In August of 2010, a dozen men in their 20s and 30s, clad in neon bibs and running shoes, chased the fastest animal in North America across the high plains of eastern New Mexico.
They were from Kenya, Ethiopia, South Korea, Canada, and the United States. They could all run a marathon in less than three hours; three of them could do so in less than two hours and fifteen minutes, a dozen behind the world record.
I was there, with a film crew. And we used the footage to make Fair Chase, a new movie about this modern day "persistence hunt." (It debuts on iTunes and Netflix this weekend.)
But why, you may ask, were they spending a perfectly good Saturday afternoon running after an animal only slightly slower than the cheetah? The answer requires a little history.
Humans have been eating meat for more than two million years, but we've only had advanced projectile weapons, like the bow and arrow, for the last 50,000. How, apart from scavenging, did we catch and kill animals to eat for all that time?
A theory has arisen in recent years--put forward most prominently by Daniel Lieberman, Ph.D., a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. First in a paper published in Nature, and then more prominently in Christopher McDougall's 2009 book, Born to Run, Lieberman proposed that humans became runners not for recreation, but as a means to survive.
(Check out the Men's Health Running Center, for everything from America's 11 best marathons to how to fix your running form.)
Consider the design of my body and yours: The gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is barely used when you walk, but it is an incredibly important running muscle.
We have twisty waists that enable us to run without moving our bodies from side to side. We have specialized middle ears that act as gyroscopes, keeping the head from pitching too much.
We have thermoregulatory systems with millions of sweat glands that enable us to cool. We can breathe through our mouths as we run.
Forcing a much-speedier animal without these useful adaptations to run or gallop for 10 or 15 kilometers on a very hot day, with no opportunity to recuperate, would lead the animal to overheat, collapse, and become dinner for the tribe.
This, at least, is the "persistence hunting" theory.
When McDougall's Born To Run book came out, I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where a number of elite distance runners train at high elevation.
One of them, whom I knew casually, thought it would be fun to put Lieberman's theory to the test. I thought so, too.
A year later, after a five-hour practice run nearly resulted in a few months worth of burgers and steaks, a film crew on a shoestring budget took on the task of capturing a modern persistence hunt on New Mexico's short grass prairie.
None of us quite knew how this would work; the logistical problems posed by chasing men chasing antelope were many, the precedents few.
But by the day of the hunt there were GoPro cameras attached to some of the runners, small cameras in the hands of mountain-bike-riding chasers, a big man on a four-wheeler, and a drone helicopter shooting from the bright blue sky.
I stood on the side of a dirt road with a radio, waiting for the breathless announcement: We've outrun the fastest animal in North America!
You'll have to watch the film to see what happened. But suffice to say the runners and the film crew had a day they won't soon forget.
So why should you run--or perhaps even organize your own persistence hunt? Simple: this is your history.
Your body, however in or out of shape it may be, comes from a long line of bodies that once did this to survive.
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"For most of human evolutionary history, running was as normal a part of people's lives as driving is today in America," says Lieberman. "In the modern world, we've ceased using our bodies the way they evolved to be used, in terms of physical activity. The typical American gets up and walks a few hundred feet a day, takes elevators, and drives to work."
(Lieberman exaggerates to make a point. An oft-reported 2010 study put the distance traveled by the average American at about 2.5 miles per day, far short of people in Australia, Switzerland, and Japan.)
The point is, we've lost touch with our bodies. But when you learn to run properly, "you use your body in a way that's just completely natural. All of a sudden it becomes effortless," Lieberman says.
You can go to Whole Foods or Trader Joe's to buy your dinner 364 days of the year. Why not try to run after it one day, with a group of your buddies?
Just make sure it's a really hot day. And, if possible, go after a pronghorn--or a slower animal--that looks like it's already tuckered out.
Brace yourself for setbacks; living like the ancients isn't supposed to be easy. And carry a rock or a knife to put the creature out of its misery, in case you actually chase it down.
If you're not up to that yet, don't live near any pronghorns, or can recognize a joke, find a reason to run whenever you can. Put down the car keys and jog to the grocery store. Remind your body what it was designed to do.
As Lieberman says, "Running is primal. We evolved to do it. To run is sort of to be alive in a way that you aren't when you do anything else."
Charles Bethea has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, GQ, and others. Fair Chase is his first film.
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