We were not born to run…but we can…only if we need to.

Your knowledge of running is poor.

Why? Please explain your hastily thought out judgement.

The documentary was a good watch. These guys seem to carry more fat in their waists than I would’ve expected for a hunter gatherer life of hard physical labor.

Agree “born to run” is just a catchy phrase. We seem well designed to acquire food, originally by hunting and gathering and then by culturing, all using increasingly sophisticated tools over the eons. Our opposable thumbs were far more critical than our bipedal speed or endurance.

Because you're posting the most ridiculously reductive argument questioning the existence of innate running ability in our species, on the biggest running website in the entire English speaking world and you think you are actually positing a profund hypothesis.

Have you ever watched kids playing? They run a lot. Millions of them are faster than you.

Kids running is play. They run when they feel that they have to / want to. The majority of the time they walk.
Just as animals in the wild, play for kids is a precursor to practice what we may need to do in order to survive, it’s practicing the skills. Just as animals wrestle and fight as play…they don’t fight every day, and neither would they want to. They practice fighting because they might have to.

Have you ever watched kids run? As soon as it gets tiring and stops being fun…they stop, rest, and then they may start again. No tempo running or long runs / long intervals for them. The running mimics pretty much what is seen in this video. A short, quick run ( not even what you would call a sprint) and some occasional jogging, when needed. Absolutely nothing like we would practice it in developed countries. The notion of a watch / timer and training for such occasions would be foreign to them.
Can you imagine the catastrophe of an injury occurred from doing too much running? It wouldn’t just be a few weeks bored, sat on the couch. The person might not be eating.

im afraid that you’ve let your love of the activity cloud your judgement which has guided you to your emotional response.

Think this cat would disagree about not being born to run,

Yep, born to run and his older bro Roger faster than he was......

Every so often you post a motte and bailey fallacy on these boards and completely fail to engage with the counter arguments, presumably because you have a strange, deep-rooted dislike of running for performance. Your 'motte': 'running for performance isn't natural- Homo Erectus didn't run for 26 miles at 3:00/km'. Well, obviously. Homo Erectus also didn't deadlift 500lb, ski, free climb El Capitan, or sit on his butt all day with a tub of Ben and Jerry's. So what's your point?

But your 'bailey' is that humans didn't adapt for running *at all*, a claim that has been thoroughly debunked in all of your previous threads on the exact same topic. Indeed, even in the book you cite (did you read it?) Lieberman makes it very clear that humans adapted for long range walking *and* running. Whereas you seem to think it's some sort of accident that humans are capable of running for long distances in heat better than any other animal on earth.

I’m afraid that you haven’t quite got the full context…

Ive never said that we didn’t evolve to run. But there are two romantic notions of how our ancestors used running.

On one hand you have folks like Art DeVaney and Mark Sisson who promote the idea that our ancestors walked a lot but were built (and ran) like muscular sprinters.

On the other hand you have the “born to run” types who seem to think that our ancestors ran similar to ultramarathoners on a regular basis.

The reality is pretty much far removed from both of these extremes.

As for not engaging after I’ve initially posted…why should I? I don’t live for letsrun and I don’t have the time to continually post in a thread that has dozens of pages.

Instead, I present concepts / possibilities / opinions / facts for others to assess and mull over…if they want to. I’m not asking anyone to agree with me ( on this topic I’m doubting that many will on this forum)…but the video does seem to demonstrate my point, that running was used infrequently, sporadically and not too intensely ( unless being chased for your life). Even Lieberman concedes this point in the book…if you have read it…

"Ive never said that we didn’t evolve to run"

Come off it, your thread titles are always some variation of 'we were not born to run'. If you wanted to accurately portray your posts, you would say "we are born to run, but not to the extent extolled by a number of random non-scientists like Mark Sisson or Chris McDougall."

"...but the video does seem to demonstrate my point, that running was used infrequently, sporadically and not too intensely ( unless being chased for your life)."

Do you think there's a lot of value in cherry-picking one video and asserting that based on one video of one tribe, we didn't adapt for endurance running? It's about as scientifically sound as me posting a video of a sleeping tribesman and saying that we obviously didn't evolve to be awake. Why didn't you pick the video of the Kalahari bushmen chasing a kudu for 8 hours which had lots of running in it? Why didn't you pick a video of the Hadza chasing down baboons on foot? Why didn't you mention all of Lieberman's biological indicators of human adaptation for (not as you suggest- random sporadic 30 second jogs) but specifically endurance running?

Also, your portrayal of kids running is misleading. From the age of about 3 onwards, when they are in the mood to run they keep going and going with zero encouragement (indeed, sometimes in spite of being told to stop). Any kids not doing this are perhaps suffering from inactive parents who keep them inside all the time.

You are making these threads because you are slow. You can not convince me otherwise. Hobbyjoggers passing you broke your brain.

😂😂😂

You clearly haven’t read all my threads.

I’ve yet to see a child at play run continuously, like a steady state run. It is in short spurts and certainly NOT to exhaustion in the majority of instances.

There is more than one video on the topic. There is one, for example, narrated by David Attenborough where only ONE hunter runs after the prey. Even then it is not strenuous. The rest barely break out of an occasional jog.

As I’ve said…a typical pace for a persistence hunt has been observed as being not much faster then 6 kph.

In “Exercised” Lieberman himself implies that the amount/ frequency / intensity / speed of running done by hunters has been overstated. In the book he implicitly states that the running done isn’t faster than nine minute miles. Is that cherry picking?

That's because it's the natural way to develop running skills. Why isn't that obvious to you?

Is it not obvious to you that we don’t run…unless we have to? Is the idea of conservation of energy a new concept to you?

No. You're posting nonsense. Kids love to run. I love to run and always have.

What percentage of letsrun posters do you think will feel the same way as you?

Why do you run if you don't enjoy it?

Sounds like we were born to jog.

Yeah, humans using endurance to hunt down pray to exhaustion was not fast running.

You are missing the point…and taking it out of context.

I’m not talking ABOUT the average letsrun forum member.

Have you read Lieberman’s book? Even he states that walking is our primary mode of movement. Unlike the born to run types who would have people believe that we ran everywhere, all the time.

I've watched the survival reality tv show "Alone" quite a lot. It always seems like the fishing, trapping, and foraging strategy never procures enough. The one who ultimately wins usually gets lucky and manages to take down a large animal with their bow and arrow. The last guy I saw who did this had to then trek several miles before finding the final resting spot. Hauling everything back to camp seemed like the most exhausting part.