WE WERE ALL BORN TO RUN

LOOK TO OUR ANCIENT ancestors, and itmakes sense why running is a natural life- extender. For about two million years, the activity was integral to our survival. ‘Our bodies adapted to running because we had to do it to get food,’ says Dr David Raichlen, an anthropologist who studies runners and the evolutionary history of exercise at the University of Arizona, US. The need to constantly be on the move had a profound physiological impact, causing our hearts to enlarge and our capillaries to grow, says Raichlen. In a fascinating work published in Trends in Neurosciences, Raichlen lays out how running allowed Homo sapiens to reach old age. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors had two copies of a genotype that greatly increases the risk of Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease. Yet during this time, humans began living much longer than other mammals. Raichlen believes that’s primarily because we were constantly running – for our food, from our food – which minimised the chances of developing these diseases, despite having the high-risk genes. He also believes it’s no coincidence that today, as our time spent running (or doing any activity) plummets, our chronic disease risk rockets. ‘ I think that exercise explains quite a bit about why we are the way we are today,’ he says. In other words, not running actually goes against our own evolutionary history.