Hey, this is Chad. Before we start the episode, which will happen in a few seconds, I just want to give a quick peek behind the Radiolab curtain. So, Radiolab is a team of about 20 people, and that includes, you know, reporters, producers, fact-checkers, Robert, me. Some of the stuff that we do on this podcast is a lighter lift.
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Radio Lab. From WNYC. Hey, I'm Chad Abumarab. This is Radiolab.
And today we've got a story from our producer, Matt Kielty. Okay. And reporter, Heather Ratke. All right.
What? I have no idea where we should start. I was like, it's like the dawn of human civilization. Uh, maybe.
Okay. So the story comes to us from Heather, who is a fantastic writer, who brought us a story that if I were to boil it down, it's about a horse, a lone man running through the desert, and what it fundamentally means to be a human being. And weirdly, butts. I didn't see this coming from.
It's about butts. Just butts. Your butt. It's about your butt.
You've got to say it a few times. Butts. Okay. So let's back up.
I am writing a book about the cultural history of the female butt. Oh, interesting. I know. I thought I'd save that one for on tape.
It started as an essay that I was just working on because I have a big butt and I grew up in, you know, the suburbs of mid-Michigan, it was pretty white, and in high school, in the 90s, it was very much, like, not good to have a big butt. Like, I got made fun of, et cetera, et cetera. But then sometime in the mid-aughts, all of a sudden, this body that had sort of been bringing me all to shame became attractive in sort of a mainstream way. And as Heather started picking that apart and looking at these things about race, appropriation, beauty, this essay about the butt ended up becoming a book about the butt.
About, you know, what does the butt mean? Like, what does it symbolize and why does it symbolize that? But before she really dive into all those things, she realized she had, like, just a more fundamental question. Why do we even have a butt at all?
Okay. So, um, I started to research, just, like, search around for people who have tried to answer it before, but because of what a butt is, just even, like, anatomically, it's not a simple question. Because it's at the point that you have, you know, the butt. The aesthetic object.
Like, the whole entire butt. And there's two parts to the butt. There's the butt that's the muscle, and then there's the butt that's the fat. So, I talked to the fat butt people, and there's a lot of them.
And although there's a lot of different theories about why we have fat butts, there's no real consensus. No one knows why we have the fat. Do we have the fat because we sit a lot? But then why do men have so much less than women is kind of the question.
So then Heather started looking at the butt muscle. You're sort of a preeminent butt muscle scientist, as far as I can tell. That's an interesting distinction, but it's possibly true. And we call them up, not too long ago.
Hello, everybody. Because what was this thing you learned from them? The butt may be made as human. Oh, gosh.
So, I mean, I've been interested in the evolution of the human body and the evolution of human physical activity for a very long time now. It's just because, like, you look at a human body, and you're like, why? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm interested in how and why our bodies are the way they are, and the way in which we evolved.
Okay. So, to get to the butt stuff with Lieberman, we have to go back. So, many years ago, I was, I guess I must have been a postdoc or a grad student doing research on, actually, it was about pigs. The story starts with a pig on a treadmill.
You were doing this just out of curiosity? I don't think anybody just puts a pig on a treadmill out of curiosity, but it was an experiment to look at how different parts of the skeleton respond to the effects of the loads caused by exercise. Daniel said every day he would come into the lab where he had these pigs. Mini pigs.
Oh, mini pigs on a treadmill? Yeah. Cute. He put one on a treadmill.
Mini pigs are just the right size, let me tell you. And to keep the pig on the treadmill. He put a box. And put a box and turn the treadmill on, and, you know, the pig doesn't like having its butt hit the back.
And also, the animals like it if you put a mirror in front of them. So, um, so if there's a mirror in front of them, it thinks there's another pig there, and they're kind of much more happy running. Forever chasing towards their other pig. Yeah.
That's sad. It works. So, this was famous life. Mini pigs.
Treadmills. Sounds like an exciting thing, but believe me, eventually it gets kind of dull. But then one day, it got exciting. A fellow named Dennis Bramble, who's a professor at the University of Utah, now retired.
That's Bramble. He was on sabbatical at Harvard. Yeah, I was there for the whole year. To do his own research.
Coincidentally, right next door to Lieberman. And I heard the sound. And I said, what the hell's that sound? Is somebody doing something there?
And they said, yeah, and this guy Dan Lieberman is running pigs over there. I said, I've got to see this. Eventually, he goes next door to Lieberman's lab. Lieberman's in there.
With yet another pig on a treadmill. Popped his head in. Look at the pig. And cocked his head to the side and said to me, you know, Dan, that pig can't hold its head still when it's running.
