As an anthropologist and former international endurance runner, I’ve long been fascinated by what makes endurance sport meaningful to people.
What makes us voluntarily run or ride hundreds of miles? And what can we learn from studying cultures of endurance such as Rarámuri runners in Mexico?
I began exploring these questions by spending 15 months living and training alongside elite Ethiopian marathon runners for my PhD in anthropology, learning Amharic (Ethiopia’s official language) and trying to follow the same routines of training, eating and resting as they did.
Since then, I’ve spent time immersing myself in endurance activities, from cycling 100 miles overnight at Ride to the Sun to running the length of the Lake District at the Lakes in a Day ultramarathon.
Here’s what I learned along the way…
01: Endurance sport tends to be popular at times of societal change
For a couple of decades in the mid to late 19th century, there was a sport so popular that tens of thousands of spectators crowded venues in America and England for an entire week.
A contest of this type in 1879 even heralded the first time electric lighting was put to popular use, and Gilmore’s Garden, in New York, was so crowded that a balcony collapsed under the weight of spectators.
The sport in question was walking, with the most popular contests taking place over six days, with participants barely sleeping and sustaining themselves on such things as beef tea, egg yolks and champagne.
Later, six-day bicycle races, also featuring endless indoor laps in front of huge crowds, also became popular, with an Irish immigrant named William Martin setting a world record for six days (on a penny-farthing no less) of 1,466 miles.
These races took place at a time of profound change, when walking everywhere was starting to be replaced by driving, and machines were more generally beginning to replace people.
As a journalist for the Virginia Quarterly Review put it at the time: “It seemed as though the muscles of the nation were making one final, vast, collective effort before being replaced by the internal combustion engine.”
Could the current boom in endurance sports be motivated by thoughts about being replaced by AI and the like, perhaps?
02: Endurance events can be a form of secular ritual
Inspired by the Rarámuri runners I met in Mexico, who don’t explicitly train for races that can be up to 180km long, I took part in the 100mi/160km overnight Ride to the Sun from Carlisle to Cramond after just a few cycles to and from work.
The ride marked the summer solstice, enacting a kind of moving vigil on the shortest night of the year. It felt significant to mark the changing seasons with something challenging that brings together a bunch of people who wouldn’t otherwise know each other.
In the anthropologist Victor Turner’s classic work on ritual, he writes of a ‘liminal’ period that temporarily transports people beyond their routine lives to a “moment in and out of time,” which usually involves the acceptance of pain and suffering, and where the kinds of hierarchies and distinctions that characterise their lives are broken down.
Turner was writing primarily about African rites of passage, but many people experience a sense of a generalised social bond through endurance sports and find that it gives them a renewed perspective on the rest of their lives.
One ultra runner described running all day and all night as a way of performing a kind of factory reset on himself, both mentally and physically.
He spoke of “scraping off the life pollution” over a long endurance challenge, where everything else pales into insignificance apart from the desire to continue, and a subsequent feeling of calm that can last for months after.
When I went back to work on the Monday after the ride, I was tired, but it felt like I’d put a lot more distance than usual between one week and the next. Which, in a sense, I had.
03: Enduring together creates unusually strong bonds
After running for a little over 13 hours at a Lake District ultramarathon, I sat on the ground watching people finish the race until after midnight. Most new arrivals came in pairs or small groups rather than alone.
“Oh mate, thank you,” one man said, wrapping his arms around his companion in a sweaty embrace that made it seem like they’d known each other for years, before adding, “Nice to meet you.”
It turned out they’d met an hour or so before, on the dark fellside.
“It’s incredible the bond you can create over 20km of an ultra,” said someone else.
This was also something I experienced when cycling 100 miles overnight in the Ride to the Sun – something about covering long distances together connects us.
As the historian William H McNeil puts it: “Moving our muscles rhythmically… consolidates human solidarity by altering human feelings.”
This was probably an important part of bringing communities together in the past, and one we can recreate through endurance challenges.
04: The best endurance athletes in the world embrace technology carefully and selectively
When Tao Geoghegan Hart won the Giro d’Italia in 2020, he didn’t even start the race as Ineos Grenadiers’ main GC contender.
Speaking about his first stage victory at the ski station finish at Piancavallo, he told me about looking at the numbers on his bike computer on the climb.
