Featured
On Running and Naturalism
There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
— Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
I run because I am an animal. I run because it is part of my genetic wiring. I run because millions of years of evolution have left me programmed to run. And, finally, I run because there’s no better way to see the sun rise and set.
— Amby Burfoot, The Runner’s Guide to the Meaning of Life
So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.
— Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”
Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.
— John Muir, as quoted by Albert W. Palmer in “A Parable of Sauntering”
Nothing reminds you that you are simultaneously more alive and yet mortal than running in nature. Connected to this is the notion that there’s something to be said for running free, letting your body dictate how far and how fast you go on a particular day, and there is no better place to run free than on a nice nature trail, whether through an open field or a wooded single track. Steve Prefontaine was right when he referred to running as potentially a form of art. Running is an art form in the best sense of art in that it connects us to the ecological and biological aspects of our evolutionary history. The best forms of art and culture in general connect us with, bind us to the Nature from which we emerged.
It is, then, that there is a direct link between running and naturalism that connects us to the very fabric and evolutionary history of life itself. Even though most of them were written well before the advent of the running boom of the latter 20th century, it is a fun thought experiment to imagine this connection through the writings of some of our greatest naturalists.
In a wonderful passage from The Runner’s Guide to the Meaning of Life, Amby Burfoot imagines Henry David Thoreau as a runner:
Thoreau walked often and everywhere, mulling over the day’s options and ramifications. If he were alive today, I imagine he would be a runner, covering his favorite haunts at a steady jog. Not that walking wouldn’t be part of his routine. But he’d also run because running is really just advanced walking; because it is more vigorous and, hence, healthier; and because it opens even more veins of creative and reflective thought.
The same, if not a stronger case, could be made for John Muir, who followed Thoreau in the next generation of great American environmentalists. Ken Burns’ documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea gives an account of Muir’s penchant for covering great distances in his explorations of Nature:
Every moment of his free time, Muir devoted to exploring the valley and the mountain ramparts surrounding it — travelling for days with only a few pounds of crackers, oatmeal, and tea for nourishment; clambering up rocky slopes in shoes whose soles had been studded with nails; pondering the geology of the Sierras; closely inspecting everything he encountered; thinking nothing of covering fifty miles in a two-day excursion.
Can you not imagine Thoreau, on the front steps of his cabin at Walden Pond, patiently patching up a pair of old trainers for a good “saunter”? And can you not perfectly relate to his economy of nature seeking to hold on to that which has become an extension, albeit a minimal one, of your foot, a good friend through mud and mildew, blood and rocks, water and ice, laced up day after day in order to keep sticks and unholy glass out of the soles of your feet? And further, can you only imagine what John Muir would have done with a good pair of trail shoes?!
In fact, it was a short, approximately quarter mile walking trail that he referred to as the Sandwalk where Charles Darwin cleared his head and contemplated and processed his scientific observations about the origins and evolutions of life in the process of uncovering the invaluable realization that our species is different in degree but certainly not in kind from all other forms of life we observe around us. It was apparently walking on this path that inspired his well-known description of a tangled bank, a passage that appears toward the end of On the Origin of Species and perfectly encapsulates the beauty, complexity, and creative struggle for existence within the web of life.
Of course, the vast majority of us can’t expect to even remotely approach the running artistry of a Prefontaine or the observational and insightful genius of a great naturalist like Darwin. Yet, running, like naturalism, is available to most, at least in some capacity. As I frequently remind my cross country runners, referencing a quote attributed to running Coach Tim Miles, running is not rocket science. The only way to become a better runner is to run.
What follows is that running is not always easy, but running, particularly through natural environments, is perhaps the most rewarding form of athletic activity in which one can participate. And, if done the right way and for a long enough period of time, it can become fun and a lifelong enjoyable activity. For those of us who either find or continue down the trail beyond our younger years, we find that running through Nature also beautifully orients us to the rhythms and uncertainties and exigencies of life as we inevitably age with the passage of years.
Get David C. McDuffie’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
On the trails, we come to realize that we are not alone. In a single cross country season, my runners’ reported sightings included a pig, a groundhog, a coyote, and this is in addition to the inevitable snake or two and colony of vultures that share our training grounds with us on a daily basis to remind us, despite how swift of foot we may feel on a particular day, of the eventual way of all flesh.
