[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: [singing] Do do do do. That's not the Olympics song. But the summer Olympics are in full swing, and I am feeling sporty. You know, the Olympics, they've got so much! They've got gymnastics, they've got swimming, they've got archery and so much running. Relays, sprints, marathons.

LULU: But you know what race they don't have? The wildest running race I have ever heard of in which a human competes against a horse. Yep, it's a real race. It happens every year in Arizona. Humans race horses. The course is 50 miles long. And today we are gonna go. We are sending reporters to witness the race with all its snuffling, sweaty beasts and horses to learn why this bizarre-sounding race may actually give us a clue about how we became humans, and sort of the qualities that give us our humanity.

LULU: I am a human named Lulu Miller, and new Terrestrials episodes are coming out really soon in September, and all summer long we're warming up the feed with some of our favorite Radiolab animal stories of all time. Which brings me to this one, "Human vs Horse." It is quite a ride, and it comes to us from producer Matt Kielty and reporter Heather Radke. Here we go. Giddy up!

MATT: I have no idea where we should start. I was—like, is it like, with the dawn of human civilization?

HEATHER: Uh, maybe?

MATT: Okay, so this story comes to us from Heather, who is a fantastic writer who brought us this story that, if I were to boil it down, is about a horse, a lone man running through the desert, and what it fundamentally means to be a human being. And weirdly, butts. I didn't see this coming, but it's about butts. Just butts. Your butt. It's about your butt.

HEATHER: You gotta say it a few times. Butts. Okay, so let's back up.

MATT: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: I am writing a book about the cultural history of the female butt.

MATT: Oh, interesting!

HEATHER: I know. I thought I'd save that one for on tape.

MATT: But before she could really dive into all those things, she realized she had, like, just a more fundamental question.

HEATHER: Why do we even have a butt at all?

MATT: Which led her to this guy ...

HEATHER: Sorry, sorry. I just missed you for a second. Say that again?

MATT: ... Daniel Lieberman.

HEATHER: This evolutionary biologist at Harvard.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You want to talk about the gluteus maximus, if I recall.

HEATHER: I do. I do, I do.

MATT: So you called him up ...

HEATHER: You're sort of the pre-eminent ...

MATT: ... a while back for your book.

HEATHER: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: ... butt muscle scientist, as far as I can tell. [laughs]

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That's an interesting distinction, but that's possibly true.

MATT: And we called him up not too long ago.

HEATHER: Hello, everybody.

MATT: Because what was the thing you'd learned from him?

HEATHER: The butt maybe made us human. So to get to the butt stuff with Lieberman, we have to go back.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: So, many years ago ...

HEATHER: Around 1992.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: I was—I guess I must've been a postdoc or a grad student.

HEATHER: At Harvard.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Doing research on—actually it was about pigs. The story—the story starts with a pig on a treadmill.

MATT: So Daniel said every day he would come into the lab where he had these pigs.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Mini-pigs.

MATT: Oh, mini-pigs on a treadmill?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Yeah!

HEATHER: Cute!

MATT: He'd put one of them on a treadmill.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Mini pigs are just the right size, let me tell you.

MATT: And to keep the pig on the treadmill ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You put a box—and you put a box and turn the treadmill on and, you know, the pig doesn't like having its butt hit the back. And also the animals like it if you put a mirror in front of them, so ...

MATT: Weird.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: So if there's a mirror in front of them, it thinks there's another pig there, and they're kind of much more happy running.

MATT: Forever chasing towards their other pig.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Yeah.

HEATHER: That's sad.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: It works.

MATT: But then one day it got exciting.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: A fellow named Dennis Bramble who's a professor at the University of Utah, now retired ...

DENNIS BRAMBLE: [clears throat]

HEATHER: That's Bramble.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Mm-hmm.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: ... he was on sabbatical at Harvard.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Yeah, I was there for the whole year.

HEATHER: To do his own research, coincidentally right next door to Lieberman.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: And I heard this sound, and ...

