Tribal Runners, Weekend Warriors, and Our Changing Relationship to Endurance Sports

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Endurance activities, like distance running, have existed since ancient times. But humans' relationship to those pursuits has changed, according to time and place. In the West, we've currently turned endurance sports into a science, tracking every metric and chasing personal records through sophisticated technology and personalized training plans. But as my guest, who spent years studying the running cultures in different societies knows well, this modern, individualized

Data-driven approach isn't the only way to pursue the art of endurance. Michael Crawley is a competitive runner, social anthropologist, and the author of, To the Limit. On the show today, we first examine how Western athletes have workified running through technology and social media. We then look at how other cultures approach running differently, including why East African runners emphasize group training over individual goals, and how there are Murray people in Mexico incorporate spiritual dimensions into the running.

We end our conversation with how we might rediscover more meaningful, holistic ways to approach our own physical pastimes. After shows over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash endurance. All right, Michael Crawley, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. So you are a social anthropologist and you recently put out a book exploring why humans willingly, and some might say, I would say this because I'm not an endurance guy, needlessly take part in endurance events like marathons and triathlons, things like that. What led you down that line of research?

Well, I guess I've been running for over 20 years now. I'm 36, so I've been running for most of my life. That culminated in running at a relatively high level. I run for Scotland and Great Britain, run a 220 marathon. But I suppose I've always been interested in

running culture or endurance culture. So growing up as a teenager, I had a coach who was very good in the 1980s in the northeast of England and back then there was a club called Gates at Harriers that produced loads of really good runners Olympic medalists, Commonwealth Games medalists.

but all from quite a small area of the northeast of England. And so he would tell me about, you know, in the 80s, it was very normal to run 100 miles a week. If you went to a running club, that's just what was expected. So I was curious about, you know, the fact that that's kind of changed and it seems like there's some sort of cultural influence that makes people want to train that hard. So that was an area of the UK where there's a lot of working class people. It was kind of part of working class culture to do a lot of running. So I was interested in cultures of endurance long time before I even knew what anthropology was, I suppose.

And then you also you sort of anthropology and then you've taken this interest in the cultures of endurance and like you didn't really spend time with Ethiopians to figure out why they run the way they do.

Yeah, so the biggest project I've done so far really was in Ethiopia, so I was there for nearly a year and a half. And that was motivated by this kind of curiosity about what it was about Ethiopia that made them produce so many top runners. I think we tend to lump Ethiopians, Kenyans and Ugandans together as kind of the East Africans, but we don't know very much about people from Ethiopia. Lots of people have gone to Kenya to do research because it was a former British colony and people could speak English and things. But I really wanted to understand what it was specifically about Ethiopia that made runners tick basically.

The idea for this new project actually came from Ethiopia because what I found there was that people saw running success as something that was collectively produced through practices of kind of living and training together rather than as something that was quite individualistic. I think we sometimes think of running, I guess, in the West. And I learned that people in Ethiopia saw energy in quite different ways. So if you think about a sport scientist, they tend to think of energy as

as kind of something that is bounded within an individual body, a kind of system of inputs and outputs that you can measure in the lab. But in Ethiopia, people thought about it as a kind of shared substance that meant that it had to be very carefully sort of shared out between people. It meant that running had to be something that was communal, that was done together and that you could see what other people were doing, basically. So when people would run together, they would literally time their footsteps with each other and run in sync with each other, which was something that I found quite difficult to replicate.

Yeah, that's one of the big takeaways from your book and you explores how in the West, we typically take an individualistic approach to running or other endurance events. And then in other cultures like Ethiopia, Kenya, it's more communal. And I hope we can flesh that out. But let's talk about just running in the West. And you make a point in the book. I thought it was interesting as an anthropologist, sometimes

You notice people in the popular culture put too fine of a distinction between Westerners and the non-Westerners. It's more squidgy than we think. But when you ask Westerners, by that I mean Americans, people living in the United Kingdom, Canada, things like that. When you ask them why they take part in endurance events like running or cycling, what are the typical answers you get on why they do it?

Well, a lot of people would tend to say something like it allows them to strip things back to the sort of the bare minimum to kind of return to something more simple and profound, basically. So the ultra runner, Damien Hall, who

He won a race called the Spine Race in the UK, which is a nonstop race on the Pennine Way, which is 268 miles. He talked about that in a kind of joking way, is that an extreme way of battling phone addiction. So it is like a way of getting away from his emails and stripping things back to this kind of, this simpler way of being. And I think to a certain extent, when we

But running shoes on a jump on a bike, we are kind of embracing this kind of freedom, allowing our minds to wander and all those kinds of things. But then on the other hand, as you say, there's a tendency to think of these activities in precisely the kinds of terms that we're actually trying to escape. So we celebrate individual resilience, the drive for productivity. We try to quantify as many variables as we can. We rank ourselves against other people and things. So endurance sport seems to embody

These elements of play, but also lots of qualities of work as well. So someone like Elliott Kipchogi, the first man to run into two hours for the marathon, one of the things he likes to say a lot is only the truly disciplined in life are free, which kind of brings these two things together, you know, this idea that it's

You know, this is a really kind of contradictory statement that you just, in order to be free, but it seems to be that endurance sport brings together work and play in these really interesting ways. Why do you think Americans and British people, people in the West, do that? Like, why have they taken something that I think, you know, maybe a hundred years ago with something just you did for fun, just, you know,

It was just something you did, maybe for exercise. And we started to make it more work-like where you're quantifying how many steps you're taking. You're looking at your VO2 max. You have this very set out program. You need to follow in order to get ready for a race. Like why the drive towards workifying recreational endurance sports.

