

The Endurance Running Hypothesis - colins_pride
http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/the_running_man_revisited/

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10ren
Life of Mammals persistence hunt: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wI-9RJi0Qo>

~~~
alecco
Amazing. It's also notable how most natural hunters almost always pay respects
to their prey.

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wallflower
> but in order to accelerate, a deer goes anaerobic, while the man remains in
> an oxygenated jogging zone.

Anaerobic exercise is where you get close to red-lining your body's limits.

The Ironman is arguably one of the most difficult single-day athletic event an
individual can participate in. Training for the Ironman (2.4 mile swim, 112
mile bike ride, 26.2 mile run) requires at least one year of up to 20 to 40
hrs of concentrated training every week. The whole point of the training is to
build your body's endurance such that when you do the actual race you do not
go anaerobic. Even the people winning the race in 9hr times do not venture
into the anaerobic zone while racing. Once you go anaerobic (lactic acid),
your ability to complete the race (or even continue) goes seriously downhill.
Going anaerobic is also the reason why most people cannot swim more than 100m
without training (simply put - their technique is so bad that most of their
energy is expended and wasted into fighting the water - so it's like running
100m sprints).

Also, check out the Marathon Monks of Japan. 84km/day for 100 days.

<http://www.howtobefit.com/tendai-marathon-monks.htm>

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stewiecat
As a three-time ironman finisher (Wisconsin '04, Lake Placid '06/'08) this is
spot on. The key is long, slow, boring training, keeping your eyes glued to
your HRM to stay <zone 4. It's also why a lot of first time ironman racers
don't do as well as they trained for since they tend to get caught up in the
moment and go too hard, go anaerobic, and spend the rest of the race paying
for it.

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billroberts
A friend of mine who keeps a small flock of sheep as a hobby swears by the
run-them-down technique. He doesn't have a sheepdog and sheep can be difficult
to catch for a human. But he says that if he is prepared to chase one sheep
round the field for 45 minutes or so, then it will give up, even though he can
never catch it in a sprint.

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colins_pride
_he says that if he is prepared to chase one sheep round the field for 45
minutes or so_

Your friend must not be a programmer. If he were a programmer, methinks he
would just get a sheepdog, and save the 45 minutes.

~~~
radu_floricica
Of course, he would also maintain the dog for two hours a day...

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frossie
If endurance running has significantly affected human evolution, why are there
not more pronounced differences between men and women? Anthropological
evidence is unequivocal, I thought, about the fact that men hunted far and
women gathered nearby. So you would expect men to have evolved much higher
endurance running traits that women, if their primary hunting technique was
running animals down. Yet many of the modern ultra-distance runners are women,
and last I checked my toes were shorter than most men's :-)

Yet bipedalism has effectively made human reproduction a nightmare (due to the
orientation of the pelvis with respect to the birth canal). So if there is an
evolutionary reason for bipedalism I would expect it to apply at least equally
if not more to women. Naively, anyway.

~~~
tl
Men and women have a lot more similarities than the males and females of some
species, and we'd hardly be the first species where a genetic trait hurt one
gender but helped the other.

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radu_floricica
The first thing that comes into mind is old Roman military. Infantry and long
marches - on a regular basis they could out-march cavalry.

~~~
swillden
The same was true 100-150 years ago in the US. The US Army Infantry routinely
marched 35-40 miles per day, seven days per week for weeks on end. The cavalry
simply could not maintain that pace; it killed the horses.

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Aron
Keeping track of where your prey has gone suddenly becomes a matter of putting
pieces of evidence together to tell a story that is quite a bit more
complicated than simply seeing them directly and running them down. If we are
going to have physical adaptations, we should also expect cognitive ones.

~~~
eru
[http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/01/31/hacktrack...](http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/01/31/hacktrack/)

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enra
This is intresting, since some health or fitness advocates has been saying
that "no-one should run a marathon" (eg. Art De Vany:
<http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html>)

Still it isn't clear that marathon or any massive repentive excercise is
ultimately good for you, but if humans are built for running, it might change
my mind a bit towards running.

