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.
For nearly 2 million years, our ancestors survived and thrived and spread across the planet because they could run other mammals into heat exhaustion.
Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.
When it comes to mentors, you can’t beat survival.
Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger’s life to be a total head-scratcher.
We are the biggest sissies in the jungle. Every other animal is stronger than we are – they have fangs, they have claws, they have nimbleness, they have speed. We think Usain Bolt is fast – Usain Bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel.
You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.
Running should be free, man.
That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation.
But you can’t muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.
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.
He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn’t just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we’re meant to be.
Perhaps all our troubles – all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can’t overcome – began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.
Everyone is built for running.
The ‘Tarahumara’ use their legs ‘as designed.’ By running at a young age with minimal footwear, they naturally develop the best biomechanical use of their legs. Cushioned shoes restrict foot movements and allow for over-striding. Short strides are natural.
Endurance, after all, is the only reason we even exist. We think of ourselves as nature’s deadliest animals, but the truth is, a naked human is the biggest wimp in the wild. We have no fangs, no claws, no strength, and no speed.
We’re constantly told that running will ruin our knees and outrage our hearts, but for nearly all of human existence, it was associated with freedom, vitality, and eternal youth.
Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life. We’ve taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure.
Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy – but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault.
We were born to run; we were born because we run.