I think endurance sport just kind of ends up reflecting the broader culture really. I think it's just that we spend so much time sort of emphasizing things like productivity and ranking each other based on achievements and things that we can't help but apply that to anything that we do including endurance sport I guess.

It seems like if you look further back in history, endurance sports have tended to become really popular at times of societal change or when there's been broader anxieties about things. The turn of the 19th century, the most popular sport in the world was walking. People walking for six days around places like Madison Square Gardens without sleeping and they would draw these enormous tens of thousands of people would come and watch that.

Historians are speculated that it's because people were worried at that point about automation and about the introduction of motor cars. It was a way for humans to be like, we can still do this with very unique things that we can do as humans that machines can't do. It seems like insurance sport tends to reflect or push back against certain elements of what's happening in the broader culture. I think we can trace those today as well. We're having a lot of change with artificial intelligence, digital technology, things like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And speaking into pedestrianism, like when walking was this huge sport, we actually did a podcast on this a long time ago, episode number 167, it was with Matthew Algeo. You heard about his book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, great book. Yeah, it's a great book. It's really interesting because you wouldn't think endurance walking would be a compelling spectator sport, but it was huge. Like competitors would walk laps for

six days straight and then the winner would get the equivalent of a million dollars in today's money. It was really peculiar.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's kind of sort of disappeared from the popular consciousness. But there was that and then there were dance marathons in the depression era where that was kind of a huge thing that everyone wanted to watch people dancing and dancing for like, you know, weeks on end, basically on very little sleep, which sort of, I guess, reflected something of what was happening more broadly in America with, you know, ideas of the American dream. If you just keep dancing long enough, it doesn't matter where you're from, but you might eventually make it and become famous or whatever. But, you know, these things have

There's been a few pockets of real attention on endurance sports and I think we're kind of in one now as well which is interesting.

Yeah, and I think social media has only just amplified the popularity of endurance activities. You actually write about how social media has changed our relationship with endurance sports like running or triathlons. Walk us through that. How has social media changed? How people approached their sport, say, compared to 20, 30 years ago?

Sure, yeah. So my interest in social media kind of started with this project that I did during COVID lockdowns where I was interested in asking people, professional athletes, how they experienced having to post on social media as part of their contracts, basically. And what happened was that we're talking about this idea that posting on social media was basically a form of work and it was something that they found quite sort of physically and emotionally draining a lot of the time.

And that was because it was something that they weren't necessarily trained to do, but they needed to do it in order to continue to get paid by the brands that they were working with. And why I think it's kind of interesting is that kind of amateur cyclists and runners tend to mimic the kinds of scripts that

professional athletes will produce. So they'll produce very similar kinds of posts without necessarily knowing that the professional athletes that are posting in that way are doing it without really wanting to. So I kind of explored these ideas about presumption, this idea that we're both producing and consuming when we use social media, that we think that we're kind of consuming something, but we're the ones who are actually creating the value for these companies. So just quickly asking the question of whether we need to think a bit more carefully about how and what kinds of things we post.

There's social media around endurance, but I think it tends to amplify particular kinds of messages, so ideas about taking personal responsibility, about just pushing harder all the time, and then you can make it those kinds of messages. And it tends to push kind of quick fixes, which might not necessarily

There aren't really many quick fixes for endurance sports. I spoke to a guy called Andy Berry for the book who holds the record for the most mountains run up and down in the late district in the 24-hour period. He said he went on a podcast and talked about one training session he did. Then the next day, it was all over social media with this post saying, this is the one training session that everyone must do in order to become a better runner, this quick fix idea.

So he, when I asked him for training advice and what kinds of training sessions he would recommend, he was really reluctant to tell me. He was like, I can tell you some things, but don't put them in your book because people will, you know, people will grab onto one little thing. And really the message that people who do endurance sport need to learn is that it's all about kind of patience and cumulative effort over a really long period of time, which isn't, it doesn't fit the sort of temporality of social media very well or the kinds of sort of easy messages that people want to pick up there really.

And then going back to your point that, you know, in the West, we typically have an individualistic approach to everything, but you see it in endurance sports, which is running like a solo activity. Social media, I imagine, just amplifies that because when you're doing social media, you kind of have to make yourself the main character of the event and you have to kind of think about, how can I script this video or this picture? So it shows me

doing this thing. So you start getting very self-reflective about how you present yourself. And again, it makes it more just about you and the self and the individual as opposed to, as we'll talk about here in a minute, and other cultures where it's more communal. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it does a similar thing in some ways to the kind of wearable technology that has become far more popular, where it's kind of encouraging people to focus on the individual and on your own data or your own kind of selfie or whatever it is, rather than looking outwards towards others.