A good trail run can lead to moments both sublime and precarious. I was once running peacefully and comfortably at a steady pace on a flat stretch of north Georgia mountain trail with a lake on my left when I heard the presence of something that was clearly too large to be misidentified as a squirrel running parallel to me on the slope of the hill to my right. Instinctively, my thoughts scrolled through the possibilities (dog, fox, bear…) as I turned to assess what would need to be my next immediate action. Running next to me in stride was a good-sized fawn, joyously bounding along with unbridled playfulness in apparent wonderment at this strange two-legged creature that had come to run with her in the woods. This lasted for what felt like 10–15 seconds when I was alerted to a larger version of my running partner running an equal distance further up the hill in the form of an urgently concerned doe. Once the mother was able to regain the attention of her errant fawn, my running partner was herded up the hill and away from the awkwardly running human on the trail below, accompanied by the startling blowing alarm that I imagined served as both the distinctive deer’s signal for danger and as a parental rebuke of perceived reckless child behavior. The two disappeared into the woods and the moment had passed, leaving behind the indelible, albeit brief, memory of a beautiful moment of symbiotic running with a member of another species.
On a similar, yet more remote, mountain trail a few hundred miles north in the North Carolina section of the Appalachian range, my brother once rounded the bend of a trail to be brought face to face with a bobcat standing stone still in the middle of the trail waiting to see what manner of creature would be rounding the corner bringing my brother also to an abrupt stop in the middle of the trail. The bobcat stood and retained eye contact for long enough for the encroaching human to become adequately aware that he was no longer in his territory before casually moving away down the trail. The trails let us know that we are one with the rest of life, but on the trail, as in life, we are not favored and may not have the advantage.
I am not sure if Aldo Leopold had any set fitness routine, but in his nature writing, among the most beautiful and poetic words in the history of environmentalism, we are presented with vivid images of wildlife reaching out, whether consciously or not, and truly experiencing the life that we have the privilege to experience pulsing through our bodies. In his essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” from A Sand County Almanac, he soberly describes the death of a mother wolf by his own hand, and in a breathtakingly honest way, describes his regret at his action when he comes face to face with the life he meant to take only moments before:
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
In “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” also in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold mourns the loss of the metabolic furry that was the passenger pigeon, a species that once numbered in the billions but was driven to extinction through human hunting and habitat destruction in a matter of decades during the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Framed in vivid detail from the perspective of the pigeon pursuing their biological limits, Leopold explains that the species was a “biological storm…the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen of the air.” Further, he continues: “The pigeon loved his land: he lived by the intensity of his desire for clustered grape and bursting beechnut, and by his contempt of miles and seasons. Whatever Wisconsin did not offer him gratis today, he sought and found tomorrow in Michigan, or Labrador, or Tennessee. His love was for present things, and these things were present somewhere; to find them required only the free sky, and the will to ply his wings.”
The poignancy of the essay lies in Leopold’s view that what makes us, as homo sapiens, unique among life is not what separates us in terms of our advanced technology but instead is in our ability to recognize and appreciate the value of another species, even one we have driven to extinction. And, it is this understanding of the connection which Nature provides that allows us, like the pigeon, to fully embrace the life within us while we have it.
The most important thing in Leopold’s examples is the biological/ecological connection and the striving to experience and value the most that life has to offer. Running and naturalism alike connect us with ourselves and with the natural environments, and the life within them, through which we travel. The distance runner can relate to this fierce longing to cling to and push the limits of the experience of life. While wingless, we can relate to the satisfied aching of well-used muscles, the immediate and intense craving for caloric intake brought on by prolonged physical exertion, and the feeling of liberating freedom in wild spaces.
Medical science is clear on the benefits of exercise and being connected with Nature. It is not as if this is a cure that we “discovered.” It is, on the other hand, a return to a state where depression is less likely, a return to our animal selves. I am not trying to claim that running or being in the woods is a cure for all forms of depression, and I am a firm advocate for accessible medical treatment for mental illness. However, it is well documented that exercise and being in natural environments frequently trigger something within us that improves our overall well-being. It is a part of our genetic memory and, therefore, an inextricable part of who we are. Even better, combine the two and have a good run in a natural setting and return to an awareness of the environments from which we emerged and the animals that we still are. A good run in the woods won’t necessarily cure all of our problems, but there are times when it damn sure seems that it will.
Returning to The Runner’s Guide to the Meaning of Life, Burfoot recounts the words of his coach, John J. Kelley:
He says that we are out of sync. We have forgotten, Kelley argues with Irish wit and relish, that we members of the species Homo sapiens are only recently evolved from the apes and their predecessors. We have moved too quickly away from the earth that sustains us; we have grown blind to our true animal selves. We have too many machines and chemicals, and we don’t exercise enough. ‘How can automobiles and TVs make us better or healthier?’ he sputters.
