont give a shit how high the hill is or how far youve got to go. When youve practiced that so long, that you forget youre practicing, you work on making it smooooooth. You wont have to worry about the last one - you get those three, and youll be fast.

The reason we race isnt so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other.

“We live in a culture that sees extreme exercise as crazy, Dr. Bramble says, because thats what our brain tells us: why fire up the machine if you dont have to?”