Mon, Jan 04, 2010 page19

• FEATURE : Norwegian writer unveils history of favorite pastime

  RUNNING In one story, a Norwegian took a bet that he couldn’t run from Paris to Moscow in 15 days. He won after climbing from the chimney of a Russian jail

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  Even though running is the world’s most popular hobby, the running bookshelf is curiously empty.

  Of the few books on the subject in print, nearly all fall into one of two categories: either how-to tips or personal accounts of one man’s perseverance against pain.

  Both share one weird feature: As celebrations of running, they make running seem pretty awful.

  

  Olympic and world champion marathon world record holder Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie, left, and Kenyan Shadrak Lagat compete in the 20th International New Year’s run in Trier, Germany, on New Year’s Eve.

  PHOTO: EPA

  It comes across like performing home surgery — it’ll hurt, require expensive equipment and leave scars.

  The same tired fantasies are endlessly repeated — about the Greek messenger Pheidippides dying after 41.5km (he ran at least 482.5km, in fact, and there’s no account of his death), and our feet being so dainty that they require highly engineered trainers (there’s actually no scientific evidence — none — that running shoes do anything to prevent injury).

  Running fares just as poorly in film and fiction. It’s always the misery the protagonists have to endure to win the fight, win the girl, or escape ­diamond-­hoarding Nazi dentists who resemble Laurence Olivier.

  Thor Gotaas, a Norwegian writer who specializes in folklore and cultural history, comes from a different starting point.

  Recreational running, he points out, has been around since the dawn of recreation time.

  It’s not some modern punishment we invented to burn off excess pints and pizza; it’s our most ancient and universal form of play, and has been rhapsodized and dramatized for thousands of years.

  Gotaas combs the world for true running tales and comes up with some beauties.

  Who knew that naked running was the vogue in 18th-century England, with men and women racing separately and thousands of spectators lining the race course?

  Or that in ancient Egypt, Ramses II legitimized his hold on the throne by performing a long-distance run every few years, a ritual he performed until he was over 90?

  Gotaas’ span begins with prehistory, arguing that because of our sweat glands and springy leg tendons, humans are the greatest distance runners on earth.

  Our tremendous efficiency at venting heat and maximizing caloric energy allows us to run big game to death by chasing them across the savannah until they collapse from heat exhaustion.

  Access to meat allowed us to grow big brains, while tracking animals allowed us to use this cerebral hardware to develop abstract thinking, verbal communication and cooperation strategies, the mental skills we’d later use to come up with intravascular surgery and iPods.

  Gotaas’s research ranges as freely across the globe as it does through time.

  He pays as much attention to modern African champions as he does to European greats, carefully and colorfully describing the lives of overlooked luminaries such as Abebe Bikila, the barefoot Ethiopian who won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome, and Henry Rono (Kenya’s “Mr Comeback”).

  One of Gotaas’ best tales is about Mensen Ernst, a Norwegian sailor who, in the mid-1800s, came ashore to take a bet that he couldn’t run from Paris to Moscow in 15 days.

  Not only would Ernst have to average 185km a day, but he’d also have to stop along the way to scavenge food and shelter, periodically hauling a compass, maps and wooden quadrant out of his backpack to figure out where he was.

  He not only won the wager, but did it with swagger; imprisoned by suspicious villagers toward the end of his run, he escaped by climbing up a chimney, jumping off the roof and racing off toward the gates of the Kremlin, arriving a full day ahead of schedule.

  Because these passages are so strong, they make Running’s two weaknesses all the more glaring.

  Gotaas is trying to get his arms around a subject that could fill volumes, so he skips all too briefly over areas that really ­demand a deeper dive.

  Some sections of the book read like online abstracts of articles you can’t access without paying a subscription fee; you’re enticed, then frustrated.

  Take the account of King Shulgi of Sumeria.

  In 2088BC, Gotaas tells us, the king promised to attend religious feasts in two cities on the same day, even though it required a 321.5km round trip.

  Shulgi ran the entire distance between one sunset and the next, but he was accompanied every step of the way by servants carrying snacks and drinks.

  Were they also running?

  Was running such a way of life in Sumeria that a 321.5km jog wasn’t such an outlandish way for a head of state to commune with the common folk?

  Gotaas alludes, but doesn’t investigate. One of the great physiological mysteries of all time, for instance, is how the “marathon monks” of Mount Hiei in Japan manage to run 80.5km a day for up to seven years while somehow surviving on a diet of thin soup and veggies.

  You won’t find the answer in Running, and you’ll likewise be left hanging with this great tease from ancient Greece: “Magic and spells were part of the runners’ tactics and some of them were unbelievably cunning.”

  Ordinarily one wouldn’t snipe at this amazingly wide-ranging study because it’s not deeper.

  But Running’s second weakness could have remedied the first: What it lacks is a unifying theory of distance running, a thread that unites this singular human skill beyond the fact that it explodes into a boom every generation or so.

  Gotaas is great at gathering up the clues.

  All we’re waiting for is a detective to show us what they mean.
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