Not what I'd hoped for

Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human

by  Vybarr Cregan-Reid

Seldom have I anticipated a book so much nor been so glad when it was over.

Chapter 1, Footnotes to a Body of Knowledge, was exactly what I was hoping for:
an overview of the many adaptations in our species that fit us for running.  If you've read Born to Run, most of it won't be new, but still very interesting to re-visit. To sum up,

...as a Homo sapiens, you have evolved to be one of the best running animals that the planet has ever witnessed. Running is not what we might do; it is who we are as a species.

I thought the book was going to go on in that pattern, maybe talking about the pre-historical evidence for running, running games in native societies, the 'persistence hunt' legends, competitive running in the Greeks and Romans and maybe even the Oriental societies.... Be forewarned: it doesn't.

The rest of the book relates all of the cool deep thoughts he has during his own running and how they connect to the poetry and prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If you're a Brit-ophile, or an English major, or really into Thomas Hardy and Leslie Stephens and William Hazlett; and if you even know who those people are, you'll eat this up. But I failed to see what any of them had to say about running. In fact, I frequently failed to see what they had to say, period.

If the soil weren't so wet it would look seared...
It folds and rolls away toward a leaden sky...
The cut wheat like greying stubble
slowly dying on the sagging jaw of a corpse.
 

 And--even more embarrassing--I didn't even get his modern allusions--

...feeling like Daniel Craig sprinting up crane arms pursuing the bombmaker, Mollaka, in Casino Royale.

Sorry; meant nothing to me. A few near-misses are to be expected; too many, and a book means less than empty words.

The running descriptions are great. The historical bits, like his description of the trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde or of the origin of the workhouse treadmill, are fun (and sad). I didn't see any significance in knowing that treadmill went from a punishment for criminals into a necessity for fitness addicts, but it's interesting to know that it did.

One of his themes is that running outdoors, away from advertisements and TV screens and recorded music, frees the mind from stress:

Not-thinking, huddling down into the body's experience, is a kind of mental repose, a Pilates for the brain.

He may be right--but only for 21st century humans who are uneducated about the green world. For people whose only thoughts are, "Ah, green leaves!" or "Distant clouds; so pretty." or "Silent airplane tracks on the sky!" 

I'm not one of those people--my outdoor brain is constantly interrupted by nitpicky thoughts--is that a hawk's screech or a bluejay? What is this grass--wheat or something native? Should I grab a specimen? Oh, no, is that a skunk and is it turning its back to me?!!  Primitive man, whose very life depended on constant observation, would have had it worse. I wish Mr. Cregan-Reid had asked a hunter-gatherer what he thinks about when running a trail.

I also think the editor needed to do a math check. While discussing treadmill running, he writes,

As a species we have been running indoors for only 30 of the many millions of years of our history (that's about 0.000015 per cent of our time on earth).

Huh?  Last I heard the Homo sapiens species had been around for about 300,000 years. 30 years is .000015% of 300,000,000, which is indeed 'many millions' -- but humans haven't been here that long.  Maybe he's thinking mammals, like mice. Mice run indoors--at least in my brother's house.

I'm sorry to be so down on the book. It's a beautiful book and he's a lovely author and he describes many fascinating runs. Read it. It's a book of poetry, deep thought, insight, and great heart. I think you could have replaced the word 'running' with 'walking' on 75% of the pages without any loss of meaning, but I could be wrong. Start with an open mind and see for yourself.

I need running because I want to stay curious. Our curiosity needs to be continually teased out of its shell and into the world. Because it feels like once that goes, everything else follows. Nothing unites us with the world so completely as our curiosity for it.