It's funny. I, you know, spent hours watching pigs run on treadmills, but I never really thought about it. But, oh, there it goes. We looked up pigs running on YouTube.
Oh, wow. Oh, go, go, go, go. So is his head still or not? Their heads do kind of flop.
So it's a floppy head. Right. Pigs on treadmills, their heads flop in this kind of ungainly manner. And I can't read which way.
So anyways, two of them are staring at this mini pig on a treadmill. It's head bobbing up and down. And Bramble said, you know, Dan, I bet that pig's head is flopping all around because it doesn't have this thing called the nuchal ligament. Nuchal ligament?
Yeah, the nuchal ligament. N-U-C-H-A-L. And I explained to him that, you know, it provides support for the head and neck. Okay, so the nuchal ligament, it's like a rubber band that attaches to the back of the animal's skull and then runs down its spine and keeps the head straight as it runs.
Right. And then I went on to point out that old mammals that are specialized and have evolved as runners everything from cheetahs to leopards to antelopes, grazing animals like horses, down to the teeniest, tiniest runners, jackrabbits, among other things, dogs, too. They've all got a nuchal ligament. All these animals that evolved to run got this ligament to keep their head from flopping around.
And the animals that suck at running, they don't have one. Right. Pigs don't. Apes don't.
Chimps. Gorillas. They have no nuchal ligament. Nothing.
They don't really need one because running's not a big part of who they are. But then the weird thing is that humans, well, humans have one. Humans have one of these, too. So then I explained to him just very briefly that at this point, Dennis said, Dan, a while back, I had this grad student who wrote this paper about humans and running.
Trying to figure out how breathing fits into locomotion. Running and breathing. The paper basically argued that because of how we breathe and other things, that running was actually a key part of human evolution. That it was a really essential part to us becoming human.
Yes. That was exciting. Because it turns out Dan had read that paper, thought it was really interesting. But I remember having a discussion about it with a professor who basically told me to ignore the paper.
It was a silly idea that humans really suck at running. They were terrible. They were slow. They were inefficient.
They were awkward. And the things that really made us us. It was all about walking and tools and brains. Not running.
There's no real evidence for it. Well, anyway, going back to the pig story. To them in the lab with a pig talking about nukle ligaments. And Dan was the one who was like, oh, wait.
One of the very cool things about this ligament is that it leaves a trace on the skull. A sharp ridge in the back of the skull. And so Dan thought, okay, well, maybe we could go to the fossil record and see when this ligament shows up. See if other things show up with it.
Almost in the same way that when we started walking, our phones started changing dramatically. Like, maybe he could sort of see the same thing with running. Or maybe this ligament is actually just the equivalent of wisdom teeth. It doesn't really matter.
Fortunately, we're surrounded by a wonderful museum right there, Harvard. Full of fossil casts of our ancestors. And also lots of butts. There are butts.
We're not going to talk about butts yet. But we'll come back. We're coming back to butts. For now, nukle ligaments go searching looking at skulls of our ancient ancestors.
And they first look at a skull from a 7 million year old human ancestor. No nukle ligament. Nothing. And then they keep looking at fossils that are like 6 million, 5 million.
Nothing, nothing. But then. Sure enough, there it is. A little sharp ridge.
They find a ridge in a skull. From about 2 million years ago. There's a nukle ligament. The skull of our ancestor, Homo erectus.
It doesn't have a snout. It has smaller teeth. It's the first species that's really very much like you and me from the neck down. And this is sort of like a eureka moment.
Like Dan says, a eureka moment. Because from the neck up, essentially what we're talking about is the brain. The thing that really sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. And when Homo erectus first appears, you know, their brains are about half the size of the brains that we have today.
What Dan and Dennis realized, like looking at the fossil record, doing all sorts of laboratory research, is that from the neck down, 2 million years ago, we got all these adaptations that we still have. Adaptations that seem to be explicitly designed for running. So for example, take the foot. Almost all animals that run have short toes.
If you have long toes and you're running, your toes break. And sometime around 2 million years ago, our toes got shorter. Or also, like 4 million years ago, our feet were flat. You can have a flat foot and walk very well.
But once you have a flat foot, it's very hard to run. 2 million years ago, our feet start to arch. That arch is a spring. And in fact, there are plenty of other springs.
Like the Achilles tendon. Which is like a centimeter long in a chicken's ear or gorilla. With Homo erectus, it becomes really long. A huge spring in your leg.
Also, our hips become twisty, tall, narrow. That helps us stay stable. Arms that are really useful for climbing. Shorter.
