Distance Running Was Revered Because It Was

Only Recently Have We Come Up With The Technology To Turn Lazing Around Into A Way Of Life. We've Taken Our Sinewy, Durable, Hunter-gatherer Bodies And Plunked Them Into An Artificial World Of Leisure.

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 Off A Naked Foot.

...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.

-the Reason We Race Isn't So Much To Beat Each Other But To Be With Each Other. -the Hopis Consider Running A Form Of Prayer; They Offer Every Step As A Sacrifice To A Loved One, And In Return Ask The Great Spirit To Match Their Strength With Some Of His Own.

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 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. And When Our Ancestors Finally Did Make Their First Cave Paintings, What Were The First Designs? A Downward Slash, Lightning Bolts Through The Bottom And Middle-behold, The Running Man.