Yeah. And then, I mean, I imagine to the social media where you had to think about not only professional athletes where they had to think about, okay, I got to put out this stuff so I can get the sponsorship so I can do my races. So in a way, it acts as a distraction from the main thing that you're trying to do, which is run.

I imagine you can do the same thing to recreational runners where they took up a sport, they took up running, they took up cycling because they really enjoyed it. They found it as an intrinsic good. But then if they start adding in social media and maybe they started to do it because they just wanted to share with their friends, like, here's what I'm doing. And it was sort of like a.

Maybe it was like a communal thing, like you're just sharing with your other friends who do running as well and you're able to share that with people who lived far away from you. But then it might turn into something a little bit more because maybe you're getting like some reach outs from brands saying, Hey, if you tag us or just talk about our product in your video, we'll give you some money. And so it changes the relationship to their sport from one of like intrinsic worth and value to something like, well, I got to do this so I can.

get something else, get money or whatever. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then you see a lot of the videos will be someone's kind of propped up their phone on a tree or something. And then they're going and running past it and making sure they time themselves running past it right so that they can capture the image that they can then go and post on social media. And I just wonder, you know, the act of doing that, is that improving the experience of that runner? Is it just interrupting it? And yeah, exactly what you're saying, you know, it changes the reason for doing it, which I think is really, really kind of important.

And with an endurance sport as well, people get injured an awful lot because you're doing a huge amount of running or huge amount of cycling. So you end up, what happened when I spoke to the professional athletes was that they said sometimes the highest performing posts were the ones where they're talking about being really vulnerable or about being injured, because they're actually more relatable than the ones about where they talk about being able to run a 13 minute 5K or something like that, that most people can't comprehend. So they end up focusing on the moments of kind of.

vulnerability and injury and things, which can be quite, again, quite draining for people to have to be that vulnerable on social media, I guess. Yeah, because then you start getting questions from everybody. They want to, like, pry further. Well, tell me more. Yeah. And then sooner or later, you're spending five or six hours on Instagram, which is what the runners that I spoke to said they were often doing. Yeah. They don't want to do that. I imagine a lot of runners are introverts. And so having to do that, it's just like, geez, I don't want to just drain it. Yeah.

So you mentioned the tracking devices, the data wearable, the smart watches, Apple watches, whoops, things like that, and how that's also changed our relationship to endurance sports and just sports in general in the West. Walk us through that. What's the history that? When did Americans, British people, people in the West start using data to improve their running times?

Well, the history goes back quite a long way. So if you look back 100 years in the 1920s, there was a Finnish runner called Pavo Nirmi, who was an industrial sort of training college, basically. And he came up with the idea of running with a stopwatch in his hand.

and at the time that was unheard of basically he would run with a stopwatch in his hand in races. And people were really critical of that. Cartoons at the time depicted him as like a stopwatch with his limbs made out of industrial chimneys and as this kind of stiff-limbed robot who was crushing his opponents into the ground as the way that it was put in an article at the time.

So it shows that these kind of worries about people merging with machines or about the kind of dehumanizing effects of technologies goes back, you know, a century basically. But I think what I've traced in the book is the fact that I think we can say that there's been a relative explosion of the use of these kinds of tracking devices just in the last sort of 10 years. So what I did was I basically used a whole load of different things. So I used a Woot band, I used a

Garmin watch i use super sapiens life glucose monitoring i did some home blood tests we post off a little file of blood to a company to get it tested and things. Because i was interested in sort of experience in the myself these things are marketed by the companies as explicitly performance enhancing which i think is interesting so they're marketed as giving us this kind of privileged insight into our bodies and ourselves.

which made me wonder whether we're, because the other thing is they're not actually particularly accurate. So if you wear multiple devices that measure heart rate variability, for example, you'll normally find that there's quite a big discrepancy between them. So if we're giving a lot of our agency away to these devices, it might not actually be particularly beneficial. And rather than kind of giving ourselves new insights, whether we're actually kind of blunting our ability to learn how to feel things sort of for ourselves or through intuition or something like that. So one of the things I did for that chapter,

was that I took all these different kinds of devices to a guy called Charlie Spedding, who is the last British Olympic medallist in the marathon, who happens to live two streets away from me. And I said, you know, if all this stuff had been available in the 80s, would you have used it?

And he said he would have used one or two things, but very selectively. So he'd have used heart rate monitors for maybe one kind of run so that he could get a kind of baseline for it. But then he would put it away for a while and then use it again because he wouldn't want to become dependent on it. And he told me a story about going down to do a training session one night, driving through to Gateshead, warming up, just not feeling right. And basically putting his tracksuit back on, driving home again, driving through the next night to do the session again.

and being really proud of the decision to not do it. And what he said to me was, you know, I really wouldn't have wanted to watch making that decision for me because he needed to know that he was able to make that kind of decision. And he kind of drew a line between that and when he got his Olympic medal and being able to make the right kinds of decisions about what to do in the heat of the moment in a race, he was like, if you give that kind of agency away to a watch or some sort of device.

you're not going to be building that kind of trust in yourself to know your body for a start but also to trust your own kind of decision-making processes I guess.