MATT: Turned to his co-researcher.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: And I said, "What—is somebody doing something there?" And they said, "Yeah, and this guy Dan Lieberman is running pigs over there." I said, "Oh, I gotta—I've gotta see this!"

MATT: Eventually, he goes next door to Lieberman's lab. Lieberman's in there.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: With yet another pig on a treadmill.

HEATHER: Popped his head in, looked at the pig.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: And cocked his head to the side, and said to me, "You know Dan, that pig can't hold its head still when it's running." It's funny I'd, you know, spent hours watching pigs run on treadmills, but I never really thought about it. But ...

MATT: Oh! There it goes.

MATT: We looked up pigs running on YouTube.

MATT: Oh, wow!

HEATHER: So is his head still or not?

MATT: Their heads do kind of flop.

HEATHER: So it's a floppy head.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Right.

MATT: So anyways, the two of them are staring at this mini-pig on a treadmill.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Its head bobbing up and down.

MATT: And Bramble said, "You know Dan, I bet that pig's head is flopping all around because it doesn't have this thing ..."

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Called the nuchal ligament.

MATT: Nuka ligament?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Yeah the nuchal ligament. N-U-C-H-A-L.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: And I explained to him that, you know, it provides support for the head and neck.

HEATHER: Okay, so the nuchal ligament, it's like a rubber band that attaches to the back of the animal's skull and then runs down its spine and keeps the head straight as it runs.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Right. And then I went on to point out that all mammals that are specialized and have evolved as runners ...

HEATHER: Everything from cheetahs to leopards to antelopes ...

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Big grazing animals like horses.

HEATHER: Down to the teeniest, tiniest runners.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Jackrabbits among other things. Dogs too.

HEATHER: They've all got a nuchal ligament.

MATT: All these animals that evolved to run got this ligament to keep their head from flopping around. And the animals that suck at running, they don't have one.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Right.

MATT: Pigs don't.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Apes don't.

HEATHER: Chimps.

MATT: Gorillas.

DENNIS BRAMBLE: They have no nuchal ligament.

HEATHER: Nothing.

MATT: They don't really need one, because running's not a big part of who they are. But then the weird thing is that humans, well ...

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Humans have one.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Humans have one of these too.

MATT: We have this ligament. And this is sort of like a—like a, Dan says, a "Eureka!" moment, because from the neck up essentially what we're talking about is—is the brain. The thing that really sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: And when homo erectus first appears, you know, their brains are about half the size of the brains that we have today.

MATT: What Dan and Dennis realize, like, looking through the fossil record, doing all sorts of laboratory research is that from the neck down, two million years ago we got all these—these adaptations that we still have, adaptations that seem to be explicitly designed for running.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: So for example ...

MATT: Take the foot.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Almost all animals that run have short toes.

HEATHER: If you have long toes and you're running, you—your toes break.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: And sometime around two million years ago, our toes got shorter.

MATT: Or also, like four million years ago, our feet were flat.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You can have a flat foot and walk very well, but once you have a flat foot it's very hard to run.

MATT: Two million years ago, our feet start to arch.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That arch is a spring. And in fact, there are plenty of other springs.

HEATHER: Like the Achilles tendon.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Which is like a centimeter long in a chimpanzee or a gorilla.

HEATHER: With homo erectus, it becomes ...

DENNIS BRAMBLE: Really long.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: A huge spring in your leg.

MATT: Also, our hips become ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Twisty, tall.

HEATHER: Narrow.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That help us stay stable.

MATT: Arms ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That are really useful for climbing.

HEATHER: Shorter. Legs ...

MATT: Longer ...

HEATHER: The inner ear ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: The semicircular canals ...

MATT: Larger.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: More sensitive to pitching forces.

HEATHER: So you can balance better.

MATT: Our joints in our knees and our hips get bigger, which are supposed to be able to bear the load of running.

HEATHER: And maybe the most important adaptation: the butt.

MATT: Butts!

