Humans Were Born to Carry Weight on Our Backs

After the Arctic, I traveled to meet researchers at Harvard, who told me that, compared to most other mammals, humans are “athletically pathetic.” We’re slow and weak. But we are damn good at endurance running and carrying. We can’t go fast. But we can go far — especially in hot weather. On a hot day, a relatively fit human will beat most other mammals in a distance race — lions, tigers, bears, dogs, etc. And we’re also the only animal that can carry well.

Endurance running and carrying are, quite literally, acts that made us human. The human body is built the way it is so that we could slowly but surely run down prey for miles and miles in the heat until the animal toppled over from exhaustion. Then we’d kill it and carry it back to camp. This is why we have two legs, springy arches in our feet, big butt muscles, sweat glands across our body, no fur, short torsos, and strong grips.

But as we evolved, running was relatively rare. It was reserved mostly for hunts. Modern-day tribes like the Tarahumara, for example, never run for the fun of it. Running is reserved for rare hunts and religious ceremonies, the Harvard anthropologists (who’d embedded themselves with the Tarahumara) explained.

Carrying, on the other hand, is something we humans did all the time as we evolved. So all the evidence suggests that we were more so “born to carry.”

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After the Arctic, I traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, to spend a few days with Jason McCarthy, a former Green Beret who founded GORUCK, a company that makes beautiful backpacks built to military specs.

“You never run in war without weight. Never,” said McCarthy. “But you’re always rucking. No matter what. Always. Rucking is the foundational skill of being a Special Forces soldier. Any soldier for that matter.”

“Ruck” is both a noun and a verb. It’s a thing and an action. It’s military speak for the heavy backpack that carries all of the items a soldier needs to fight a war. And “to ruck” or “rucking” is the act of marching that ruck in war, or as a form of training for soldiers or civilians to get really, really fit.

One morning Jason and I each loaded about 45 pounds into his GORUCK packs and rucked into GORUCK HQ. It worked my lungs and muscles. He described rucking as, “cardio for people who hate to run, and lifting for people who hate the gym.” It corrects for body type. If you’re too big, it’ll lean you out. Too skinny? It’ll add muscle to your frame. This, he explained, is why carrying is the foundation of military fitness training. It builds humans who one hour can hike 75 pounds of gear up a mountain and the next powerfully breach an enemy cell.

- More here from Michael Easter, the author of new book The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self