Legs. Longer. The inner ear. Semi-circular canals.
Larger. More sensitive to pitching forces. So you can balance better. Our joints and our knees and our hips get bigger, which are supposed to bear the load of running.
And maybe the most important appetizer. The butt. Butts. So butts are not only beautiful, and they're helping me sit on this chair right now, but the butt is, of course, the gluteus maximus, it's a technical term, is the largest muscle in the human body.
And when we've done electromyographic studies, so yes, I have been paid to put EMGs on the rear ends of people. And we do it very discreetly and very carefully and modestly. But nonetheless, when we do that, what we find is that the gluteus maximus fires twice in every stride. Once, and most importantly, to prevent the trunk from pitching forward.
So every time you hit the ground when you're running, your upper body wants to fall forward. Huh. When I'm running, I'm in an perpetual state of near falling. That's correct.
Running is a controlled fall, very different from walking. And so your gluteus maximus fires just before your body's about, your trunk is about to pitch forward and make it hit your nose on the ground. And it helps pull your trunk backward. And the other time the gluteus maximus fires is when your leg is swinging forward when you're in the air, and it helps decelerate the leg so that you bring your leg down onto the ground.
So the gluteus maximus plays a very important role when you're running, and it turns out to barely be active when you're walking. And you don't need the fancy equipment in my lab to figure this out. You can just do this yourself at home. Just walk around the room and hold your butt, and you know, clench your kind of butt.
And when you're walking, your butt will just stay kind of normal, right? It'll stay kind of, you know, won't really clench up very much. But when you run, you'll feel it clench up with every step. And it turns out that very nicely, we can see when the gluteus maximus got big in human evolution, because its upper portion, the portion that's really important for this function, leaves a trace on the pelvis, on the bone.
And we can see that, you know, chimpanzees and early hominids had a small, chimp-like gluteus maximus. Tiny buns. Tiny buns. Wimpy buns.
Took them out of the oven too soon to keep them in the oven. There you go. But as soon as Homo erectus comes along, you can see that it really got big. So they must have big butts like us.
Yeah, big buns. But then it's like, well, why? Why did this happen? Yeah, like, now bloods, nubal ligament, everything.
Inner ear. Yeah, all this stuff. It's just like the whole human body changes all of a sudden. Why?
Like, why did we start running? Well, it was climate change. So the ice age began starting, you know, starting about 2.8 million years ago, there was climate started changing substantially. And Africa started to dry out.
And Dan says, what happened is forests and jungles turned into grassland habitats, more open habitats. Which quickly filled up with large grass-eating mammals. Herbiforce. Like kudu and antelope.
And other large mammals. Sabertooth tiger or something like that. That eat those mammals. But unlike other carnivores.
Your lions, tigers, cheetahs. We don't have any natural weapons. We don't have claws and fangs. And the kinds of technologies that we think about for hunting were not invented until very recently.
So the bow and arrow was actually invented less than 100,000 years ago. And in fact, just pointing a sharpened stone point on a stick, right? So a spearhead. Yeah.
That was actually invented less than 500,000 years ago. Really? We had nothing? We had pointed wooden sticks, which probably weren't that sharp.
We had many clubs. You know, we could throw rocks. Great. And we don't have lots of fur to protect ourselves.
We sound like the worst equipment animal to deal with this climate change. But natural selection often comes up with really interesting solutions. Dan says, imagine you're back 2 million years ago. Where are we?
Well, we might be in a woodland or we might be a savannah. You know, there's a variety of habitats. We'll stick with a savannah. You're out there with your family, friends, clan.
We don't really know the group sizes, but probably, you know, 15 to 20 maybe is not an unreasonable guess. But who knows? You and your group are walking through the tall grasses of a savannah. You're hungry.
And off in the distance. You see some wildebeest and you run after them. But the wildebeest run away faster than you can possibly run. And the wildebeest will run far away, right?
And they'll hide. But that's okay. You're just going to keep chasing them, tracking them, looking for any signs of their trail. And you're not chasing them at a sprint.
You're kind of running along in a nice, relaxed, endurance space. Like 10 minute miles. And you do this for mile after mile after mile. But the trick is you find that animal before it's cooled down.
Because of course, the animal would run away. When it runs away, it's hot. Like when you're running, it generates a lot of heat. And these animals aren't very good at dumping heat.
And why can't it dump heat? Because they can't sweat. Unlike us. Most animals are unable to sweat.