Running in the natural environment, which can still be found even among the most clearly human-constructed aspects of the built environment, brings us back.
For the cross-country/trail runner, running paths serve as sanctuaries for the body and mind (which are inextricably linked), places of renewal and reorientation to the fact that we are alive and have the privilege of moving about in a natural world not made exclusively for us but in which we evolved to potentially thrive. Yet, it should also be said that we can find this connection on our favorite neighborhood runs, where we more readily accept the merging of the natural and built environments and occasional inhalation of unhealthy amounts of CO2 emissions. The chosen trail is a respite, a retreat from human traffic and all that it brings with it.
Yet, like life, our chosen paths are not always perfect. If you have a nice running trail open to general use, you have to contend with an acquired hate for four-wheelers or any other vehicles that muddy up your trail that, you feel, is perfectly suited for running. In my personal experience, there is little that can send a mild mannered runner swimming in a happy current of endorphins, brought on by the smells of nature and the effort of our bodies, more quickly into a quick fit of expletives (whether internal or voiced) than a tiny cardboard sign atop a plastic stake on a nice soft stretch of runner friendly grass that reads “Herbicides — keep off grass!” John L. Parker said it perfectly through the thoughts of Quenton Cassidy in Once A Runner when he wrote, “This country at times stinks in the nostrils of the runner.”
We seem to have never properly heeded Rachel Carson’s advice from Silent Spring that “herbicides” and “insecticides” are in fact “biocides” that potentially adversely affect all life including humans and that “the ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.” The runner and the naturalist knows, at least implicitly, that, while Nature is not always kind and never perfect in our limited human estimation, the further we are distracted from her sustaining wisdom is a further removal away from the philosophical ideals of the true, the good, and the beautiful, which serve as the foundations of the meaning, purpose, and significance that makes life so special and worth living to its fullest.
The emergent creativity that led to galaxies, star birth, and the supernova explosion that led to our solar system and us transcends all that emerges from it. Life, therefore, emerges from and returns to a creativity that is both transcendent and also necessarily imminent. Science, consequently, is naturalistic yet also spiritually significant. When we run, we get a glimpse of the revelation of the universal and evolutionary epic, as E. O. Wilson called it in On Human Nature, from which we emerged and the source to which we will return. We connect to our animal selves and have a greater appreciation for the natural environments that produced us and continually sustain us. Once again, from The Runner’s Guide to the Meaning of Life, Burfoot writes,
We were meant to run, and we do so naturally when left to our own devices. Watch a group of children on the playground, in your backyard, or wherever they come together. When they play games like tag, they run for a while, with squeals of obvious delight, and then rest until they are recovered again. Run and rest, run and rest. It is the perfect exercise program because it is coded in our genes. It is what our forefathers did millions of years ago.
Through running, we are no longer separate but more thoroughly aware of the attraction to Nature that comes through a greater awareness of the ecological communities in which we live and to which we are inextricably bound.
Wilson coined the term biophilia (love of life) to refer to “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” Humans (as well as other organisms) are, he argued, attracted to these ‘life and lifelike processes’ because we have evolved from them, from Nature. The great ultrarunner and biologist Bernd Heinrich, a friend of Wilson’s, connects our impulse for biophilia to distance running in Why We Run: A Natural History (previously published as Racing the Antelope) by claiming that we humans evolved our proclivity toward running not primarily to escape prey but instead to pursue prey over long distances.
In a more recent book, Racing the Clock: Running Across a Lifetime, Heinrich even suggests that running can potentially serve as a social, ritual expression of our recognition that we emerged from and are continuously drawn to the evolutionary ecology in which we exist. In his words, “Running in Nature is getting close to it, absorbing its magic.” In other words, we are natural runners, and in the pursuit of our running routine, we are following pathways that help us learn who we are and where we came from through the years of our species’ natural history. Through this process, we have the potential not only to form meaningful communities with our fellow runners but also with our extended ecological communities as well.
Biophilia is at the heart of the naturalist’s ethic. For Wilson, “to the degree that we come to understand other organisms, we will place a greater value on them, and on ourselves.” He goes on to emphasize the following: “Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.” E. O. Wilson, who only recently passed away in 2021 at the age of 92, was perhaps the greatest naturalist since Darwin for the contributions he made to the human understanding of biodiversity and how we should value and protect it. E. O. Wilson was also a runner.
