Have you heard of the “long-distance runner theory”? Ever heard of exhaustion hunting? Throughout the evolutionary history of hominins, Wikipedia tells us, humans, taking advantage of their better ability to regulate their body temperature thanks to their lack of fur and their numerous sweat glands, “use endurance running during the great midday heat to bring their prey into a state of hyperthermia and exhaustion such that it can then be easily caught and killed.”
In his praise of running, first published in 1999 in the New York Timesthe great novelist Joyce Carol Oates probably had this tireless primitive hunter in mind when she spoke of her “distant ancestor in whom the physical being, charged with adrenaline by one emergency after another, was indistinguishable from the spiritual or intellectual being.”
The often-drawn parallel between jogging and novel writing had not escaped him. “When you run, the mind flies with the body, the mysterious blossoming of language seems to pulse in the brain to the rhythm of your feet and the swing of your arms.”
“Accumulating mile after mile is difficult, hallucinatory and hypnotic — just like lining up words on a page,” Nick Ripatrazone noted in The Atlantic.
The long-distance runner theory was developed to explain why humans are so well-adapted to endurance running. We still have a long way to go before we can understand the strange mentality of the madmen who run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, but with the benefit of hindsight of a few million years, we can now say that chasing exhaustion has been good training for humanity.
In modern times, it was still practiced by a few peoples living in relatively open and arid areas, such as the San of the Kalahari Desert and the Tarahumara of the Mexican Sierra Madre. And would we really be surprised if we discovered one day that the distant ancestors of Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes forced hartebeest, impala and greater kudu to race?
I haven’t yet started chasing deer that wander into my neighborhood, but let’s just say I get the idea. At the Paris Olympics in a few days, Jean-Simon Desgagnés will cover three kilometers in something like 8 minutes and 13 seconds. I cover the same distance in three times as long. And he has to jump over fences and wade through a pond while, under the soles of my New Balances, there is nothing but beautiful municipal asphalt. And that’s not all: Desgagnés, who combines training and crazy studies, will soon be a doctor, while I, on the doctor side, am hanging around on a waiting list. It would almost be enough to be jealous if you didn’t feel a certain satisfaction at the idea of being yourself.
With my slightly sluggish stride (“a little train goes a long way,” my mother used to say), I am nonetheless representative of a certain breed of Anthropocene runner for whom the thing we want to exhaust is in our heads. A healthy (and busy) mind in a healthy body, that’s my motto. I may not combine middle-distance running and show jumping like the steeplechase enthusiast, but I take advantage of my outings to exercise my neurons just as much as my thighs and calves.
Time can, indeed, become long when you have to manage the self-inflicted suffering of sustained exercise, and it can then happen that you ask yourself questions, including this one: what am I going to think about during the long climb up Rue Bouchette? I know that, in order to obey the fashionable precepts of “mindfulness,” you are supposed to drop organized thought somewhere along the way, but it doesn’t work for me. I am capable of listening to the sound of my breathing for five minutes, after which the horror of the void catches up with me. It must have something to do with my choice to run without the indispensable wristwatch capable of informing me in real time of the slightest biometric fluctuation of my vital data.
But when my brain is working at the same time, time passes by itself. That’s why I no longer go jogging through the streets of the neighborhood without a good mental supply of mnemonic formulas. Thank you, “chained words” from Duty Saturday! Blini-initiated-warm-edile-island-vancouver-lock-ruble-pale-drunk-kennel. Forest-return-bear-Sonora-Oran-rank-Angus-GustaveEiffel-Fellini-initial. (Just to reassure you: I am not paid per word for writing this text…)
Sports lists are another excellent resource for the jogger who doubles as a cerebral gymnast. Those who accuse me of lacking loyalty to the local club will take note of the fact that I can list, player by player, the four forward lines of the 1976 Canadiens.
The 1955-56 team was pretty good too, with Geoffrion-Béliveau-Olmstead, followed by the two Richards and Dickie Moore, to give one of the most terrifying first halves of a lineup ever seen. Kind of like the Oilers of the 1980s: you put your big defensive trio against Gretzky and Kurri and, in the next round, guys named Mark Messier and Glen Anderson jumped on the ice…
So here I am, running around trying to remember who completed the trio of Brett Hull and Pavel Datsyuk on the 2002 Red Wings. Luc Robitaille? Probably a Russian with a name like Itof Meichev.
Not serious, you think? You’re probably right: I should think more about Haiti, Ukraine, Gaza, China’s bullying off Taiwan, and the next climate catastrophe. I can always run.
Novelist, independent writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.