Yeah, so what these devices promise, like the whoop or the ordering, you know, you worry these things and it can tell you based on data they collect, like your heart rate variability, so HRV, if that is high, actually high HRV is good. It means you're like not stressed, looks at your sleep, it looks at, you know, just your activity. It gives you what's called like a readiness score. So you can wake up and like, oh, it'll tell you you are, you could hit a PR today on your runtime. You can go hard.

I've used these devices too, and I found that it was really weird. One thing I noticed too, there's differences between how these things measure sleep, even your heart rate. Then sometimes you'd wake up and you'd say your readiness score is lousy.

But then you kind of check in with yourself and you're like, actually, I feel pretty good. I feel like I could go hard today. And so I would just ignore it and I had a great workout. And I imagine there's people who just, they lived their lives, particularly like recreational runners who lived their lives by what these devices tell them. And they're probably, they're probably leaving stuff on the table as a consequence.

Yeah, I think so, definitely. But I definitely had experiences where what the watch was saying and how I felt were really out of line with each other. Sometimes a very, very high HIV score as well can indicate that you're extremely stressed. So this thing of like, it's really high, that's really good, is not necessarily always the case. But most people just assume that really high means really good.

One of the interesting things, I asked people about this when i was doing interviews about social media as well, and i talked to some athletes who were sponsored by, HIV monitors, and they would they said you know if we go to the world championships of the Olympics or something, you take it off for the four or five days before the race because you don't want it telling you that your readiness score is low.

But also, if you're running an Olympic final 1,500 meters in the evening, your readiness score isn't going to be through the roof because you're going to be stressed because you're about to run the Olympic 1,500 meter final. But that doesn't mean that you're not ready. So these kind of professional athletes, they understand it with a level of nuance that I think is important to bring that level of nuance to interacting with these things really.

Yeah, but the recreational runner might not. They might think, well, you know, this professional said this is what they use. I'm going to use it all the time. But without that nuance that the professional takes to the device.

Exactly. I've done weightlifting and HRV actually doesn't play much of a role in anaerobic activities like weightlifting. If you've had a crappy HRV or high HRV, it doesn't really affect strength-based sports based on the research I've read. But there are devices in weightlifting that monitor things that can tell you how fast the bar is moving.

Um, so that you can use that information to be like, well, of the bars moving fast, then I can, you can do these calculations to figure out what your PR is for that day, the highest amount of weight you could lift that day. And I thought it was kind of interesting. It was useful to play around with actually got some infantry information.

But again it doesn't really tell you much that you already don't know the device tell you the bars moving fast like well i know it's moving back i felt to go fast and so i don't know how much like how useful it was compared to just listening to your body. Yeah it reminds me of the.

One of the biggest agents for Kenyan athletes is a guy called Josh Herman. He was a very good Dutch runner back in the 70s. He was the world record holder for 10 miles running. They did a special new kind of muscle biopsy on his leg to see what kind of muscle fibers he had and things. They came back two weeks later and said, it turns out from the muscle biopsy that you're probably really good at running pretty fast for a long time. He was like, well,

Yeah, I know that because I regularly run fast for a long time. So it's like whether it's actually teaching you anything new is a big question. I think. Yeah, again, and what these devices do, it makes running your sport more work likes. You have data, how you can improve yourself. And then also just reinforces the individuality of the sport because all of this data that you're getting is going to be unique to you. Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, if you wanted to try to run with the group, it'd be hard to coordinate that if everyone's using these devices because one guy would be like, well, my HRV is great today. So I'm going to go hard. And then your buddy's like, well, mine's crappy. So I'm going to go slow. So you wouldn't be able to sync up with a group.

Yeah, and I've had this with people who just run based on their heart rate as well, you know, people who go out and say, I'm going to go for a run today, but I'm not going to let my heart rate go over 160 and you'll be running along with them feeling good and you want to push a little bit up a hill because it feels good to do that. And they're kind of looking at their watch saying, Oh, no, you know, I've got to slow down.

So it means it makes it hard to run with other people, basically, if you can't all run according to the same sort of heart rate zone. So I think there's important things to think about there. There's a good anecdote from one of the top coaches of Kenyan athletes who also coaches some European runners. And he said, if he gave a group of Kenyan runners and a group of European runners, the same training session where he said, you've got to run three minutes per kilometer for an hour or something like that. The European runners, if they didn't think they could do it, they would all decide what pace they could run for an hour and do it on their own.

Whereas the canyon runners would go as a group and they'd run at three minutes per kilometer until they couldn't do it anymore. So it's kind of two different ways of approaching two different ways of valuing things, I guess, one of which is far more communal than the other. We're going to take a quick break for you. Words more sponsors.

And now back to the show. Okay. So yeah, we've basically in the West, we've really, we've workified running with data, with technology, with our approach to training. We've made it very individual, but every now and then there's the, you know, Westerners kind of get fed up and think, I just, I want to bring back the joy into running into my cycling. And what they'll often do is they'll look to non-Western or indigenous cultures to figure out how to get back to a more natural or simple way of running.

And Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run is often the gateway into this approach of, quote unquote, natural running. For those who aren't familiar with this book, what's the basic thesis of Born to Run?

So, Born to Run, it's a book about the Rauramuri in Mexico, also known as the Tarahumara, which is the name the Spanish gave them. And McDougall basically interweaves this narrative of a 50-mile trail race featuring some Rauramuri runners and some top American ultra runners with this kind of narrative about

the fact that humans are born to run. This idea that endurance running is an important part of our evolutionary history because we basically used it as a technique for hunting called persistent hunting, basically where we would have chased animals to exhaustion over many hours of determined running. I found the book extremely compelling when I first read it. I read it in a couple of days like a lot of other people have.

And his argument is basically that the Rara Muri, what he calls a near mythical tribe of Stone Age super athletes, and that we can therefore see in them some kind of representation of our kind of ancestral past. So this is a view that's shared by a lot of people. So he writes that if Scott Durek could win the race that he describes in Eureka, he wouldn't just be beating Anofo and Sylvino, who are his main sort of Rara Muri rivals,

but he'd be demonstrating that he was the best of all time. So I think there's a problem because these representations kind of reinforce ideas about the differences between kind of so-called savages and supposedly civilized people or between kind of like westerners and kind of non-westerners. And there are a moment you therefore come to represent humanity as a whole in this kind of pristine and supposedly like physically superior state.

Right. It's the myth, it's the myth of the noble savage that Rousseau popularized. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. But something you point out too is that one of the critiques you make of McDougal's thesis, right? So these runners, they represent sort of like man at its best. If it's like the Edenic state of man, if we run like them and approach running the way they do, all of us, everyone could be just these high performing athletes. But one of the critiques you make is that McDougal, while he lionizes these indigenous runners,

He takes a very Western view of the tribe, which misses the broader context which you try to dig into. Can you flesh that out a little bit for us?

Yeah, well, I guess I'd just argue that he focuses mainly on some things that the Rora Murray themselves wouldn't have thought were that important. So it spends a lot of time focusing on the fact that they wear very rudimentary sandals to run in rather than running shoes. And so there was the whole argument that that was a far more natural way of running and that kind of spawned this whole interest in barefoot running shoes and a whole market for like vibrant shoes and things that kind of mimicked being barefoot.

What I've tried to do is, rather than focusing on things like that, I tried to focus on the kind of cultural reasons why people run. Basically, what people would say is that there was this really important spiritual dimension to running in rural Murray culture.

God, who's referred to as honor or army, basically likes it when people bet a lot of money on the running races and he likes it when the music that accompanies the runners is performed really well and that the running goes on for a really long time. So the music is important because it's that the emotion of running is supposed to be very important.

And basically, if people were able to run or dance for really long periods of time, God is thought of as having a tendency to reward that through making it rain and through causing people to have a kind of prosperous future, basically. So running has this very spiritual importance where it also has this symbolic idea that through running or dancing, you're kind of stamping down any bad vibes, keeping them down below. And you are literally kind of keeping the world turning by running.

I think those kinds of cultural reasons for running are, for me anyway, that those kinds of explanations are more interesting than the evolutionary ones. Yeah, or even like the technique, like what gear you use to run. Yeah, I think that's, I was an interesting point that, you know,

The book focus really on like, oh, what kind of stuff are they using to run or how is their form when they run? And I mean, I, I remember when that book came out and the whole barefoot running thing was a craze. I guess it was probably 15 years ago. I'll admit, I bought a pair of those vibram five finger shoes and you just look goofy.

But the guy at Sylvino, who was third in the race that Chris McDougall described, I spent a lot of time with him when I went out to Mexico and he took me running. And he was just, he was wearing trail shoes because he said, you know, it's more comfortable to run in these than it is to run in, uh, in sandals that are made out of car tires. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you actually talked to him, it was like, why do you run in the car tire sandals? And it's like, well, it's all we can afford. If I could, if I had the money, I would buy, I'd have a good pair of shoes.

Yeah, so I kind of it's kind of tongue-in-cheek in the book, but I was saying that going to there are a murian focusing on the shoes is a bit like writing a book about French cooking and focusing on the spoons that they're using to stir things with rather than the recipes and the kind of ideas behind it and stuff. So I think yeah, there's just there's more interesting things going on, I think.

Yeah. And so going to their, their culture of running, like why they run. So it's a spiritual practice for them. Like there's actually existential stakes going on when they run. And I mean, the other thing you talk about too, it's these races that they run, these long distance races. How long are the races again?

So sometimes they're as long as people can keep going for basically. So the format is, it's like a, about a five kilometer loop, and you have two teams normally, and they throw a ball, they can refer to it as throwing, but it's kind of like kicking, sort of scooping it with their foot, a wooden ball that goes around the loop. And sometimes the races are over a predetermined number of loops, but more often it's just,

basically keep going around the loop until one team gets lapped or all of the members of one of the teams give up. So I heard stories about these races that go on for like 180 kilometers, which is a long time. That is a long time. And they're highly competitive. So they're betting lots of money on these things. But you talk about, even though they're highly competitive, the competition actually makes it cooperative. Can you walk us through that idea?

