Augustments

What happens when you have to make adjustments to your August running schedule? You have a month of Augustments.

July to August has been a month of ups and downs for my running. Around mid-July I had managed to get both of my hamstrings healed and had started to ease back into structured training. It was a humbling process, as I had to start at paces that were slower than when I began training for London 2019. I was grateful to be training again, though I felt sluggish and tired from trying to play catch-up with my training for Valencia. It was just as I was trying to get back into full swing with my training, that I caught a horrible chest infection in the final week of July.

Born to run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen (Christopher McDougall).

Fleet of foot fantasy about the joys and marvels of running.

If you are completely new to the sport of running by way of signing up to your first marathon or parkrun there is no better way to feed your running bug than by reading this book. McDougall is an excellent story-teller, taking the reader along a wonderful ride through the predominant lens of ultra-running. The story that McDougall weaves is at once fascinating and exciting, as he explores the reasons why we run and what enables us to achieve such feats of endurance.

The story revolves around the now famous Tarahumara (a remote Mexican tribe), some eccentric characters such as Caballo Blanco and famous ultra-runners of the likes of Scott Jurek to name a few; and the race that takes place between Jurek and one of the Tarahumara. I won’t digress into the narrative, as that would ruin the book, however McDougall uses this so-called epic race to put forward a number of significant statements about the state of modern running.

Ultimately McDougall presents running in a sort romantic tradition, i.e. before the technological and commercial aspects were introduced to running, there was a pure or natural way of running that meant people could run for as far as their bodies would allow them to. The strongest part of this arguments comes from McDougall citing the Harvard academic Daniel Lieberman, who argued that humans were designed to run long distances to gradually wear down prey (e.g. deer); who could sprint in short bursts away from humans, but did not have their capacity for endurance. If this was as far as McDougall was willing to go by linking this research with the Tarahumara race, as well as the tribe itself, then that would not be so controversial.