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March is Women's History Month!

Running The Paleo-Race, Celebrating Meat

Predator or prey? You'll have to choose sides when you take part in a Track Meat event.
Courtesy of Track Meat
Predator or prey? You'll have to choose sides when you take part in a Track Meat event.

Looking for an unusual 5K obstacle race this summer? Feeling a need to reconnect with a 40,000-year-ago paleo lifestyle? Craving some meat?

For anyone who can get to Lake Odessa, Michigan, on August 10, Track Meat may be the event for you.

At Track Meat, competitors will sign up to run as prey or predator. Dressing as "cavemen or cavewomen" is optional.

The organizers' philosophy is pithy enough:

Track Meat is a celebration of our scary, dirty, bloody past, but at the same time, our ancestral connection to nature. It's about good, healthy food and where it comes from–meat appreciation at it's very best! It's about achieving health and fitness through the balanced connection of movement and food. Crazy, healthy good times.

"Crazy" sounds about right to me. "Healthy good times" is not what I'm hearing about meat consumption.

And now I call on the many tribes who make up the 13.7 community to respond: Anthropologists, what do you think? Pescatarians, vegetarians and vegans, what say you? Carnivores, is this your kind of recreation? Let the feast begin.


Barbara's new book is How Animals Grieve. You can up with what she is thinking on Twitter.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Barbara J. King is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. With a long-standing research interest in primate behavior and human evolution, King has studied baboon foraging in Kenya and gorilla and bonobo communication at captive facilities in the United States.