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: So the gluteus maximus plays a very important role when you're—when you're running, and turns out to barely be active when you're walking. And, you know, you don't need the fancy equipment in my lab to figure this out. You can just do this yourself at home. Just walk around the room and hold your butt and, you know, clench your kind of butt. And—and when you're walking your butt will just stay kind of normal, right? It'll stay kind of, you know ...

MATT: Saggy.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: It won't really clench up very much. But when you run, you'll feel it clench up with every step.

MATT: But then so, like, why ...

HEATHER: Why did this happen? Like, why did we start running?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Well, there was climate change. So the Ice Age began, starting—you know, starting around 2.8 million years ago the Earth's climate started changing substantially and Africa started to dry out.

MATT: And Dan says what happened is forests and jungles turned into ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Grassland habitats and more open habitats.

HEATHER: Which quickly filled up with large grass-eating mammals.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Herbivores.

HEATHER: Like kudu and antelope.

MATT: And other large mammals.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Saber-tooth tiger or something like that.

MATT: That ate those mammals.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: But unlike other carnivores ...

HEATHER: Your lions, tigers, cheetahs ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: ... we don't have any natural weapons. We don't have claws and fangs. But natural selection often comes up with really interesting solutions.

MATT: Dan says, imagine you're back two million years ago.

MATT: Where are we?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Well, we might be in a woodland. Or we might be a savanna. You know, there's a variety of habitats.

MATT: We'll stick with the savanna.

HEATHER: You're out there with your family, friends, clan.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: We don't really know the group sizes, but probably, you know, 15 to 20 maybe is not an unreasonable guess. But who knows?

HEATHER: You and your group are walking through the tall grasses of the savanna.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You're hungry.

MATT: And off in the distance ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: You see some wildebeests. And you run after them. But the wildebeests run away faster than you can possibly run. And the wildebeest will run far away, right? And go hide. But that's okay.

MATT: You're just gonna keep chasing them.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Tracking.

MATT: Looking for any signs of their trail.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: And you're not chasing them at a sprint. You're kind of running along at a nice, relaxed endurance pace. Like, 10-minute miles.

MATT: And you do this for mile after mile after mile.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: But the trick is you find that animal before it's cooled down, because of course the animal would have run away, and when it runs away it gets hot. Like, when you—running generates a lot of heat. And these animals aren't very good at dumping heat.

MATT: And why can't it dump heat?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Because they can't sweat.

MATT: Unlike us ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Most animals are unable to sweat.

MATT: So ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: The way they lose heat is by panting.

MATT: The thing about four-legged animals, though, is every stride they take when they're running ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: ... the guts slam into the diaphragm like a piston. And so when an animal starts galloping, it has to train each breath with each stride. And that prevents it from doing the short little shallow breaths, you know, that animals do when they pant.

MATT: Huh.

MATT: And so Dan says what you do is you try to keep this wildebeest sprinting. So you stay slow and steady, keep moving. Just slowly chasing this thing. And slowly over time, you're making it get hotter and hotter and hotter, until at a certain point after tons of miles, it could be 20, could be 30, you push this animal to the point of exhaustion.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: At that point the animal is basically collapsing, right? Its—its defenses are gone, and they just find a rock and dispatch the animal with a rock.

MATT: And when you say 'dispatch,' you mean, like, it—we beat its brains in?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: That might be what they might do, yeah.

MATT: Huh. This is so horrifying.

HEATHER: I know. It's a terrible way to die, right?

MATT: Yeah.

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: But once we are able to do this, we become—we were able to become hunters. And of course, hunting gives us access to incredible number of calories. You also have access to important nutrients. It's not just meat, it's also liver and brain and marrow. These are very rich, important and rare resources that enabled our ancestors to overcome the constraints of—that so many animals face. And—and of course to hunt, you can't really hunt without running. And so—so running helped us become hunters, and hunting and gathering helped us become the smart, intelligent cooperative creatures that we are today.

MATT: Yeah, but I gotta say, the idea of humans running down animals over these, like, huge distances, like it just—it just seems ...

HEATHER: Well, and it kind of boggles the mind, right? Like, it seems impossible. So I'd been, you know, preparing for this conversation with Lieberman and I had heard this theory, and I had said to a few different people, you know ...

