BORN TO RUN, BUILT TO BE LAZY
DANIEL Lieberman has just returned from his morning run when we meet via Zoom, which means his cells will be undergoing the “after-burn”. The term is used to describe a heightened metabolic state that can endure for hours after physical exertion.
Dozens of repair mechanisms are said to kick in, at a microscopic level, to reverse some of the biological damage that accumulates with age. As he sits in his home office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it seems fitting that Daniel, a lithe 56-year-old Harvard professor and avid marathon runner with a resting heartbeat in the forties, should be found in this restorative condition.
Over the past two decades, few academics have done more to shape the way the western world views athleticism. Daniel studies how and why the human body is the way it is. His research has combined paleontology, anatomy, anthropology and experimental biomechanics, and today he’s best known for his work explaining how we came to run.
A paper he co-authored in 2004 – Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo – proposed that early humans prospered because they developed an ability to cover fantastically long distances more efficiently than rival species. His