So the way they lose heat is by panting. The thing about poorly animals, though, is every stride they take when they're running. The guts slam into the diaphragm like a piston. And so when an animal starts galloping, they have to train each brain.
with each stride and that prevents it from doing a short little shallow breath you know that animals do when they pant huh and so what you do is you try to keep this willy beast sprinting so you stay slow and steady keep moving just slowly chasing this thing and slowly over time you're making it hotter and hotter and hotter so at a certain point after tons of miles could be 20 30 you push this animal to the point of exhaustion at that point the animal is basically collapsing right it's it's um its defenses are gone and they just find a rock and dispatch the animal out with a rock and when you say dispatch you mean like if we beat its brains in that might be what they might do yeah huh this is so horrifying i know it's a terrible way to die right yeah but once we were able to do this we could be we were able to become hunters um um and and of course hunting gives us access to incredible number of calories and energy is well life is all about energy you know basically you know the equation of life is you know and energy's in and baby's out right so more you know that's basically life right a kudu is a lot of calories which is a lot of babies so if you can run down an animal like a kudu um you have access to an astonishing um energy supply you also have access to important nutrients it's not just meat it's also uh liver and brain and marrow these are very rich important and rare resources that enabled our ancestors to overcome uh the constraints of uh that so many animals face and i think it's one of the reasons um that uh it's after the evolution of hunting begins that we really see big increases in brain size in evolution so brains basically doubled uh after we started hunting and and of course to hunt you can't really hunt without uh running and so so running helped us become hunters and hunting and gathering helped us become the smart uh intelligent uh cooperative creatures that we are today yeah but i gotta say like the idea of of humans running down animals over these like huge distances like it just it just seems well it kind of boggles the mind right like it seems impossible like i think i had heard this theory before i think you had probably heard this theory before at least in some part of my life some runner friend probably some point i'm like you know we're like i actually remember you remember those toe things came out and i remember there's a there's a time when people would always be talking about how we were made to run and we were evolved to run and there are groups of people who have historically hunted this way but even so there's something about thinking about modern humans like people like me who like sit on the couch and watch netflix and eat ice cream i just was like i'm not me it's just so i think there's a part of this that it's like so elegant but it's also really counterintuitive it just does not seem possible so i've been you know preparing for this conversation with lieberman and i had heard this theory and i had said to a few different people you know um oh yeah this guy thinks that you can outrun a horse or something and everyone's like no it's not possible and he was like well it's kind of like you saying you can see this whole theory play out in the desert of arizona right and you and i thought about this and we were like okay we're going when we come back it is off to the races radio lab will continue in a moment this is lauren fury from western springs illinois radio lab is supported in part by the alfred p sloan foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world more information about sloan at www.sloan.org anxiety depression bipolar disorder at least half of us will experience a mental illness in our lifetime in a new podcast from call to mind we hear about the mental health impact of stress climate change immigration and more i'm angela davis joining for conversations with people managing hardship and experts seeking solutions from american public media comes call to mind listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast app jack radio lab back to reporters matt guilty and heather radke and a race which this is one of my favorite parts of this whole story so in 1983 a city councilman in prescott comes to this bar in whiskey row like super old west america and he gets there he sits down he has a beer and down at the end of the bar there's a couple of cowboys the city councilman's just run a marathon and at some point the city council guys says i just ran this crazy race and one of the cowboys says my horse could run that far easily you're not that fast my horse could do that in an afternoon wouldn't even break a sweat and then the city councilman's like you know i'm not sure you can actually in fact i bet i can outrun your horse and for 30 plus years they have been sort of seeing who's right i put in new batteries last night yeah i'm so confused so a while back you and i flew to phoenix we rent a car and drove up to prescott we went to prescott don't say prescott no it's kind of just like high desert country cactuses and scrub and red rocks big blue sky it's like super cinematic it's like this is the west ah man horse sign arrow to the right i'm there to see this race nicely homemade too it's just a piece of wood it's this man horse in red paint born out of this bed and the race it's a 50 mile race through the desert up this mountain man against horse winner take all all right okay um so i mean we're essentially like standing in like an open desert plain everything's super flat a little bit of a valley kind of right out ahead of you is this big mountain that is the mountain that they're gonna climb during the race shin high drive scrub grass we got there for day one and we go to the check-in table and we met up with ron barrett by the way i'm mad i don't think ron barrett ron barrett basically orchestrates this whole thing paul guy bald got a white goatee you meet him and you're