Yeah, so often the teams will be from kind of competing villages or from the surrounding area. People that you know, but you don't know that well. And then the villages will normally bet lots of money and other things like horses on the person who's from their own village. So it's a way of, and people will talk about the races for like weeks in the run up to them. So it becomes a real kind of focal point for the communities. And people will talk about the races for like weeks in the run up to them. So it becomes a real kind of focal point for the communities.

And it brings people together and then beyond just that you have the teams of runners that are normally sort of six people, but it's not just them that are running a lot of the time you get the other villages running alongside them for for portions of the race. Large parts of the race obviously overnight and it's dark and so people run with torches that are set on fire.

You have musicians that run parts of the loops with everybody playing musical instruments to kind of keep the morale up and things. So basically, it's just this focal point that brings the whole of the community together and where these kind of big outpourings of energy are kind of seen as something that is beneficial to the whole community, basically. All right. So it's a group activity. It's not you're just running by yourself. Do the people who take part in these long races, do they train for them like an American would train for a marathon?

No, absolutely not. So Sylvino, he took me for a run, but we ran really far down into this valley and we went to have a cup of tea with his brother. And then we ran all the way back again. So even just taking an anthropologist to see what running is like here wasn't really seen as a good enough reason for him. He needed to do something as well as the running. And if he had a load of spare energy and time, he would rather use it to do something like chop some wood or go and make some money than he would training.

I mean, I suppose it depends on how you think about training, but every day life for a lot of people involves quite a lot of slow jogging or walking to get around places, but just training for the sake of training basically doesn't happen. Yeah, if you gave them like a six month program, they'd be like, this is weird. What are you talking about?

Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm curious, has tourism or interest in the raw marine, how they run, has it affected their running culture in traditions? Because you see this happen in other cultures where Westerners go there and they say, oh, wow, look at this cool exotic culture. And they start visiting it. And then the cultures, they pick up on it, like, oh, these Americans like it when we do this. And so we'll just play up

this one thing. So, you know, because it becomes like a money making thing. Has that happened at all? Do they like play up for like the Westerners who read, born to run and like, okay, yeah, we'll give them some parachas and we'll take them on a race.

Yeah, so there are lots of races that are organised that what the Rara Murray referred to as marathon is as opposed to Rara Hippoly, which is the game with the ball. So marathon is just, it doesn't mean marathons, it just means any race that is just a normal kind of trail race. And the number of those has really exploded since Born to Run was written because there's a lot of interest in running, but people don't tend to organise Rara Hippoly because that's kind of a separate cultural practice, I suppose.

So what's happened is that the Rara Murray runners ended up running more of these kind of conventional races to the detriment of the Rara Hippori. But people did say, I talked to a lot of kind of old people who used to do a lot of running when they were younger. And they said the culture of the Rara Hippori is going down anyway because of things like the introduction of the cell phone and other kinds of forms of entertainment running for two days at a time.

and spending two weeks preparing for it and things that just isn't a priority for as many people anymore, people go away to work and things. So there was already a kind of decline in the kind of traditional running practices, which is a shame, but it's just kind of, I think it was what happens. Yeah. Okay. So this is one example of a culture that, you know, Westerners might look to like, oh, this is an inspiration, but we kind of missed the mark and missed the mark on sort of the existential reasons why these people run in the communal aspect. Another group of people,

that Westerners look to for inspiration. We've been talking about them throughout this conversation are Eastern Africans, Kenyans, Ethiopians. When you do this research, when you talk to Westerners, what do Westerners think these endurance athletes in Eastern Africa do differently? And like, what are they trying to emulate?

Well, that's a good question. I think a lot of the assumptions about why Kenyans and Ethiopia are so good come down to kind of genetics and altitudes. So people just assume that they're particularly good because of factors that are sort of beyond their control. Either that or they say, you know, they're really good because they're coming from impoverished backgrounds. So they kind of have to be good, right? And I think both of those ways of thinking about it are quite deterministic. They're just like, you know, well,

They're very, very poor, which naturally leads them to be very good at running, or they have this genetic advantage, which naturally makes them good runners. I think both of those explanations downplay a lot of the hard work and expertise that runners in Ethiopia and Kenya have. People are aware of the group training dynamic that exists in Ethiopia and Kenya, but

I don't think people really put it into practice that often. It tends to be that people assume that people are good because they did things like running to and from school out of necessity and things like that. There might be some truth to the idea that there's some kind of genetic explanation for success of East African athletes, but scientists have tried really hard to find the kind of

a secret there and they've so far completely failed. So I would say that the explanations are probably more to do with particular kinds of expertise that exist in those places or kind of cultural values.

I want to dig deeper into this idea of their communal aspect to running. You talked about it a little bit, but what does that look like? In the West, we have our own individual running programs that we follow. When East Africans decide they're going to get into running, how do they approach training?

Well, so a lot of people when they first start, they find somebody else who's already a runner and kind of just try to join in with them in the forest or something. And so they're passing on information directly from one person to another or through practice, basically, through following somebody else. People were quite skeptical about a kind of scientific approach to running, so they would

I remember one runner saying, you know, adopted doesn't understand running because they don't run. If your mind and your legs are not integrated, you can't understand running. So they would really not trust a kind of abstract sport scientist approach. But I do think that the approach that they have, it can be described as scientific just in a slightly different way. So they're kind of continually experimenting with different kind of environments with the balancing of different kinds of environments within Ethiopia.

