Born To Run

 I recently finished reading Born To Run by Christopher McDougall.

The subtitle is "A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen". It's often credited with kicking off the "barefoot running" craze.

The author is a sports journalist, and it's an odd mix of a book. It's partly a narrative about a foot race in a remote part of Mexico. Partly a story about colorful American ultra-runners. Partly an account of ultra-running itself. Partly a tale about this ultra-running tribe that lives in the remote part of Mexico. Partly a look at the scientific study of human distance running.

I enjoyed it a lot, but I would say you should take it with a grain of salt before you decide to venture into the desert for a fifty mile jaunt in your bare piggy toes.

Anyway, one little sort-of inconsistency I noticed dealt with the science side of things.

In general, McDougall pushes a low-meat diet. His wondrous Mexican tribe doesn't get much meat - they mostly chow down on corn and beans. And on page 209 a cancer-surviving doctor advises that "we need to build our diets around fruit and vegetable instead of red meat and processed carbs."

But by page 227 he is advancing the thesis that humans evolved into long distance runners so that they could run their prey to exhaustion. And by page 241 he writes: "Actually, it would be weird if the women weren't hunting alongside the men, since they're the ones who really need the meat."

I'm not sure what it all means.
I know I was born to eat.
But should it be corn and beans
or tasty meat?