“I remember a point where I saw some stuff on the screen and I was conscious of how high it’d been for such a long time, and I kind of decided to tune out of it, because I was feeling really good. And in some moments, you just have to trust your intuition and your feeling.”
At a time when it feels like there are ever-increasing opportunities to track even more variables – from watts and heart rate variance to blood glucose – it’s interesting to note that many of the best athletes in the world, from Geoghegan Hart to the marathon runners I knew in Ethiopia – are very selective about when and how they record data on themselves.
“I don’t think there are many people in the world for whom having more and more numbers dictating how they live their lives is going to be beneficial,” is how Geoghegan Hart put it.
Companies such as Whoop and Forth Edge may well give us privileged insights into what’s going on in our bodies that may be performance enhancing, but I think it’s worth also considering whether an over-reliance on this kind of data might blunt our ability to run or ride using feel, as Geoghegan Hart did on Piancavallo.
It’s also important to remember that there are many important things that we can’t track. If you focus too much on the data, “anything that isn’t quantifiable gets removed from the picture,” Geoghegan Hart says.
“But our emotions and our experiences as humans – we aren’t robots – actually determine far more about our performance than anything else.”
05: Endurance sports create an interesting tension between work and play. Being aware of this can help us get more out of them
On the one hand, sports such as running and cycling seem to offer an escape from the pressures of modern life.
We lace up our running shoes or jump on our bikes and, for a few hours at least, we’re away from our emails and our minds are free to wander.
Many of the endurance athletes I speak to talk of “stripping things back”, of returning to something more simple and profound, of embracing their own vulnerability.
The ultra runner Damian Hall, for instance, joked that completing the Spine Race – a non-stop 268-mile journey over the Pennines – was an extreme way of battling phone addiction.
However, we can have a tendency to think of these activities in precisely the same kinds of terms we’re trying to escape.
We celebrate individual resilience, the endless drive for productivity, the quantification of ever more variables, from watts to glucose levels, and we rank ourselves in terms of performance.
It seems important to get the right balance between these two kinds of motivation.
06: Cultural explanations of success in endurance sport may be more important than physiological or genetic ones
This is perhaps a less significant problem in the cycling world, where you don’t tend to read claims that Slovenian athletes have superior genetics, but many of the endurance cultures I studied have been assumed to have some kind of genetic or altitude-derived advantage.
A CNN article from 2016 is entitled The Biological Secrets that Make Sherpas Superhuman Mountaineers, for instance, claiming that they’re able to scale Himalayan mountains “with ease”.
Similar comments are often made about Ethiopian and Rarámuri runners, the assumption being that superior genetics makes running come ‘naturally’, in spite of there being no scientific proof of this.
This can downplay the hard work and expertise that go into running at the top level or guiding often hapless clients up Everest, and also fails to account for the often more interesting cultural reasons why people do hard things.
For Rarámuri runners in Mexico, for example, races are explicitly about bringing communities together, and running for a long time has been seen as a way of pleasing God and keeping the earth turning.
07: It helps if you can connect what you’re doing to something bigger than yourself
While the current focus on data tends to make endurance sport about the individual, it seems to help many people if they can connect what they’re doing to something bigger.
For trail runners in Nepal, this meant connecting their aspirations to run internationally to other ways in which Nepalese people have demonstrated physical prowess on the world stage, primarily by becoming a Gurkha in the British Army.
Being a Gurkha was a way to ensure your name was never forgotten, and the same was true of becoming an athlete.
For many others, endurance sport has become a way of delivering a message about climate change.
Lewis Pugh, the UN Patron of the Oceans, for example, argued that many people develop an environmental consciousness through connecting with nature by spending long periods of time moving through it, and often suffering in the process.
For him, there is a clear symbolic value in doing challenging things that draw attention to the fragility of the planet.
His 1km swim in supra-glacial Antarctic water, for example, had a genuine effect on the negotiations to secure a protected area there with Russia and China.
On a smaller scale as well, our efforts to replace driving with active travel make a difference not only to our health, but also to the environment.
There have been many attempts to connect endurance sport to our ancestral past, for instance in glorifying hunter-gatherer lifestyles or trying to run barefoot like the Rarámuri.
It may be that the most important thing we can learn from the way we used to live as a species is that our physical activity was far more embedded in the necessities of our everyday lives.
To the Limit: The Meaning of Endurance from Mexico to the Himalayas by Michael Crawley (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is out now
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