Persistence Running

Persistence Running
is an ideology Csaba Lucas has developed based on his three decades of experience coaching world class athletes, examining traditional hunter-gatherer cultures, and practicing running both competitively and recreationally.

Csaba’s Persistence Running principles ring true to most people once they are exposed to them.

These principles and the process are not based on only theories, but iron-clad logic based on a unique mix of science, archeology and experience.

While practicing the Persistence Running principles the practices become joyful.

The movement of running structurally feels ‘right’.

Practicing Persistence Running won’t just make you fall in love with the hardwired human activity of running, which your body was designed to practice regularly, but will also help you to reach your optimal health.

Basic Persistent Running Principles

• Head positioning is based on the original purpose of running: tracking to hunt.

• Involvement of proper breathing with emphasis on nose breathing, partially due to proper parasympathetic nervous system activation and partially due to physical orientation via smelling.

• Constantly changing foot placement, ankle positioning, knee usage and the overall change of the running gait.

• Foot conditioning and establishing proper proprioception via the sole of the foot: a.k.a by being barefoot

• Self-monitoring with internal measuring awareness, as opposed to performance monitoring with external devices, such as heart-rate monitors or watches.

This cutting edge yet primordial way of using your running gait has worked for our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years, including the San people in sub-Saharan Africa, the Tarahumara Indians of South America, the Aboriginals in Australia and even for the highly specialized, reindeer-hurdler Chukchies in Asia.

Persistence Running still continues to be used by a few other existing hunter-gatherer masters of running, but it is time for us in the Western World to rediscover this hidden genius of our own bodies.

You were born without shoes.

Play around with the concept of not wearing these odd ‘casts’ around your feet, first in your mind, then try it out practically as well.

Once you re-learn to run this ancient way you can never go back (nor would you want to) to running the way (almost) everyone is running today.