like now that's a good guy oh look at that oh a bunch of clippings he was cropping up this big poster board just a board that we you know over the years we've uh taken pictures of back in 83 85 the early years there's a lot of old newspaper photos of horses so that's the mojo man scott mojoleski runners a shirtless runner he's uh mojo mo and he was the first guy to be with no shirt on runners world magazine allegedly but when we were talking ron uh he won it back in 94. it turns out daniel's theory is kind of not quite holding up out here he won the human he won the yeah the headline of these horses again proved to be faster he won the run at that time some humans can beat some horses did he ever did he ever end up beating a horse no he never did but no human ever in this race has outrun the fastest horse this guy here he's been the one to come the closest so in the 36 years this race has been going a horse has won every time and to be honest it sort of makes sense once you see the horses what is that why do they do that and you got horses just kind of hang down these tiny makeshift enclosures and it's not just like honing down at the fair or something they're big they're muscular i can never stand that close behind a horse like evolution has made this animal to be like the best running beast on the planet so we talked to some of the riders the horses don't run by themselves i'm bruce i'm heather how are you and these people know what they're doing they've been running endurance races with these horses for a really long time i'm mad by the way i'm mad so one of the guys we ended up talking to for a while was this guy troy real dressed cowboy hat on and troy looked determined i think of this ride i don't even worry about who else shows up here to race on the horse race i just want to be the runner troy's actually been competing in this race the man in the first race the last 13 years and he's beat a lot of humans and so when i see these guys running i'm like going you guys are good you know but i'm gonna beat you don't worry you know yeah yeah i still it's like if i was playing basketball with 12 years i still want it i still want it right you know do they like congregate some other spot or they're over there troy pointed a couple hundred yards over the other side of this dried out riverbed the wash little wash right there those will be all those okay they're little skinny people all right so here's what we got for the reenactment of the origins of running and humanity on one side of this wash standing in for the ancient antelope serengeti masses of muscle bred and trained to run and then on the other side subarus a small group of maybe eight people wearing microfiber whatever they just like have like high-tech clothes on and they're nibbling on like little vegan treats are you guys you guys the runners we're uh we're with the public radio station at the nyc yeah i know all these subarus out here i figured a bunch of public radio hairs i was a little scared coming over so for some of them this is their first time racing a horse how are you feeling about that excited for a couple of others they've actually tried before of course i think i'm about 10 years old so i'll do it probably take a lot longer usually don't ask them why are you swimming why would you run 50 miles through the desert competing against a horse their answers i feel like we're kind of comrades out there just us against the course we're not exactly encouraging for the human side all you're worried about is doing it and then it's time to find another race it's us against the course it's us against ourselves we're all friends here i mean at this point it's pretty much seems like the horses have got it yeah like a blowout yeah they don't have a shot but then we heard about this one guy nick nick nick now this kid says he's coming nick cory we actually also heard him from ron he says he wants to come tomorrow and beat the course wrecker i got you know so i'm kind of interested to know how fast he's gonna run right turns out troy had got wind of him but i don't really know maybe he even sounded a little nervous but there was no sign of him yet at this point it's almost it's like sunset we need to eat lasagna and so we head out to our hotel yeah yeah thinking like we're doomed it just doesn't seem like there's any chance um only other than maybe this guy nick day two wake up super early oh the sun's coming up whoops i the race starts at 6 30 in the morning the horse people are all getting the horses ready they're settling up their horses putting on these fancy horseshoes they're feeding the horses and back across the divide the runners are sort of like you're ready to go but we are immediately looking for nick like where is he one of the runners was like nick's over there yeah he's the one to talk to and pointed at this little hatchback and so i went over there with my microphone and my little headphones and he sort of like popped open the hatchback hi morning what's your name nick curry nick we've been hearing about you so i hear he's a young guy early 30s little bit bleary-eyed you just get up uh kind i slept out here last night so this is this is my place to get ready he slept in the back of his honda fit in a sleeping bag easy to just wake up and be here and not worry about driving and right away we were like so are you are you going for a course record uh i'd say it's a possibility like i don't like to get ahead of myself um i know so he sort of hedged a little bit um but we didn't actually have that much time to talk to him because the race was about to start yeah thanks so about 10 minutes later 50 milers runners check in over here ron starts calling people together horses are driving hey everybody respect everybody everybody take your time going through this wash i don't want no accidents on the other side of that hill i'd ask ron if i could run with everybody beginning like sure you guys all have a good day it's probably about 20 runners standing there but a dozen horses behind us and then right about 6 30 ron shouts start right now here we go go all the runners get down into this wash first come up into this barren