For nearly 2 million years, our ancestors survived and thrived and spread across the planet because they could run other mammals into heat exhaustion.

We say the rarajipari is the game of life, ' Angel said. 'You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can't control it. You can only adjust.

...there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you've got, being patient and forgiving and... undemanding...maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

We've created an unnatural form of running. It's not just the shoes, but we run on artificial surfaces - straight ahead, hard and steady - instead of speeding up and slowing down, reacting to the terrain with changes of pace and rhythm.

Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.

Humans are built for endurance, not speed. We're awful sprinters compared to every other animal. We try to run our races as if they were speed races, but they are not. They're endurance races. Even a marathon, the way it's run now, it's not an endurance contest.

We're constantly told that running will ruin our knees and outrage our hearts, but for nearly all of human existence, it was associated with freedom, vitality, and eternal youth.