The Logic of Long Distance

It is popular these days (and attractive to us runners) to believe that humans are born to run and that running is a natural practice that somehow lies prior to culture or is at least shared across cultures. Of course Chris MacDougall makes this case most vividly in the book Born to Run by connecting running with two things: the ancient "pre-civilized" culture of the Tarahumara and the remarkably fertile image of the bare foot. He gives us a picture of running as something at least in principle raw, pre-consumer, and innate. These qualities of running, especially as practiced by this primitive tribe, make it a possible practice of liberating ourselves from a decadent, insulated, sedentary Western consumer culture. The bare foot is a particularly potent sign for this liberation. It is a double image. A bare foot reminds us of two contrasting feelings at the same time: the stinging pain of stepping on a sharp gravel  and  the bliss of digging the toes into soft and dewy ...

To exercise an art one must begin by procuring for oneself the instruments for it; and, to be able to employ these instruments usefully one has to make them strong enough to resist wear. To learn to think, therefore, it is necessary to exercise our limbs, our senses, our organs, which are the instruments of our intelligence. And, to get the greatest possible advantage from these instruments, the body which provides them must be strong and healthy. Thus, far from man's true reason being formed independently of body, it is the body's good constitution which makes the mind's operation easy and sure. J.J. Rousseau These words were written two and a half centuries ago. They are taken from Rousseau's great treatise on education, Emile . Rousseau wrote the book as an attempt to imagine a free education; it was a thought experiment on what it would take in order to educate a human being to flourish in all of its capacities. Rousseau was thinking about these things because he...