desert and pretty quick come horses yeah it's kind of crazy nick was up ahead of me the horses take off in a cloud of dust and you kind of cop it up a bit and then settle in meanwhile troy as soon as ron says go i'm thinking tall ass troy is like galloping out there he's like 100 yards ahead of anybody as quickly as we could you can see dust coming up behind this horse how was your horse feeling out of date oh it's good hi oh god no no i'm going like a quarter mile coming back good luck y'all it was kind of crazy running out there with them and how like everything was going exactly like dan's scenario on the serengetti with the amloper in this case the horse like taking off the human eating dust for the moment but like nick when we talked about this he said as he watches the horses speed off into the distance the first thing i think is i will see you later just like don't worry about the horses calling us focus on the race slow and steady am i running the right pace am i eating at the right time so let him do what your body just find a rhythm whatever i need to do to keep going steady meanwhile troy is hauling ass through the desert somewhere between 14 miles per hour and 18 miles per hour now we should point out uh there are a couple things about this race that are not like the ancient hunt for one over these these 50 miles the horses have to stop three different times at these things called vet checks so it's a requirement of any kind of official endurance right when the horse gets to a certain point the horses stop and a vet checks them they just want to make sure the horse is okay before they let it keep going with the race which is good because what that means is that the horses don't sprint themselves to death like they would on the savannah but it also eats up an hour and 15 minutes where the horse is stopped and the human is still running which would be like okay great the humans like nick have this sort of unfair advantage to catch up but it actually puts the human at a disadvantage in this race because in the end when ron calculates the final scores for the humans and horses he subtracts the horse hold times from the human racer scores so the human has to beat the time the horse would have run if it hadn't stopped but i felt sluggish probably the first 10 miles or so and so you know i'm kind of second guessing myself like you know is this gonna go away or is this gonna blow up and then i'm gonna have to drop in the race you know halfway through or something but keeps chugging along dragging myself and then troy still hauling ass at mile 16 trots into vet check one we actually got into the vet check exactly when i had planned to get in which was right around 8 15 8 30 in the morning so yeah that's horse took a saddle off taking the heat load off in the saddle pad got some water the vet came over when pretty much out of nowhere oh shit nick came running through i could see horses they're being you know examined by the vets uh i didn't see a whole lot more than that because i was in and out of it really quick he looked good too i'm finally warming up trying to more or less push it i hadn't seen the guy in that race uh anything close as fast as he was nick takes off and then after 20 minutes hold troy comes flying out of that check marking the miles as they go by 17 18 wondering when you're gonna see the front runner i'm feeling more loose but i'm starting to feel fatigue setting in i don't feel fresh anymore but he says he tells himself okay you don't need to push yourself any faster just keep going steady the horses are gonna come catch me at some point i've just gotta keep steady and hold myself together so that i'm gonna have more left later on meanwhile troy is hauling out of that check step on the gas until he gets to the back side of nina's mountain the big climb nick my legs are burning he's only a few miles ahead hitting the steep part of the climb my hands are on my knees kind of using them almost like hiking poles to push off every footstep you know climbing like it's a boulder i was really like i expected a horse to pass me at any moment and while all this was going on i can't see anything we were lost on the mountain i don't love that that's us almost driving off a cliff even though my hands are sweating and remembering it yeah so we had gone to look for the first vet check uh we've gotten totally turned around here on this mountain that was just treacherous like awful and i just remember thinking like how do you run up this thing or with a horse i mean both both of them yeah but then so we finally find our way off the mountain circle all the way back around the mountain go back up the top and go to a different checkpoint ron told us he's like you can get to the checkpoint you'll be there in time nobody should be up there and this is the checkpoint that's at the top of the climb we found it oh i didn't think it ever happened all right it's at the peak of the mountain mile 32 it's just a small gravel parking line it's like a lookout point there's about six volunteers there yeah we're with the deep hoppy virgin revenue we are walkie-talkies they're getting updates from other checkpoints on the course and they told us that the first beast we were going to see was a horse yeah they're just letting go through here because that's what always happened before horses always come up the first and then you is it grab me like you should come look at this view i mean you're gonna see oh oh my god isn't that the most beautiful thing you've ever seen that's incredible it's this huge green valley that runs all the way these beautiful red cliffs this is crazy like they come up there these horses and humans climb up this essentially like a sheer face of a mountain i can't believe they come up this way i guess they're gonna be a little further you'll see them trucking your way up here and you'll hear them coming it's like very steep i just have no idea where the trail is kind of just sitting around waiting for like a sign when all of a sudden one of the volunteers to shout out runner coming runner coming yes runner running before a horse they do it out of nowhere coming from