~~~
gaius
Top ten _excuses_. I'll tell you this for free, runners have longer, happier
lives than couch potatoes.

~~~
enra
There is quite a lot of space between being a couch potatoe and a marathon
runner, on both cases probably the extreme is bad for you. Professional
athlethes tend to have severe problems, injuries, joints operated once or
several times by the time they retire in their forties. It's a hazard of the
job, but should try to achieve the same hazards? I wouldn't.

People tend to think that primitive hunter-gatherers had so good health since
they were excercising or were on the run all the time, but it isn't
necessarily true. Hunter-gatherers actually had leisure times to sit by the
fire telling stories, creating art or tools. Some todays tribes actually have
lower or the same activity levels than us westeners(some studies:
[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/01/exercise-
and-b...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/01/exercise-and-
bodyfat.html))

~~~
gaius
Oh I agree, but most Marathon runners are doing 1 Marathon a year, if that.
For many people a Marathon is a once-in-a-lifetime thing that they do and move
onto the next challenge or goal. That list is ridiculous, you could make a
list of worst-case risks for any activity and not do it.

The top athletes in _any_ sport won the genetic lottery to be well-adapted for
that sport. Basketball players don't _train_ to get that tall... It's not
reasonable to compare their training and competition volumes with average
people. Even a full time professional Marathon runner only competes a few
times a year.

Incidentally, if you show up to a Marathon (or a half-Marathon or even a 10k)
and look around you, you'll see that 99% of the crowd look perfectly ordinary.
If you saw them (us!) in street clothes, you wouldn't think they were anything
unusual, certainly not super-athletes. A Marathon is not at all out of reach
for the average person.

~~~
Psyonic
Some run far more than a few times a year... for instance Dean Karnazes. He
once ran 50 marathons in 50 days as a promotion for North Face.
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.01/ultraman.html>

~~~
gaius
Karno has amazing endurance and recovery but he's not a competitive Marathon
runner - his best Marathon time is 3:00:30, compare that to Haile Gebrselassie
in 2:03:59. Geb competes once every couple of months on average.

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dkarl
Another good book is _Why We Run: A Natural History_ , by Bernd Heinrich, a
biologist who studied insect physiology, wrote many books about natural
history, and held several American ultrarunning records. The book is half
memoir and half natural history, and it's a quick and fascinating read.

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jws
And yet all this research and hypothesizing doesn't end with grabbing one of
these super marathon runners, taking him to the wide open plains of Utah, and
asking him to bring back a dead antelope.

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plinkplonk
"grabbing one of these super marathon runners, taking him to the wide open
plains of Utah, and asking him to bring back a dead antelope."

you might need a tracker for when the antelope goes over the horizon/out of
sight. Most ong distance runners would be clueless about tracking prey. Maybe
the tracker can drive/cycle alongside the runner in a hypothetical experiment.

~~~
jws
I suppose darting the antelope first and attaching a radio direction beacon
would be cheating.

~~~
plinkplonk
"darting the antelope first and attaching a radio direction beacon"

well, If you don't want to model how much the hunter recovers during periods
of relative rest ( slower-than-running-time-spent-in-tracking this would be
additional resting time for the prey as well I suppose) you could do it that
way.

Does anyone in HN know of what kind of mathematics would be needed to set up a
simulation like this?equations for rates of exhaustion/ speed loss over time
etc?

~~~
telegraph
You can easily model something like this with regular old ordinary
differential equations in Mathematica or MATLAB. The hard part would be
gathering the data to design realistic equations.

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rue
It seems that Mr. Hawks, the critic toward the end, is somewhat confused about
evolution, expecting traits to disappear once they become no longer useful.

His second assertion, from the finding that toe length does not affect
walking, strikes me as completely nonsensical even considering the above
confusion.

~~~
sho
I thought that was strange too. But even more strange is his job description:
"researches the acceleration of human evolution since the advent of
agriculture".

Acceleration? I was under the impression that once the food problem was
solved, evolution slowed dramatically. In fact I thought it had basically
stopped thousands of years ago, apart from obvious things like "impotence is
selected against", or "luxury evolution" like selecting against extreme
ugliness.

It makes no sense. Tools and farming remove selection pressure _per se_ , and
if that's gone we just stay as we are, not slowly "revert", or whatever he's
imagining.

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gregwebs
One of the basis of evidence for this about spear use is very misleading. We
have no idea how long humans have been using wooden spears since they don't
preserve. But since chimps do, it is possible we have been for millions of
years. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/02...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201007.html)

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Frimep
Amazing!

