We run when we’re scared, we run when we’re ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.

Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.~Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100 mile race

Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow.” Ken Mierke says. “So they’re just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner...

Imagine your kid is running into the street and you have to sprint after her in bare feet,” Eric told me when I picked up my training with him after my time with Ken. “You’ll...

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before...

But you can’t muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy...

We’re all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known. But the American approach — ugh. Rotten at its core. It was too artificial and grabby, Vigil believed, too much about getting stuff and getting...

Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.

Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy – but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault.

The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According...

If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.

We wouldn’t be alive without love we wouldn’t have survived without running maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.

Ask nothing from your running, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined!

Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a...

Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck...

You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.

But yeah, Ann [Trason] insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn’t get it because they’d never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6...

After all, what else did we have going for us? Nothing, except we ran like crazy and stuck together. Humans are among the most comunal and cooperative of all primates; our sole defense in a...

Perhaps all our troubles – all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can’t overcome – began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other,...

You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running,...

But there’s a problem,” Dr. Bramble said. He tapped his forehad. “And it’s right up here.” Our greatest talent, he explained, also created the monster that could destroy us. “Unlike any other organism in history,...

The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other,… but to be with each other.

Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and...

If you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they...

…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...

He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn’t just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we’re meant to be.

Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then work on light. Make it efforthless, like you don’t give a shit how high...

If you don’t think you were born to run you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.

Vigil couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. The engineering was...

Strictly by accident, Scott stumbled upon the most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner’s arsenal: instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it. You refuse to let it go. You get know it so well, you’re...