There are still humans who do this to this day, the most notable being the tarahumara tribes of South America. They will literally run down the local deer barefoot for their food.
Humans are insanely adapted to be endurance runners compared with the rest of the animal kingdom which, if you think about it, kind of makes sense. It takes a LOT less energy for a cheetah to sprint down an antelope in 3 minutes than to chase it for 3 hours, so they adapted to be great sprinters. Likewise, the antelope only has to outrun the cheetah for 3 minutes so they, too, became great sprinters. For small mammals it makes more sense to be able to run very fast and hide from predators than to run long distances in potentially dangerous territory.
Since there was no evolutionary incentive for animals to run marathons they never developed the biology to do so, and we see this not just in mammals, but in reptiles, too. Horses are an exception to this though as they, too, are well adapted to distance running although iirc their adaptations are more in the way of making it mechanically easy (long, strong legs, huge hearts, etc.) to run long distances rather than the cooling systems humans developed.
Humans just kind of lucked out or perhaps ended up filling an evolutionary niche due to our need to cover long ranges with scarce food sources in our early evolutionary development.
And here I am, a couch potato that can barely jog for over 90 seconds before feeling like i’m going to die.
The humans running down animals for hours also feel like that after a bit fyi. They are just hungry enough to keep running.
I have some friends who are into serious long distance running and they are constantly in a state of suffering while running. It’s the feeling of stopping running that makes them keep wanting to go running, not the feeling of the actual running.
I’m a distance runner, and I don’t know if you’ve captured running all that well tbh. I certainly don’t go out for my Sunday long run looking forward to the finish. It’s pretty enjoyable when you’re training, but I concede that racing is difficult and can turn into prolonged suffering.
That’s purely endorphin addiction, in the 80’s I had (for a short time till he got re-homed) a boss that was a true asshole motherfucking sonofabitch if he didn’t get his 6 miles in before he headed to work.
And yes, that IS how I got him fired removed, an emergency meeting between my department (which had to include him, the department head) over a virus infection (mid 1980s mind you) got him to be said “asshole motherfucking sonofabitch” to the C** people in the meeting.
The fact that he had been “promoted” from head of QC to head of a 1980’s IT department and had once said in front of the entire department that he wanted to throw every PC in the company into the company pond had “nothing” to do with it. >
Yet if you were to start walking today, and kept walking every day, in 6 months you’ll be able to jog half a mile, or a kilometer. There are literally humans out there that have gone from 600+ lbs, or about 275 Kg, to running and completing their first marathon in just over 18 months. That’s dangerously fast by the way.
Your body wants to move and stretch that’s why stretching feels so good. Master Sin Thé taught his Shaolin classes that if you get a good workout going as a youth, and you keep making it harder so you keep growing, that will keep you young and in shape till you are around 80, and will slow the decline of age after it finally starts.
Our endurance isn’t just for running. We are also one of the longest lived species on the planet, and we are about to use medical tech to become the longest living animals, I doubt we will be beating trees, sponges, and jellyfish for age any time soon
Edited to add: it’s pronounced like Sin Tay
