Welcome to Welcome to Earth, the world’s first and only running magazine department that deals with running-related queries from extraterrestrials in 600 words or less. This month’s letter comes from Borp, who writes:
Dear POSSESSED,
My name is Borp, and I am very interested in knowing what this earthling activity called Ultrarunning is. What is it? I need to know.
Cheers,
Borp
That’s a really good question, Borp, and the easy answer is this: Ultrarunning is the practice of running any distance over 42.195 kilometers (26 mi 385 yd). This is the distance of a marathon, and completing a marathon was once considered an impressive feat, but then someone decided to tack on an extra ten or so kilometres and call it an ‘Ultra Marathon,’ thereby ruining it for everyone who was proud of themselves for running a marathon. Pretty selfish. Let’s look at the history.
The original Ultrarunners appeared on the scene two million years ago. These were ancient humans who traveled great distances on foot because they didn’t have the means to purchase cars or even bicycles. They were a simple people, much like the Amish, only instead of overalls and straw hats, they wore animal pelts and defecated in full view of one another. These early Ultrarunners would cover hundreds of kilometers to visit with friends in neighboring villages or to outrun hostile invaders, but the majority of their ultrarunning was done to track animals for food. At the time, they called this hunting strategy ‘Ugh-ugh-ugh,’ but these days, we know it as ‘Persistence Hunting.’
Historians believe the first persistence hunters may have existed in the southern Kalahari because the sparsely vegetated terrain would have been ideal for pursuing prey over enormous distances. But there’s also evidence of persistence hunting in other parts of the world, especially the Americas, where Indigenous peoples would frequently run up to 320 kilometers non-stop for food, inter-village communication, and to get out of going to therapy. These days, we communicate by sending one another funny Instagram reels, and our food comes to us in handy pills dispatched by the Government, so no one needs to cover great distances on foot anymore, and yet they do, and they call it ‘fun’.
Ultrarunning for fun has its origins in the mid-19th century with the emergence of ‘Pedestrianism,’ a sport that began when a drunkard bet his friends that he could walk from Boston, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C.—a distance of 770km—in just ten days. The newspapers took notice of the nutty wager, and suddenly everyone was placing bets on who could walk the furthest the fastest. These ‘racewalkers’ were the ultrarunning pioneers, and as the wagers on endurance ramped up, the walking progressed to skipping, and, as we all know, skipping leads to running.
In the early 1920s, the first ultrarunning events were organized, the most notable being South Africa’s Comrades Marathon, an 88km race between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. The inaugural Comrades race saw 48 runners enter, 34 turn up at the starting line, and 16 actually finish. The winning ultrarunner clocked in at a sluggish 8 hours, 59 minutes—three hours longer than it would take today’s fastest humans, but back then they didn’t have super-shoes or gels or even Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) for support. The Comrades Marathon is still held every year and now draws tens of thousands of eager ultrarunners (in 2019, race organizers had to cap entries at 25,000 because it was just getting too damn silly).
By the 1950s, ultrarunning was quite popular. Not as popular as the Hula hoop, James Dean, or making out with your steady at the drive-in, but people knew about it, and races were being organized hither and thither (but mostly thither). These early ultra marathons were, however, anything but official, and lots of people fell over and just died. These days, you have to sign a disclaimer saying it’s your fault if you die, but in the '50s, you just had to make eye contact with a race representative and shrug. As the decades rolled on, ultrarunning’s popularity grew in the same way a snowball might if you rolled it down a snowy hill and let it collect more and more snow so that it became a bigger snowball. And now, in the year of Our Lord 2024, the sport is absolutely bonkers huge, and everyone is racing. This is terrific news because with the coming apocalypse, we’re gonna need people to chase food again.
Thanks for writing, Borp!