HEATHER: Oh yeah, this guy thinks that you can outrun a horse or something. And everyone's like, "No, it's not possible."

HEATHER: And he was like, "Well ...

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: I have. People do it all the time. Even I've done it.

HEATHER: ... I've actually done it."

HEATHER: You've outrun a horse?

DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Absolutely. There's a course—there's a race called Man Against Horse, it's every year in Prescott, Arizona. And two years ago, I ran the race. And I ran—outran almost all the horses, and I'm just a middle-aged professor. I'm not particularly fast.

MATT: It's kind of like he was saying, "You can see this whole theory play out in the desert of Arizona."

HEATHER: Right.

MATT: And you and I talked about this. And we were like, okay.

HEATHER: We're going.

MATT: We're going.

HEATHER: [laughs]

LULU: When we come back, it's off to the races.

LULU: Lulu here. We are back with our story about the man versus horse race. And I'm handing it off to reporters Matt Kielty and Heather Radke, who have just landed in Arizona.

HEATHER: So a while back, you and I flew to Phoenix. We rented a car and drove up to ...

MATT: Prescott.

HEATHER: Prescott.

MATT: We went to Prescott.

HEATHER: Don't say "Prescott."

MATT: No. It's kind of like just high desert country.

HEATHER: Cactuses and scrub and red rocks.

MATT: Big blue sky.

HEATHER: It's, like, super cinematic. It's like, this is the west.

MATT: Ah, man-horse sign. Arrow to the right.

MATT: And we were there to see this race.

HEATHER: Nicely homemade, too.

MATT: Yeah, it's just a piece of wood. It says "man-horse" in red paint.

MATT: And the race, it's a 50-mile race through the desert.

HEATHER: Up this mountain, man against horse. Winner take all.

MATT: All right. Okay. So I mean, we're essentially what, just standing in, like, an open desert plain.

HEATHER: Everything's super flat.

MATT: A little bit of a valley.

HEATHER: Kind of right out ahead of you is this big mountain that is the mountain that they're gonna climb during the race.

MATT: We got there for day one.

HEATHER: It turns out ...

MATT: Some humans can beat some horses, but no human ever in this race has outrun the fastest horse.

RON BARRETT: This guy here, he's been the one to come the closest.

HEATHER: So in the 36 years that this race has been going, a horse has won every time.

MATT: And to be honest, it sort of makes sense.

[horse neighs]

MATT: Once you see ...

HEATHER: ... the horses.

[horse neighs]

MATT: What is that? Why do they do that? And we got horses just kind of hanging out in these tiny makeshift enclosures.

HEATHER: And it's not just like pony down at the fair or something. They're big, they're muscular.

MATT: I could never stand that close behind a horse.

HEATHER: It's like evolution has made this animal to be, like, the best running beast on the planet.

MATT: So we talked to some of the riders.

HEATHER: The horses don't run by themselves.

MATT: I'm Matt, by the way.

TROY: Hi Matt. Troy.

MATT: Troy?

TROY: Nice to meet you.

HEATHER: So one of the guys we ended up talking to for a while was this guy Troy.

MATT: Barrel-chested, cowboy hat on. And Troy looked determined.

TROY: I think of this ride—I don't even worry about who else shows up here to race on the horse race, I just want to beat the runner, you know?

MATT: We haven't met any of the runners yet. Are they—do they, like, congregate in some other spot? Or ...

TROY: That's them over there.

MATT: Troy pointed a couple hundred yards over to the other side of this dried-out riverbed.

TROY: The wash, that little wash right there? Those'll be all ultra-runners. But hey, they're little skinny people, all right?

MATT: So here's what we got for the re-enactment of the origins of running in humanity. On one side of this wash, standing in for the ancient antelope of the Serengeti [horse neighs], masses of muscle.

HEATHER: Bred and trained to run. And then on the other side, small group of maybe eight people wearing microfiber whatever. I mean, at this point it pretty much seems like the horses have got it.

MATT: Yeah. Like a blowout.

