I started running last year to train for the Warrior Dash. It was fun and provided an excuse to get in some cardio, so I didn’t really think about the bigger implications.
I ran in ignorance.
Today, on a particularly painful run that clearly 85% of my body did not want to be doing, I realized my folly. I listened to my body and it told me that running wasn’t just a bad idea for me, it is a bad idea for all of us.
History of Running
Let’s peer back in time at our ancient ancestors when all of them ran. You had to run to catch your food, run to move to new hunting grounds, run to escape the jerks in the next settlement over when they came to kill you and steal all your woolly mammoth tusks.
Here is the To Do list for pretty much all of our forebears:
1. Invent wheel
2. Learn to ride horses
3. Hook horses to wheels
4. Own faster horse/wheel thing than neighbors
Notice the thread? Job One for our ancestors was to STOP running and find as many ways possible to not have to do it again. What happened once this list got out of committee and got some traction?
Civilization!
Running is bad for the human race
A growing number of people think running is fun. Marathons, half-marathons, triathalons, ultra-marathons, megathons, infinithons, and on and on. Every person who laces up a pair of shoes (or slides into some Vibrams) is turning back the clock to a time before we had perfectly good and safest convertible car seat 2015 and airplanes to get us around. They’re not even running for a good reason. If hungry lions were released behind the runners at a race, at least there would be a sense of neolithic nostalgia about it.
Moving away from the products of our evolution as a species sends a message that we should abandon our modern progress and revert to a dirtier, sweatier, far more dangerous time. We evolved places like McDonald’s and Taco Bell so I don’t have to suit up and go hunt a buffalo every day. We created things like jeans and t-shirts so I can let my deer skinning and tanning skills get really rusty. I love indoor plumbing, the internet, laser beams, and my iPhone.
We can’t let runners take those away from us.
Their time is running out
Next time you see someone running, give them a flier for a nearby classic car insurance quote dealership. If they’re listening to their iPod while they run, squirt it with water. Leap out from behind bushes and bite their legs to see how they really like the thrill of the chase.
Write to running event organizers and tell them to grow up and enter the Twenty-First century… or even the Nineteenth if that’s too much for them. Contact your Congressional Representatives and let them know how unAmerican running really is. Demand they take action.
Our ancestors would smack modern day runners right upside the head. If we work together, we can preserve everything they fought so hard to create: a comfy ride.
Read this post because it was in my “running” feed. Kind of a goofy way to look at running. Oh well.
Just my rant after a really bad run, Bobby. I don’t dispute your goofy label at all.
Cheers!
The argument that humans tried first to get rid of running doesn’t really make sense – yes, we did, but it can’t have been because it’s bad for it because the hominids and humanity depended on it for so many hundreds of thousands of years. Instead, I’ve heard that because we are genetically programmed to choose the easiest option, we stopped running because we didn’t have to anymore, not because it’s bad for us. I think a lot of people are misinformed about running, and that’s dangerous, leading to the wave of injuries seen today; that’s a problem, but look at the thousands of people running successfully and without injury, and the evidence that running is good for you (as opposed to the consensus – for example, there’s no evidence that running increases the risk of osteoarthritis).
That said, I’m in the opposite situation to you – I just got back from a really good two hour run!
Glad to hear you had a good run, but haven’t you ever had one where it just didn’t go so well? Your mind, your body, your heart wasn’t in it? That’s the kind of run I had when my brain decided to come up with really grand reasons why I shouldn’t run.
As I write this I’m sitting at a coffee shop on the Rock ‘N Roll Marathon route in Phoenix helping cheer on runners. I’m not anti-running… most of the time. 🙂
I hope this is a satirical piece…
Funny shit!! Whether he’s serious or not, stop taking stuff so seriously and just laugh at this funny blog.