The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

AS soon as I got to Borstal they made me a long-distance cross-country runner. I

suppose they thought I was just the build for it because I was long and skinny for

my age (and still am) and in any case I didn't mind it much, to tell you the truth,

because running had always been made much of in our family, especially

running away from the police.  

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Alan Sillitoe

I guess I have always been one who doesn’t judge a book by its cover, but I definitely chose Alan Sillitoe’s for its title when I was a teenager. Despite never having been any good at running at all, I felt that the book had something to tell me. Indeed, I had a lot in common with the protagonist, I was skinny, lonely, socially alienated, and hated social classes, hierarchy, status and authority.

Oh yes, and we were both introverts. Is it a cliché about long-distance and marathon runners that they are introverts or is there something about it? More marathon runners I personally know are actually extroverts who form a loose group rather than introverts. However, Psychology Today seems to agree that marathon runners tend to have at least an introverted quality (even if many of them may be extroverts) and compares them to sprinters who have an extroverted quality comparing them to fighter pilots who have to be go-getters and make decisions extremely quickly. Sillitoe's long-distance runner is a highly reserved and reflective type of person.

While one might tend to think that all runners have a similar kind of personality, there is actually a huge difference between marathon runners and sprinters. And it goes far beyond extraversion and introversion.  

I have argued that the four temperaments are based on our evolutionary mode of subsistence:

When it comes to running, hunters and pastoralists have completely different patterns. Hunters often had to run for hours on end (persistence hunt), whereas pastoralists typically had to run very fast over short distances (e.g. to catch a runaway animal). When it comes to decision-making, pastoralists have to make decisions on the spur of the moment, not a second to lose, hunters make their decisions only after taking in a lot of information and weighing the different possibilities (tracking).  This is exactly the difference between marathon runners and sprinters described in Psychology Today.

If there are evolutionary adaptations to running long-distance vs sprinting, we would also expect there to be anatomical adaptations. Indeed, in the blog post Would you rather look like a Sprinter or a Marathon Runner? claims that “Marathoners often look emaciated and sickly; sprinters usually look muscular and powerful.” Indeed, most people would not have any difficulty pointing out who is a marathon runner and who is a sprinter in the photo above.  

One question remains. Why should long-distance runners (hunter types) feel more lonely than sprinter (herder types)? Hunter-gatherers are extremely egalitarian and actively discourage forming alliances and hierarchies. When hunters in a band are unhappy they tend to leave the band (also called “voting with your feet”). Hunter types often become alienated in modern society and withdraw. Finding other hunter types and running marathons with them is certainly a joy for many of them, no matter if they are introverts or extroverts.

For more information on evolutionary types check out my book Evolutionary Symmetry - Face and Body Typing : What our bodies reveal about our temperaments and evolutionary past