this tiny little trail into this parking lot nick just appears and he looked like he looked good he just kind of seemed chill so i caught up alongside him try to keep pace with you for a minute all right okay you're out you're out ahead yeah that's a good sign i suppose i'm feeling pretty good about that how do you feel so far in general not too bad i mean that was the toughest part i uh had to hike quite a bit of that climb oh really straight up hiking yeah it's like 1500 feet of climbing and i don't know like a mile mile and a half so it's a steep steep climb yeah but yeah now it's all pretty much downhill from here so that should be good i do it for pace i'm not i'm happy with her i'm just running hard but comfortable i don't know where that compares to the record or anything i'm not too worried about it yet yeah we ran together for four minutes i'll leave you to it good luck oh my god he's been doing that for 32 miles that's insane yeah i ran with him for a little bit i'm so dead not a horse no horse yet huh there still wasn't a horse 20 minutes go by and then all of a sudden we hear another runner another runner coming then a third runner hey nice to see you not a single horse still they're coming so then finally there's a horse in fact there's two horses there's these two women riders who kind of emerged out of the trail but there's no troy yeah there's no science right and this is how i remember it like we heard something had happened that a rider had gone down but i don't know who and then we ended up finding out that in fact we caught a rock and went down and troy around mile 26 or so he and his horse caught a rock toe catcher as he called it he and the horse both fell yeah which sort of you know to a large extent ended my day and they were okay but the idea of winning was completely gone but there were these riders suzy and mj we'd also heard actually i think we're like top riders who have won lots of races and so they had a pretty good shot of winning too and we're like okay we'll follow we'll follow them so we drove a mile down the road to vet check two we're trying to figure out we knew nick was ahead but the question was was he ahead enough in order to win the race like these horses could still finish after him but still beat him so we walk into this vet check it's in this little wooded area and you go and start talking people and then when we're coming in i asked one volunteers we're doing good how are you doing not bad did the uh front runner come through if nick had come through and he was just like oh yeah he is really moving because we want to make sure we don't miss him at the finish line do you know where he uh you know where he might get in he takes we look at him and we realize that nick is running a seven minute mile so if you're trying to get there to catch him you're not gonna have a lot of time we decided that i'd stay behind and talk to the horse people and you'd go ahead and try to get to the finish line okay i'll do touch so i drove very fast down the mountain trying to catch nick who was just getting to the bottom of the mountain i'm winding down the trail it's steep it's rocky making sure i'm picking up my feet not gonna catch a toe on a rock or anything like that do whatever it takes to keep my body upright for the whole first part of this race nick's mindset is like only live in this moment don't let yourself think about the end don't let yourself have a lot of feeling or emotion but then here at the end after 40 miles i i i almost start to let a panic take over me for the first time in the whole race all the emotions that he's been repressing and pushing down i let it all come in on me you let that hit you and you let that excitement hit you and you let that adrenaline and you know fear and you know everything else kind of a huge mix of emotions all rush in and you let yourself experience like the fullness of every single emotion all at once and you hit that height i i was i just started running basically as hard as i could faster and faster and like i almost built this momentum of like nothing can stop me from getting to that finish line like i hit that last half mile where i can see the finish banner i can see the finish line uh like tears started welling up as i'm running in and like the emotion just completely overcome me as i cross the finish line so i got back down to like the base camp got out of the car and start making my way over the finish line and then i just saw him standing there how'd it go good he was surrounded by a bunch of people did you do it yeah 614 614 hey 614 i go he's not in yet i'm about to go up there 614 shit i'm gonna go man oh i just can't believe you're my favorite runner i ever tell you that so that's awesome but really what everybody wanted to know how did nick beat the horse was did nick win-win like for the first time in history this race did a human beat the horse and so what they do is they have this banquet later where they actually get out the awards and announce everybody's time get a nice big fat winner's buckle the winner gets a really cool belt buckle so the way it works is that ron announces the winners by category so in third place starting with the top three runners he announces third place and then second place and then he gets to all right here we go here's a big one really big really big nick really big show here nick cory nick cory won this course won the race in time of 614 he won he won the course outright by beating the horse by over an hour and 15 minutes nick walks up ron handsome discerning silver belt buckle 614 with the man against horse logo on it unbelievable it's never been done before where a runner has actually beat the horse uh with with the whole times yeah in the story of ancient man you this would be the moment where you get to eat your bone marrow you bash it over the head and break open it brains in while it's like just slowly breathing on the ground in front of you he's like that's not my bag i guess it's maybe like the the old adage comes to mind it's not about the destination it's about the journey it's i want it to be something like that i i guess i always found it fascinating