HEATHER: But then we heard about this one guy.

WOMAN: Nick.

WOMAN #2: Nick.

MATT: Nick.

RON BARRETT: Now this kid says he's coming, Nick Coury.

MATT: We actually also heard about him from Ron.

RON BARRETT: He says he wants to come tomorrow and beat the course record.

MATT: But there was no sign of him yet. Day two. Wake up super early.

MATT: Oh, the sun's coming up. Whoops, sorry.

HEATHER: The race starts at 6:30 in the morning.

MATT: It's just after six. Race day, race day, race day!

MATT: And back across the divide ...

HEATHER: .. the runners ...

HEATHER: Sun's finally up.

MATT: ... are sort of like ...

HEATHER: You're ready to go. So did ...

WOMAN: Yeah.

MATT: ... anxiously moving about, stretching.

HEATHER: So ...

HEATHER: But we are immediately looking for Nick. I'm like, "Where is he?" One of the runners was like ...

MAN: Right there. That guy.

HEATHER: In that red?

MAN: Exactly.

HEATHER: And pointed at this little hatchback. And so I went over there with my microphone and my little headphones and he ...

HEATHER: All right.

HEATHER: ... sort of like, popped open the hatchback.

HEATHER: Hi.

NICK COURY: Good morning.

HEATHER: What's your name?

NICK COURY: Nick Coury.

HEATHER: Nick. We've been hearing about you.

NICK COURY: So I hear. [laughs]

MATT: He's a young guy, early 30s.

HEATHER: A little bit bleary-eyed.

MATT: Did you just get up?

NICK COURY: Kind of. I slept out here last night. So this is—this is my place to get ready.

MATT: He slept in the back of his Honda Fit in a sleeping bag.

NICK COURY: It's easiest to just wake up and be here and not have to worry about driving.

MATT: And right away we were like ...

MATT: So are you—are you going for a course record?

NICK COURY: I'd say it's a possibility. Like, I don't like to get ahead of myself. I know ...

HEATHER: So he sort of hedged a little bit. But we didn't actually have that much time to talk to him because the race was about to start.

HEATHER: We're gonna let you go. But ...

MATT: Yeah.

HEATHER: Thanks for talking to us.

MATT: Yeah, thanks Nick.

MATT: And so about 10 minutes later ...

RON BARRETT: 50-milers, runners check in over here!

MATT: ... Ron starts calling people together.

RON BARRETT: 50 mile horse race!

MATT: Horses start arriving.

RON BARRETT: Listen up! Hey, everybody respect everybody. Everybody take their time going through this wash. I don't want no accidents on the other side of that hill.

MATT: I'd asked Ron if I could run with everybody at the beginning and he was like, "Sure."

RON BARRETT: You guys all have a good day, huh?

MATT: There's probably about 20 runners standing there. About a dozen horses behind us. And then right about 6:30, Ron shouts ...

RON BARRETT: All right, Man Against Horse Race! Start right now! Here we go!

MATT: ... go. So all the runners get down into this wash first, come up into this barren desert. And pretty quick ...

WOMAN: On your right.

MATT: ... come the horses.

MATT: Meanwhile ...

MATT: Troy is, like, galloping out there. He's, like, a hundred yards ahead of anybody.

TROY: As quickly as we could.

MATT: You can see dust coming up behind his horse.

MATT: Good luck, y'all!

MATT: And then Troy, at Mile 16, trots into Vet Check 1.

TROY: And we actually got into the vet check exactly when I had planned to get in, which was right around 8:15-8:30 in the morning. So ...

MATT: He hopped off his horse.

TROY: Took his saddle off, taking the heat load off from the saddle pad.

MATT: Got his horse some water, the vet came over. When pretty much out of nowhere, Nick came running through.

NICK COURY: I could see horses that are being, you know, examined by the vets. I didn't see a whole lot more than that because I was in and out of it really quick.

TROY: He looked good too.

NICK COURY: I'm finally warming up, trying to more or less push it.

TROY: I hadn't seen a guy in that race anything close to as fast as he was.