They constantly experimenting with training practices in a way that I think is scientific, but in a kind of citizen scientist kind of way, they're kind of learning through doing things. And one of the things that I think they've learned is that basically in order to improve, you need to be running with other people. So that's the main thing that they kept saying to me, you know, if you run on your own, that's just for health. If you want to improve, you've got to run with other people all the time. And that's something that they've learned through basically doing it, I think. How do you think running with other people improves your running?

Like you've talked about sharing the energy, but tell us more about that. So in harder training sessions, people would run in a single file line and they would think about it in a far more like the way we think about Velodrome cyclists, this idea that somebody's in somebody else's slipstream and they're using a hell of a lot less energy to do that. They just really believe that you would be able to do more harder running, run quicker whilst expanding less energy if you're within that group environment, basically.

So there was a real taboo against training on your own. If I occasionally went for a run in the forest on my own, it was like, that was as bad as eating in a restaurant on your own, which is also really, really kind of frowned upon in Ethiopia, but it was, I guess it. So it's also a reflection of the kind of broader cultural values, but people really thought, you know, you really just can't improve unless you're with other people, because they're going to, they kind of pull you on, they pull you to a new level, basically.

Yeah, and I'm sure everyone's experienced that when you work with the group, like you push yourself more because you want to keep up with the group. And there's something, I mean, I think you talk about this, Emile Durkheim, the sociologist came with the idea of collective effervescence where when you're with the group, you somehow are able to push yourself more because you kind of feed off the energy of everyone else.

Yeah, he talks about religious experiences and things like that as well, but there's clearly some kind of energy that is greater than the sum of all its parts when loads of people come together to do a particular thing. And I think that Ethiopian runners, they've experienced that often enough in their training that they just do it all the time. And it's become taboo to train on your own, basically.

How do the Ethiopians transition from this group running where you're pushing each other and pulling each other and doing things together? How does that transfer to race day where it becomes an individual thing?

That's a good question. So the group that I trained with was a professional group that were managed by a Scottish guy called Malcolm Anderson, who is one of the agents. And so they all trained in a group in Addis together, but he was really careful to not send athletes from the same group to the same race, basically. So you try to make sure that people didn't have to compete against people that they trained with. And so that meant that competition, people were able to see competition as something slightly different.

where they were able to sort of change their mindset a little bit. That's interesting. But the people who would race in training were seen as a real problem that had to be dealt with. One specific training is kind of speed sessions, which people would do maybe once every couple of weeks, like really, really fast running. Those were seen as opportunities to practice more competitive kinds of running, but it was

Sin is important to really limit that because otherwise people would exhaust themselves basically. So yeah, people were quite careful about raining in competitive instincts until they needed to be unleashed, basically. Have you seen any Westerners go to Ethiopian? They catch this idea that running is a communal group activity. Have you seen them take that idea and bring it back home to the West?

It's quite hard to do that in some ways. So I would, I've tried to bring groups of people together in, when I was training in Edinburgh and things like that. But I think it also relies on the being a group of people who are roughly the same level or there being enough people who are willing to train hard enough to sustain that. Often it's the case that there's only a few people who are running at a similar level to you. And even if you try to bring them together, they've all got their own coach and they've all got slightly different ideas about what they want to do. And it's a bit like herding cats. I have tried it, but it's difficult.

What do you think, given current trends in technology, commercialization, social media, where do you see endurance sports heading in the next decade?

That's a really good question. I'm not actually, it's hard to say. I think in some ways these things kind of yo-yo back and forth. So you get the kind of super shoes, these kind of really big thick spring loaded shoes that people are really into at the moment. And then you have the kind of barefoot running shoes, which are exactly the opposite. So things might continue to yo-yo back and forth. But I think you could also see this kind of dataification thing just going to a real extreme.

They're already companies developing AI training programs, so you could imagine an AI taking all your HRV data and your GPS data and all that kind of thing and crunching all those numbers and coming up with what would be the optimum, I suppose, for your

for your own particular physiology and things but for me that would be a kind of dystopian outcome everybody training on their own and being told what to do by an AI rather than an actual coach. So my whole competitive running career had the same coach and he would always say if I would try to schedule a training session for a time when

which was more convenient for me where he couldn't make it. He was always very resistant to that. He'd be like, no, I need to be able to look into the whites of your eyes and see how tired you are. And we need to be able to chat about, you know, how your day has been and that kind of peripheral stuff, because that's also important. And I think if we do go fully into this kind of training by the numbers, I think that would be a shame for me.

Yeah, it also goes to this question, and you talked about this in the book in relation to the super shoes that are allowing runners to, we broke the two-hour marathon record because of these shoes. Yeah, and the female world record for the marathon is now under 210, which is incredibly fast.

Yeah. Yeah. And something you talk about is people don't talk about the athlete that broke, you know, who actually did the running. Like I don't even know the name of the person, but like I know about the shoe, the technology behind the shoe. And something you talk about is this technology might be subsuming or taking over the humanity of the sport.

