When a person thinks about superheros, certain paradigms come to mind- Superman, the goody-two shoes superstrong alien who can fly and see chicks under their clothes, yet never bangs Lois Lane (could it be she's hiding a cock under that skirt?); Spider-Man, superstrong nerd who got bitten by a radioactive spider and swings around the city banging models and fucking up everyone from aliens to dudes made of nothing but sand; and the Hulk, a nuclear behemoth with the world's worst roid rage, capable of feats of strength that would make Paul Bunyan weep and switch his wardrobe to polka dots. You might think this is all irrelevant fantasyland juvenile bullshit, but it's actually not. One very simple method of determining what people consider to be a laudable physical attribute is looking at what powers superheroes possess. Clearly, there's not a manjack or broad amongst you who doesn't wish you had Wolverine's superhuman healing powers and adamantium claws and skeleton, or the Hulk's insane strength. With either, you're damn near indestructible, able to tear apart your mother-in-law with your pinkies the second she starts berating you for any of the thousand failings she imagines you possess, and you can pretty much own anybody's face at any time. I'd imagine some of you (perhaps those amongst you who are "light of heel" would appreciate the ability to fly. Flying can be kind of cool, since pterodactyls did it, and pterodactyls were a gigantic bag of "holy fuck that's a giant scary bird/bat/fuck I'm dead" awesome.
Some of you, perhaps might even enjoy those other, lesser superpowers associated with travel, like portal creation, teleportation (Nightcrawler was the lamest X-Man ever, but maybe you're a gymnast and you can identify with being a carnie freak) or even superhuman speed. Further down the ladder of cool, right next to the characters in Family Circus and the Go-Bots, were "the runners". The runners of the comic book world generally sucked. Quicksilver was such a lame villain that he became an Avenger, making him more or less a member of the comic worlds' Village People; the Flash, a character who's sucked in four different incarnations over the last century, gave rise to one of the worst television shows of all time, and purveyor of the world's worst fucking catchprase, "My name is Wally West. I'm the fastest man alive."; Speedball, a character so lame that as a child I actually tore comics apart out of frustration that featured him; and a whole host of eminently forgettable, bullshit filler characters spanning every comic company's universe.
Hi! I'm Speedball! How are you? I'm FABULOUS!
Their powers, to a person, consisted by and large of the ability to run really, really fast. They were all a French general's wet dream, capable of retreat at anything from the speed of sound to the speed of light, and occasionally able to do such awe-inspiring things as make a small whirlwind. Eminently useful when fighting supervillians who weight dozens of tons or who can rip worlds in half... right? Nowhere, however, will you find a superhero who can just run a really, really long way at a reasonable pace without getting tired. Know why? Because if you're in a fight and you run at a moderate pace, a really long way, you're retreating. Slowly. Which is about as useful as having your cock suddenly grow to 12 inches just as you become the last human on Earth- it's irony at best.
Superstrength gets you Uma Thurman. Fuck an a right.
Let's look at distance running another way- of all of the creatures on the planet, which ones are generally suited to running long distances very slowly- predators, or prey? Given the fact that lions sleep for up to 20 hours a day, most people should be inclined to go with prey, and they'd be right. Predators, by and large, are heavily muscled, aggressive, meat-eating creatures with binocular vision... much like the readers of this fine blog. Amusingly, even the Roman gods echoed this distinction- Mercury, the messenger god, was also the god associated with grain, and was built like a pre-teen boy. That is, of course, except for the fact that he was occasionally depicted as having three dicks, but you assholes should stop fucking nitpicking- the point is, he was a little-respected and generally bullshit god. Hercules, on the other hand, was as heavily venerated as he was muscled by the Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, and even the Germans, who sang of him first in all of their battle hymns. Rome's enemies certainly weren't singing about their twink jogging god as they waded into the fray against the Centurions... unless it was to mock them.
A jogger in the 19th C wouldn't be caught dead in public without his Penny Farthing!
So why, then, would anyone thing that jogging was a good idea? I've no fucking idea. It's certainly one of the new forms of exercise, arising in the mid-seventeenth century in England... hardly a period of history known for athleticism or really any kind of awesome. Jogging spread slowly (literally) throughout the British Empire until kiwi Arthur Lydiard really popularized it by getting eventual Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman into it. While getting Nike off the ground, Bowerman became the head of the uber-successful University of Oregon's track program, and used that as a springboard to sell books on jogging and Nikes
"But the marathon", you say, "it's ancient!" Sorry, fuckface- no it's fucking not. It didn't get included in the Olympics until the modern era, and only did then because jogging was popular in Britain, and four of the13 founding members of the IOC were British, British colonists, or American. The "original" marathon was done by a herald (read "messenger" of the Greek army who ran 150 miles in two days, followed by another 26 miles thereafter. Given that he did so running to and from battlegrounds, it's likely that he did so in his armor, which weighed up to 50 or 60 lbs. (Hoplite) Thus, he did a three day weighted run of 176 miles, or nearly 60 miles a day. And then died. The longest race in the ancient Olympics was 2.86 miles (24 stades), because the ancient Greeks knew long distance running was fucking stupid. Other pre-industrial people seemed to share that sentiment, as ingenious running events like the Kraho/Xavante log run and Sherpa mountain runs involve running up and down mountains while carrying weights, over distances of a few miles at most.
They run up a mountain with a basket full of rocks strapped to their fucking head.
Why, you ask, wouldn't they run further? Because as we've already examined, the ability to run a long distance slowly is not a laudable goal, anywhere outside of the Schindler's List lookalike conventions that are distance running events. Humans aren't designed for that sort of behavior, and the runners' physiques are a reflection of that fact.
Next time- the science behind my ridiculously compelling argument.
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