Jonathan Drummey LMT, SEP

I first heard about ultra-marathoners about 10 years ago, and I thought those folks were crazy. Running 50 to 100 miles at a time? Nuts. I’ve since learned a bit more about long distance running and I’ve learned a lot in bodywork about the difference between efficient and inefficient postures and movements, and how to shift to more efficiency. This talk at Google (YouTube) by Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run, starts out with the question of how can a group of people in a 100-mile run be smiling at mile 60 just as they are about to start up a big hill?¹ McDougall goes on to explain his theories on this in the video.

The particularly interesting bit for me came at 24:15 in the video, when McDougall talks about a woman named Emily Baer who in 2007 ran the 100 mile Hardrock, the toughest endurance race in the world, and what she did while running the race. Here’s another bit on this same story, from the Telluride Watch, July 29, 2007:

For most of the first time Hardrock runners, just finishing is great but then there are those that are out for personal bests like Emily Baer, women’s second place finisher, eighth overall and Silverton local. Baer, who has finished the Hardrock five times, had her personal-best, improving her time by four-and-a-half hours and finishing in 31:41.34, all the while nursing baby Bernard at aid stations.

We have cultural norms and expectations around weakness, pain, and suffering, and we in the West are still transitioning out of centuries of considering women as second-class citizens. I love stories like Baer’s because they challenge those notions of what we are and are not capable of.

Thanks to @AnatomyTrains for the link.

1. In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus brought up the notion that Sisyphus, condemned for all eternity to repeat pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again, could still have a smile on his face and be happy. I think there’s a connection between the sort of process of acceptance and working with one’s situation that Sisyphus does that exists in the cultures of the Tarahumara and other long-distance runners that McDougall is describing.