Yeah, and I think it's a bigger problem than previous technological developments in footwear because it's such a big leap. I talked to some biomechanists about this and they say the interesting thing about the shoes with the spring in is that they improve everybody but by different degrees. So some studies have like some people improving 1% and some people improving 8% in a particular shoe.

So it seems to be that it comes down to the combination of the particular biomechanics of the person and the footwear, which means that I think more than other technological improvements, you could see the outcome of race is being determined by the particular shoes that athletes had on.

And the slower athletes might end up winning the race because they've got a particular shoe on and it just happens to fit with the way that they run better. And I think that's a problem because it's potentially changing results. But then when you get the coverage, both of the men's and women's world records were broken just while I was writing the book. And all the coverage was about the shoes. And the only questions that they asked the athletes were about the shoes as well. So you end up learning nothing about

to Gustavo, who was the Ethiopian woman who broke the world record, or Kelvin Kiptum, Kenyan athlete. If it becomes about the shoes, then we're even less likely to learn the stories of athletes from countries like Ethiopia and Kenya, which for me seems, yeah, be better to spend more time learning about them and what makes them tick and what they think about things than just reading about shoes all the time.

Yeah, I think this goes back to Rousseau, I think, wrote an essay about this, talking about how technology, advancements in technology tend to downplay virtue, like things like courage and generosity, because you can just rely on the technology to do that thing for you. If you have a better military technology,

you know, a missile to get your enemy. Like, does it do you still need courage anymore? That was kind of his thing. And I think you kind of see the same sort of thing with this running is like, well, if you have this shoe or this data that gives you all this information, like is there any role for human grit or human resilience or whatever you want? Like those just very human virtues when you have the technology that can do it for you.

Yeah, and those are all things that also aren't measured by the kinds of wearable technology that we use now to make decisions about how to train, right? So you can have all the data on HRV and how many watts you're producing and your heart rate and all that kind of thing, but it's not telling you about your emotional state or kind of how competitive you're feeling on that particular day. There are whole loads. There's so many of the things that are important for doing well in endurance sport. Still can't be captured by anything like that. So we're missing a lot of information, I think, if we give too much up to those things.

Right. So I mean, based on your research and your own personal experience, do you have any advice for people who are listening to this and their endurance athletes? And maybe they feel sort of burnt out about how they've approached their endurance sport because they've gotten really into the quantification and they just get really obsessed with technique and programming. Anything they can do to inject a bit more joy and meaning or even spirituality into the running.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things I think it's interesting about the kind of evolutionary theories we've talked about is that what people tend to pick up on when they think about hunter-gatherer lifestyles and things is they pick up on the things that can be marketed. So things like chia seeds and barefoot running shoes or they get ahold of the paleo diet. And that's the thing that is going to transform things for them. And we tend to emphasize the things that are particularly kind of compatible with our own culture or compatible with capitalism or whatever.

One of the things i think we can learn from people like the raramuria from hunter gatherers is that insurance activities have basically been embedded in our everyday lives as part of just our normal way of doing things for a really long time so when we finish recording this i'm gonna put my running shoes on with my jeans and jog to school to pick my daughter up and then jog to nursery to get my son.

and then push a pram up a hill. And that's kind of most of the training I'll do today. It's only like a couple of miles, but it means that I'll get there in a way better mood than I would have done if I'd sat in traffic. And it's just, I think, building things into your everyday life in a way that sometimes make life a little bit harder, but also, I think, can reduce stress and make things more interesting as well. And I'm not sure about spiritual, but I do think there's something important about the ritual of some of these endurance events, particularly longer kind of ultra-marathons and things.

I think a lot of this sort of interest in data and really looking, drilling into times and all that kind of stuff is often with road running and track running and things. And once you get into the longer ultra distance races, that's where things start to get a little bit in some ways a little bit more interesting, where people start to talk about it as a form of ritual that really

There's a liminal period that people go through where they're really struggling and where their mindset is sort of transformed in some interesting way. And at the end of it, they come back with a completely new perspective on the rest of their lives. Lots of people talk about that, but it's kind of one guy, I suppose, to refer to it as doing a kind of factory reset on themselves, you know, that after they've done an event like that, it just kind of flicked a switch for their mental health and for their way of looking at the rest of their life that was really, really useful. So I guess

Yeah, trying something a bit more extreme where it's pushing you into places where you're a bit less comfortable, that kind of thing does seem to be a way of transforming the way that you look at the rest of your life sometimes. Well, Michael, it's been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? So I'm still on X at the moment at MPH Crawley and I'm Mike crawl on Instagram. If people are interested in the more academic work, best place to find that would be the Durham University website, just Google Durham University, Michael Crawley, I guess.

Fantastic. Well, Michael Crawley, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Enjoyed it. My guest is Michael Crawley. He's the author of the book to the limit. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at a whim.is slash endurance. We find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanlies.com, where we find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you've done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to get your viewing off the podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with your friend or family member. Do you think there's something out of it? As always, thank you for the continued support until next time's Brett McKay. Reminding time to listen to A1 Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

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