I read this cool piece on how a barefoot runner may never win a ultra trail race. One of the commenters said something very interesting:
"We were “built” to run from A to B with a maffetone pace. Not to get there as fast as we can."
I would tend to agree with this – if the endurance hypothesis is correct, then humans were built for long endurance runs at a sustainable pace. By a sustainable pace, I mean a pace that a person can run day in and day out for long distances. No one can run at race pace 2-4 times per week for long distances year after year.
Then, I was reading this interesting article that also talks about how elite athletes spend most of their training time at lower Maffetone-like intensities. The article talks about how "polarized" training – lots of volume at easy paces and a bit of high-intensity work - is most effective. The middle intensity (race pace) doesn't seem to contribute that much. In my view, it's probably more of an energy-draining pace, because you're working at a high heart rate over a prolonged period of time. In other words, it's something most people (including hunter-gatherers) would try to avoid if possible!
Maybe from POV of maximizing health benefit, all that one needs to do is a brisk walk interspersed with some very occasional short sprints?
Yewen,
Probably. Some daily brisk walking and an occasional burst of higher intensity. Probably doesn’t even have to be timed or regimented in any way.
Do we know whether hunter-gatherers did much running? A quick google gave me only comment from blog-type websites that presume we know, but I’d be interested to know exactly what we do know about hunter-gatherers and how they moved about and at what pace.
From memory of watching documentaries of current-day hunter-gatherers, there seemed to be more walking followed by sprints at times of finding prey.
You can look into the Harvard research by Lieberman…
If you have never read anything on Ernst Van Aaken(probably the father of jogging) on these subjects, he was way ahead of his time…