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Running, for me, is about simplicity. It’s about removing the unnecessary barriers between myself and the world; tapping into something truer, deeper, somehow more human. I don’t need grand theories or expert advice; I don’t need fancy gear, or infrastructure, or permission from anyone else. Just get out and go: move, breathe, be. That’s all there is to it.

Words here are a poor approximation, and if you don’t already know, the best thing to do is get out there and try it for yourself. But here we are, writing and reading, me at my screen and you at yours, so maybe I can at least gesture toward the feeling — maybe I can give you a little pang of curiosity — by saying that barefoot running can be a form of connection to our most essential, a sort of primal rite that reveals what it means to be a human animal alive in the world.

It doesn’t have to do with speed or numbers or rankings; it’s about the experience itself. The sensation of the ground, the rhythm of the breath, the engagement of muscles in natural alignment…each step is a decision, a calculation made too quickly to be rational; the mind delves into a flow state where sensation is more vivid, the self less constrained.

I don’t think I’m the only one to experience running as a metaphor for living life, a training ground for finding purpose and seeking balance; it’s a dance between strength and surrender, focus and flow, human and nature.

I’m a bit of a purist, if you hadn’t already guessed; some might call me a hard-headed zealot, or something far worse. The point is, I’m often slow to pick up on the nuances of life. Which is why I only began using running sandals recently, when I wanted to increase distances and explore new kinds of terrain. What I lose in sensation I find that I can gain in freedom, and that’s a tradeoff I’m often willing to make.

Persistence hunting, to my mind, is at the apex of human accomplishments: a unique union of physical prowess and mental acuity, individual capacity and collective effort. Hundreds of generations of careful observation and cumulative understanding are condensed in a single instant, channelled through raw instinct and altered states of consciousness in which the hunter merges his soul with that of the hunted.

The kill is made. With reverence, with humility, with love, the life of an animal is transformed into the life of many humans. The hunter, his family, and his tribe live on to see another day.*
It’s hard to believe that we as a species are capable of running down hoofed ungulates until exhaustion, chasing them for hours through the hot sun until they simply give up trying. But it’s true, and if it weren’t, our species would most likely long since have ceased to exist.

Consensus among academics and other experts is that persistence hunting is a lost art, long since obscured in the mists of time. Fortunately for those of us alive today, however, the consensus is wrong. There are still a handful of humans living in the Kalahari who practice persistence hunting as a way of life. I’ve run with them. I’ve hunted with them.** And now I’m working with them, to help keep their traditions alive.

I spent years researching and traveling, trudging abandoned paths and seeking unmarked villages; eventually I found what almost certainly are the last living humans to feed themselves and their families in the same way our ancestors have done for hundreds of thousands of years. These are the last remaining persistence hunters of the Kalahari.

Allow me a few sentences to try to dig a bit deeper, to get more clearly to the essence of the matter. Indulge me, or skip on down to the links below. Your choice

The origin of life, as far as we know, is a combination of disparate forces brought together into a unified whole; perhaps deep in the thermal vents of our primitive planet, matter somehow became capable of sustaining itself, reproducing itself, endowed with a force we now call life, in unicellular form. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, these unicellular organisms proliferated and specialized, and then began to join themselves with others, eventually creating multicellular beings.

Away we went, specializing functions and combing forces, adding on layers of perception, cognition, and motor activity, slowly developing complex organs and entire systems of internal communication that are now so beautifully expressed in we know as the human body. Evolutionary biology tells us quite clearly that we are inherently multiple, that the individual is legion: in the words of Dr. Michael Levin, we humans are best understood as metazoan swarms, entities composed of many distinct levels of cognition all operating semi-independently within this mess we call the “self.”

This is just another way of pointing out what most indigenous cultures and spiritual traditions, as far as I can tell, consider to be a fundamental truth: life at its core is about connection. It’s about connection internally, with our own minds and bodies, but also with each other, with the environment in which we live, and if you’ll indulge me a bit more, also to the unfolding moment: to the here and now. Everything else is a fantasy, a semi-controlled hallucination produced by our so-called rational mind, the prefrontal cortex which neuroscience seems to be revealing as little more than an accomplished story-teller, a self-perpetuating prediction machine that filters out the unexpected, convincing us that we’ve seen what we expected to see, and that it -- the prefrontal cortex — is in control of a reality that is in fact far more nuanced and complex, and far less rational than we’d like to believe.

Which is just to say that the motto of our era for the past 400 years or so — “I think therefore I am” — is utterly wrong. “I think therefore I think I am” is closer to the truth, and opens the door to another perhaps more vital truth: “I feel therefore I feel that I am.” The main difference here is that feeling is never self-contained; there is no egotistical pretension of domination that could spur something like, say, the colonization of 90% of the globe by the other 10%, or the industrial revolution that colonized 90% of of our minds with the 10% we like to call our intellect. But I digress. Let me just say that feeling, by definition, doesn’t occur in a vacuum; feeling is about engagement, connection, relationship. And that, I would argue, is far closer to getting at the essence of what it means to be human than rational thought ever could be.


It is, at the very least, far closer to the essence of persistence hunting.