A specific historical instance rather than a general claim about anybody’s traditions — and two named runners who were hanged for carrying it.
In August 1680, runners went out across what is now New Mexico carrying knotted cords of hide. Each knot was a day; a knot was untied each morning, and the last one would mark the rising.
Two of those runners are named. Nicolás Catua and Pedro Omtua, both young men of Tesuque Pueblo — Taytsugeh Oweengeh — set out on the eighth of August. On the ninth the Spanish captured them, questioned them under torture, and hanged them. They were the first people to die in the revolt.
Their capture is what gave the plan away, so Po’pay, of Ohkay Owingeh, moved the date forward. On the tenth the Pueblos rose and drove the Spanish out for twelve years.
So the tidy version — the last knot untied, everyone rises — is not quite what happened, and the actual version is better: the plan was compromised, and the network of runners was fast enough to change it.9
That is a specific event, in a specific place, run by named people, and it is in the historical record. I am using it rather than a general statement about Indigenous running because general statements are what the first essay said this series would not make.
It is also not over. Tesuque Pueblo marks the anniversary each August with a relay run retracing Catua and Omtua’s route into Santa Fe, and the courtyard of the city’s convention center is dedicated to them.
What it illustrates is not mystical either. It is that running used to be infrastructure. A runner carried what could not travel any other way, and the effort belonged to whoever was waiting for it.
Message-running of this kind is documented across many communities in the Americas, and the practice is described at length by Peter Nabokov, whose book is the standard survey and is the obvious next thing to read.1
The portable version: effort has a different character when someone is actually waiting for it.
The research adjacent to this is on prosocial and self-transcendent motivation. Work framed as benefiting identifiable other people is associated with higher persistence and output than the same work framed in terms of personal benefit.5 The classic demonstrations are small field studies and the effects are moderate, but the direction has held up reasonably.
There is also the self-transcendent purpose work in education, which found that a brief intervention framing schoolwork in terms of contribution beyond the self improved persistence on tedious tasks.6 Small effects, a few studies, and the usual caution about brief interventions.
None of that turns a training run into public service. What it supports is smaller: that “somebody is counting on this” is a more durable fuel than “this is good for me,” and that most people have access to the first and never use it.
Running for other people can become a debt you are working off, and that is a different and worse thing.
The pattern is recognizable: the run dedicated to someone becomes an obligation to someone, missing it becomes a failure toward them, and an activity that was sustaining turns into one more account in arrears. People who are already prone to earning their place will find this teaching lands badly.
There is also the charity-mile problem, where running for a cause becomes a way of feeling useful that is not especially useful. That is not an argument against it — the money is real — but it is worth being clear-eyed about which part is the running and which part is the giving.
The version I would keep is unshowy: know who benefits from you being someone who does this. Frequently it is not an abstraction or a charity. It is a specific person who needs you to be well, and that is usually enough.
Note — when the dedication becomes a debt
The run dedicated becomes the run obligated, missing it becomes a failure toward a person, and something sustaining becomes an account in arrears. People already prone to earning their place should handle this one carefully.
The move is specificity. Abstractions do not carry anyone up a hill.
This series discusses running practices belonging to specific Indigenous nations of the Americas. Where a practice belongs to a named people, it is named; where a source is an Indigenous author, runner or organization speaking publicly about their own tradition, that is said. Ceremonial and religious specifics that those nations have not made public are not discussed here and are not the author’s to convert into technique. General claims about running physiology and psychology are cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.
Running used to be infrastructure, and the effort belonged to whoever was waiting for it. Catua and Omtua were hanged for carrying a message, and the network was fast enough to change the plan without them.
“Somebody is counting on this” is more durable fuel than “this is good for me.” But it turns into a debt easily, and people who already earn their place should use it sparingly.