threerunning
Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman likes to call running “a controlled fall”—when you run, your body tilts forward at an angle so that your center of gravity is always located somewhere a little way out in front of you, at the height of your hips. If it wasn’t for the powerful contraction of your gluteus maximus muscles pulling your torso back upright with every step, you’d simply crash into the ground. The act of running is a complex tug of war between control and release, caution and exhilaration, movement and stillness (next time you go for a jog, pay attention to how your gaze stays level as the rest of your body pumps up and down like a jackhammer).
We run to escape danger, or the violent tempests of thought in our own minds. We run towards the objects of our deepest desire. Lieberman thinks our ancestors ran long distances in order to exhaust their easily overheated prey, their very bones and ligaments carefully shaped over eons of evolution for sheer bloody-minded endurance.
We run because we can. Because we dare. We run because when we do, the world shivers into a vibrating blur of speed and movement, and—if we do not fall—we fly.
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