MATT: So Nick takes off. And then after a 20-minute hold, Troy comes flying out of the vet check.

TROY: Marking the miles as they go by.

MATT: 17, 18. Until he gets to ...

TROY: The backside of Mingus Mountain.

HEATHER: The big climb.

MATT: And Nick ...

NICK COURY: My legs are burning.

MATT: Nick's only a few miles ahead, hitting the steep part of the climb.

NICK COURY: My hands are on my knees, kind of using them almost like hiking poles to push off every footstep.

HEATHER: You know, climbing like it's a boulder.

NICK COURY: I was really—like, I expected a horse to pass me at any moment.

MATT: And while all of this was going on ...

MATT: I can't even see anything.

MATT: ... we were lost on the mountain.

HEATHER: I don't love that.

MATT: What is—oh my God!

MATT: That's us almost driving off a cliff.

HEATHER: My hands are sweating in remembering it.

MATT: Yeah, so we had gone to look for the first vet check. We had gotten totally turned around, and we were on this mountain that was just treacherous. Like, awful. And I just remember thinking, like, how do you run up this thing?

HEATHER: Or with a horse? I mean, both—both of them.

MATT: Yeah. But then so we finally find our way off the mountain, circle all the way back around the mountain, go back up the top and we go to a different checkpoint. Ron told us, he's like, "You can get to this checkpoint and you'll be there in time. Nobody should be up there."

HEATHER: Oh, yeah. This is it.

HEATHER: And this is the checkpoint that's at the top of the climb.

MATT: It's at the peak of the mountain.

HEATHER: Mile 32.

MATT: And then you ...

HEATHER: [whispers] It's crazy.

MATT: Is it?

MATT: ... grabbed me and were like, "You should come look at this view."

HEATHER: I mean, you're gonna see.

WOMAN: Go look.

MATT: Oh! Oh my God!

HEATHER: Isn't it the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?

MATT: That's incredible!

MATT: It's just this huge, green valley that runs all the way to these, like, beautiful red cliffs.

HEATHER: This is crazy. Like, they come up there?

HEATHER: These horses and humans climb up this, essentially like a sheer face of a mountain.

HEATHER: I can't believe they come up this way.

MAN: I guess they're gonna be a little further. You'll see 'em trucking their way up here, and you'll hear 'em coming.

HEATHER: It's, like, very steep.

MATT: I just have no idea where the trail is. I mean ...

MATT: So we kinda just were sitting around waiting for, like, a sign. When all of a sudden, one of the volunteers just shouted out ...

MAN: Runner coming!

MATT: Runner coming?

MAN: Yes. Runner!

MATT: Runner before a horse?

MAN: Runner in the lead. They do it.

MATT: Out of nowhere, coming from this tiny little trail into this parking lot ...

WOMAN: You got it! Woo!

MATT: ... Nick just appears.

WOMAN: Good job, Nick!

MATT: And he looked like—he looked good.

MATT: I'll try to keep pace with you for a minute.

NICK COURY: All right.

MATT: Hey, you're out—you're out ahead.

NICK COURY: Yeah, that's a good sign, I suppose. I'm feeling pretty good about that.

MATT: How do you feel so far in general?

NICK COURY: Not too bad. I mean, that was the toughest part. I had to hike quite a bit of that climb.

MATT: Oh, really? Just straight up hiking?

NICK COURY: Yeah. It's like 1,500 feet of climbing in, I don't know, like a mile, mile and a half. So it's a steep, steep climb.

MATT: Yeah.

NICK COURY: But yeah, now it's all pretty much downhill from here, so that should be good.

MATT: How are you doing for pace?

NICK COURY: I'm not—I'm happy with where I'm at. I'm just running hard but comfortable.

MATT: Okay.

NICK COURY: I don't know where that compares to the record or anything.

MATT: We ran together for four minutes?

MATT: I'll leave you to it.

NICK COURY: Awesome.

MATT: Good luck.

NICK COURY: Later. Thanks.

MATT: Oh my God, he's been doing that for 32 miles. That's insane.

