As tiny as those seeds are, they‘re superpacked with omega-3S, omega-6S, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber, and antioxidants. If you had to pick just one desert-island food, you couldn‘t do much better than chia, at least if you were interested in building muscle, lowering cholesterol, and reducing your risk of heart disease.
Instead of hunting the Tarahumara, she‘d hit on the risky, inspired strategy of letting the Tarahumara hunt her. Who‘s more committed to winning, after all: predator or prey? The lion can lose and come back to hunt another day, but the antelope gets only one mistake. To defeat the Tarahumara, Ann knew she needed more than willpower: she needed fear.
They found that the thicker the landing mat, the harder the gymnasts stuck their landings. Instinctively, the gymnasts were searching for stability. (…) Runners do the same thing, Robbins and Waked found: just the way your arms automatically fly up when you slip on ice, your legs and feet instinctively come down hard when they sense something squishy underfoot. When you run in cushioned shoes, your feet are pushing through the soles in search of a hard, stable platform.
Barefoot advocates like Drs. Brand and Hartmann were still rare, while traditional podiatric thinking still saw human feet as Nature‘s Mistake, a work in progress that could always be improved by a little scalpel-sculpting and orthotic reshaping. That born-broken mentality found its perfect expression in The Runners‘ Repair Manual.
Maybe you‘ll beat the odds if you stretch like a swami? Nope. In a 1993 study of Dutch athletes published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, one group of runners was taught how to warm up and stretch while a second group received no „injury prevention“ coaching. Their injury rates? Identical.
When shoes are doing the work, tendons stiffen and muscles shrivel. Feet live for a fight and thrive under pressure; let them laze around, as Alan Webb discovered, and they‘ll collapse. Work them out, and they‘ll arc up like a rainbow.
Eric and I eased back to a walk, obeying the ultrarunner‘s creed: „If you can‘t see the top, walk.“ When you‘re running fifty miles, there‘s no dividend in bashing up the hills and then being winded on the way down; you only lose a few seconds if you walk, and then you can make them back up by flying downhill.
Ken got a stack of videos of Kenyan runners and ran through them frame by frame. After hours of viewing, he was struck by a revelation: the greatest marathoners in the world run like kindergartners. „Watch kids at a playground running around. Their feet land right under them, and they push back,“ Ken said.
It was eerie watching Scott run side by side with Arnulfo; even though Scott had never seen the Tarahumara before and Arnulfo had never seen the outside world, somehow these two men separated by two thousand years of culture had developed the same running style. They‘d approached their art from opposite ends of history, and met precisely in the middle.
Autor: Christopher McDougall