how it seems so obvious that a race is about the end right but everybody we talked to was like it's not about the end and maybe they were just sort of like maybe that's like the good sportsman thing to say maybe that's kind of like how you get yourself through it but i guess that's sort of to the point is like the only way you can run a race like this the only way you can really run 50 miles is to think about it mile by mile instead of imagining that the end is the goal right you have to go just step by step you have to keep saying like we're not just evolved to get to the end we evolved to endure the whole process if you run this kind of makes sense daniel the guy who in a way kind of set us off on this whole journey i mean there's a point when you know running is not easy um everybody when you start to run all of us um even the world's best runners the first mile or so are never easy but there's a point in every run when when things get better and you kind of realize or feel your body's really good at this and um and i think we were we kind of helped people understand um how and why that is and also help people understand why it is that so many of us enjoy running and why you know millions of people run marathons and why you know i walk out the door and go to the river here i see thousands of people running along the charles river um we wouldn't be who we are today if it weren't for running it's it's part of who we are right so did you guys go to man against horse we did yeah it was crazy it was crazy because the guy i mean i don't know if you've heard this year but the guy who won won by a lot yeah he beat the horses yeah yeah i just thought he's like yeah because the lieberman that's not a surprise yeah it's like this is who we are what we've been doing this is what we've been doing since two million years ago out on the serengeti like nick did what we were born to do yeah so so i don't buy into that scenario oh wow wow i think it's not i'm sorry no no no i mean there's no surprise that danny knows about you've argued about it right again this is daniel lieberman's collaborator dennis bramble so i don't think it's plausible really that the earliest stages of running and the things that promoted running um could be persistence hunting which is what that strategy is where you run something in the heat and it overheats ultimately and uh and you walk up and hit it over the head with a rock we should say this is a way that some people in the world still hunt it's a strategy that can work but bramble doesn't think it's the first strategy we had for getting meat it's a really demanding thing and uh takes hours and it takes tracking ability usually um i think that's something that came later after running was pretty well established to me uh it makes a lot more sense that it began in something which has been called aggressive scavenging taking advantage of real predators and trying to rip off the meat before other things started moving in and haul it off rambles like you get there and there's a chance to eat some of it and the thing is you're competing against all sorts of different like scavengers you're competing against vultures hyenas leopards leopards even like the animal that killed the animal yeah so in bramble theory you need to run to be able to get there before basically all the other animals in the savannah pick it clean right they have to get there fast because the faster you get there the more of the carcasses left i see yeah i will say that your theory is far less uh noble and exciting oh yeah of chasing down so no perseverance strength commitment you're just like hey we figured out vultures are over there let's just go see what we can pick off this dead animal it's something else like spend all the time killing and we will and we will be as badass as we can be when we get over there to scare off those other guys no it's it's totally non-glorious it makes us into vultures it makes us it makes our entire species it just it makes us into opportunists yeah i feel like maybe i buy into your i know it's pretty compelling i have to say it makes sense it's not sexy yeah so then it's like it's not sexy right like it's like the question is are we lions or are we vultures that's essentially what it is are we lions or are we vultures but i guess the beautiful thing about it is like either way no matter what we got there because of our butts is that where you were going yeah no matter what it's all about the butt reporters keith ratty and matt keelty i'm jad i'm rob thanks for listening hey this is uh producer mac keelty running near my mom's house in arizona and uh just very quickly uh this episode was produced by me with rachel kusick and simon adler uh we had original awesome music sound design mixing from jeremy bloom this was fact tracked by dory shedlin special thanks to taming gannon abby swift and everybody at a man against horse and also really quickly want to say uh both dennis and daniel may appoint a fact a lot of early theories about humans and endurance running were informed by one of the students who wrote that paper his name is dave carrier and uh coincidentally dave's brother is a man named scott carrier who if you listen to public radio he might recognize his name and has had great work on this american life also wonderful podcast called home of the brave anyways back in 1998 scott did this sort of like seminal story about his brother's work trying to try to face down an envelope and a whole lot of things anyways it's so important to acknowledge both of them and yeah that's about it this is terrible this is grace wright calling from inglewood colorado radio lab is created by jad abamrod with robert krolwich and produced by soren wheeler dylan keith is our director of sound design suzy legendberg is our executive producer our staff includes simon adler becca brusler rachel kusick david debble bethany hapti tracy hunt mac guilty annie mcewen latif nasser sarah kari arian wak pat walters and molly webster with help from shima olili w harry fortuna sarah sandbach melissa o'donnell marian reno and russell gragg our fact checker is michelle harris robert kropul You