HEATHER: What happened?

MATT: Yeah, I ran with him for a little bit. I'm so dead. Not a horse?

HEATHER: No horse yet.

MATT: Huh.

MATT: There still wasn't a horse. 20 minutes go by ...

HEATHER: So then finally, there's a horse. In fact, there's two horses. There's these two women riders who kind of emerge out of the trail.

MATT: But there's no Troy.

HEATHER: Yeah, there's no sign of Troy. And this is how I remember it. Like, we'd heard something had happened.

MAN ON WALKIE-TALKIE: Somewhere back down the trail his horse stumbled and fell.

HEATHER: That a rider had gone down.

MATT: Did I hear a name?

MATT: But no one knew who. And then we ended up finding out that in fact ...

TROY: We caught a rock and went down and ...

MATT: ... Troy, around Mile 26 or so, he and his horse caught a rock, toe-catcher as he called it.

HEATHER: He and the horse both fell, yeah.

TROY: Which sort of, you know, to a large extent ended my day.

HEATHER: And they were okay.

MATT: But the idea of winning was—was completely gone. But there were these riders, Susie and MJ, who we'd also heard actually I think were, like, top riders.

HEATHER: Who have won lots of races. And so they had a pretty good shot of winning too.

MATT: And then we're like, okay, we'll follow—we'll follow them.

HEATHER: So we drove a mile down the road to Vet Check 2. We knew Nick was ahead, but the question was was he ahead enough?

MATT: And you go and you start talking to people, and then when we were coming in, I asked ...

MAN: Hi there.

MATT: ... one of the volunteers ...

MAN: We're doing good. How are you doing?

MATT: Not bad. Did the front-runner come through?

MATT: ... if Nick had come through. And he was just like, "Oh, yeah."

MAN: Oh, he—he is really moving.

MATT: Because we want to make sure we don't miss him at the finish line. Do you know what he—do you know when he might get in, you think?

MATT: We look at a map and we realize that Nick is running a seven-minute mile.

MAN: So if you're trying to get there to catch him, you're not gonna have a lot of time.

HEATHER: We decided that I'd stay behind and talk to the horse people, and you'd go ahead and try to get to the finish line.

HEATHER: Okay.

MATT: All right. I'll be in touch.

MATT: So I drove very fast down the mountain trying to catch Nick.

HEATHER: Who was just getting to the bottom of the mountain.

NICK COURY: I'm winding down the trail.

HEATHER: It's steep, it's rocky.

NICK COURY: Making sure I'm picking up my feet, not gonna catch a toe on a rock or anything like that. Do whatever it takes to keep my body upright.

HEATHER: For the whole first part of this race, Nick's mindset is like, only live in this moment, don't let yourself think about the end. Don't let yourself have a lot of feeling or emotion. But then here at the end, after 40 miles ...

NICK COURY: I—I almost start to let a panic take over me.

HEATHER: ... for the first time in the whole race, all the emotions that he's been repressing and pushing down ...

NICK COURY: I let it all come in on me. You let that hit you, and you let that excitement hit you and you let that adrenaline and, you know, fear and, you know, everything else, kind of a huge mix of emotions all rush in. And you let yourself experience, like, the fullness of every single emotion all at once and you hit that height. I was—I just started running basically as hard as I could. Faster and faster. And, like, I almost build this momentum of, like, nothing can stop me from getting to that finish line. Like, I—I hit that last half mile where I can see the finish banner, I can see the finish line. Like, tears started welling up as I'm running in and like, the—the emotions just completely overcome me as I cross the finish line.

MATT: So I got back down to, like, the base camp. Got out of the car and started making my way over to the finish line. And then I just saw him ...

MATT: Ha ha! You already beat me here.

MATT: ... standing there.

MATT: How'd it go?

NICK COURY: Good!

MATT: He was surrounded by a bunch of people.

MATT: Did you do it?

NICK COURY: Yeah!

RON BARRETT: 6:14. I go, "He's not in yet. I don't have to go up there." 6:14. Way to go, man. I just can't believe. You're my favorite runner. I ever tell you that?

MATT: But really, what everybody wanted to know ...

WOMAN: Oh my God. So did Nick beat the horse?

MATT: ... was did Nick win-win? Like, for the first time in the history of this race, did a human beat the horse? And so what they do is they—they have this banquet later where they actually give out the awards and announce everybody's time.

RON BARRETT: They get a nice big fat winner's buckle ...

MATT: The winner gets a really cool belt buckle.

HEATHER: So the way it works is that Ron announces the winners by category.

RON BARRETT: So in third place, we got the one and only ...

HEATHER: Starting with the top three runners.

RON BARRETT: Pete Mortimer!

HEATHER: He announces third place and then second place, and then he gets to ...

RON BARRETT: All right. Here we go. Here's the big one. Really big. Really big.

HEATHER: ... Nick.

RON BARRETT: Really big show here. Nick Coury! Nick Coury won this course, won the race in time of 6:14. He won—he won the course outright by beating the horse by over an hour and 15 minutes.

MATT: Nick walks up, Ron hands him this sterling silver belt buckle ...

RON BARRETT: 6:14.

MATT: ... with the Man Against Horse logo on it.

RON BARRETT: Unbelievable. It's never been done before where a runner has actually beat the horse with—with the hold times. Yeah.

MATT: In the story of ancient man, you—this would be the moment where you ...

HEATHER: Get to eat your ...

MATT: Yeah.

HEATHER: ... your bone marrow.

MATT: You catch up to the gazelle and you ...

HEATHER: Bash it over the head ...

MATT: Bash its brains in ...

HEATHER: ... and break open its bones.

MATT: ... while it's, like, just slowly breathing on the ground in front of you.

HEATHER: He's like, "That's not my bag. That's your guys' thing." [laughs]

NICK COURY: Yeah. I guess it's maybe like the—the old adage comes to mind: It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. It's—I want it to be something like that.

HEATHER: I guess I always found it fascinating how it seems so obvious that a race is about the end.

MATT: Right.

HEATHER: But everybody we talked to was like, it's not about the end. And maybe they were just sort of—maybe that's, like, the good sportsman thing to say, maybe that's kind of like how you get yourself through it. But I guess that's sort of to the point is, like, the only way you can run a race like this, the only way you can really run 50 miles is to think about it mile by mile instead of imagining that the end is the goal.

MATT: Right. You have to go just step by step. You have to keep steady.

HEATHER: It's like we're not just evolved to get to the end, we evolved to endure the whole process.

MATT: But I guess the beautiful thing about it is like, either way, no matter what?

HEATHER: We got there because of our butts.

MATT: [laughs]

HEATHER: Is that where you were going?

MATT: [laughs] Yeah. No matter what, it's all about the butt.

LULU: Reporters Matt Kielty and Heather Radke. That'll do it for today. Thanks so much for listening. More stories about this lumpy old planet of ours coming in two weeks. Bye!

MATT: Hey, this is producer Matt Kielty, running near my mom's house in Arizona. And just very quickly, this episode was produced by me with Rachael Cusick and Simon Adler. We had original, awesome music, sound design and mixing from Jeremy Bloom. This episode was fact-checked by Dorie Chevlen. Special thanks to Tammy Gagnon, Abbie Swift and everybody at Man Against Horse. And also really quickly want to say both Dennis and Daniel made a point of the fact that a lot of their early theories about humans and endurance running were informed by one of Dennis's students, the guy who wrote that paper. His name is Dave Carrier. And coincidentally, Dave's brother is a man named Scott Carrier who, if you listen to public radio, you might recognize the name. Has been—has had great work on This American Life, also a wonderful podcast called Home of the Brave. Anyways, back in 1998, Scott did this sort of like seminal story about his brother's work, trying to chase down an antelope and a whole lot of things. Anyways, it just felt important to acknowledge the both of them. And yeah, that's about it. This is terrible. Oh, wait. Oh, there's the horse.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Sachi Kitajima Mulkey. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Beth from San Francisco. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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