Luckily, a group of Leadville llama farmers shrugged and said, Eh, what the hell. Sounded like a party. They loaded their llamas with enough food and booze to make it through the weekend, and hammered in tent stakes at 12,600 feet. Since then, the Hopeless Crew has grown into an army eighty-some strong of llama owners and friends. For two days, they endure fierce winds and frostbitten fingers while dispensing first aid and hot soup, packing injured runners out by llama and partying in between like a tribe of amiable yetis. “Hope Pass is a bad son of a bitch on a good day,” Ken says. “If it weren’t for those llamas, we’d have lost a good many lives.”
Juan and Martimano shyly returned high fives as they jogged through the raucous Hopeless gauntlet. They stopped to drink in the sight of the weird gypsy camp (as well as cups of some really tasty noodle soup someone shoved into their hands), then began quick-stepping down the back side of the mountain. Ann was nowhere to be seen.
Ann hit the fifty-mile mark at 12:05 p.m., nearly two hours ahead of Victoriano’s time from the previous year. Carl loaded her up with sports drink and Cytomax carbohydrate gel, then snapped on his own fanny pack and gave his shoelaces a tug. According to Leadville rules, a “mule” can run alongside a racer for the last fifty miles, which meant Ann would now have a personal pit crew by her side all the way to the finish.
A good pacer is a huge help during an ultra, and Ann had one of the best: not only was Carl fast enough to push her, but experienced enough to take over if Ann’s brain fritzed out. After twenty or so hours of nonstop running, an ultrarunner can get too mind numb to replace flashlight batteries, or comprehend trail markers, or even, in the unfortunate true case of a Badwater runner in 2005, distinguish between an imminent bowel movement and an occurring one.
And those are the runners who are really keeping it together. Hallucinations are no strangers to the rest; one ultrarunner kept screaming and leaping into the woods whenever he saw a flashlight, convinced it was an oncoming train. One runner enjoyed the company of a smokin’ young hottie in a silver bikini who Rollerbladed by his side for miles across Death Valley until, to his regret, she dissolved into heat shimmers. Six out of twenty Badwater runners reported hallucinations that year, including one who saw rotting corpses along the road and “mutant mice monsters” crawling over the asphalt. One pacer got a little freaked out after she saw her runner stare into space for a while and then tell the empty air, “I know you’re not real.”
A tough pacer, consequently, can save your race; a sharp one can save your life. Too bad for Martimano, then, that the best he could hope for was that the shaggy goofball he’d met in town would actually show up—and could actually run.
The night before, Rick Fisher had brought the Tarahumara to a prerace spaghetti dinner at the Leadville VFW hall to see if he could recruit a few pacers. It wouldn’t be easy; pacing is so grueling and thankless, usually only family, fools, and damn good friends let themselves get talked into it. The job means shivering in the middle of nowhere for hours until your runner shows up, then setting off at sunset for an all-night run through wind-whistling mountains. You’ll get blood on your shins, vomit on your shoes, and not even a T-shirt for completing two marathons in a single night. Other job requirements can include staying awake while your runner catches a nap in the mud; popping a blood blister between her butt cheeks with your fingernails; and surrendering your jacket, even though your teeth are chattering, because her lips have gone blue.
At the spaghetti dinner, Martimano locked eyes with some longhaired local who, for some bizarre reason, immediately began cracking up. Martimano started laughing, too; he found the shaggy guy totally cool and hilarious. “It’s you and me, brother,” Shaggy said. “You follow? Tú and yo. If you want a mule, I’m your man.”
“Whoa, whoa, hang on,” Fisher interjected. “You sure you’re fast enough for these guys?”
“You’re not doing me any favor,” Shaggy shrugged. “Who else you got lined up?”
“Yeah,” Fisher said. “Okay, then.”
And just as he’d promised, Shaggy was hollering and waving by the aid station the next afternoon when Juan and Martimano came running into the fifty-mile turnaround. They took a long, cool drink of water and grabbed some pinole and thin bean burritos from Kitty Williams. Rick Fisher had also roped in another pacer, an elite ultra-runner from San Diego who’d been a longtime student of Tarahumara lore. The four runners traded Tarahumara handshakes—that soft caressing of fingertips—and turned toward Hope Pass. Ann was already out of sight.
“Saddle up, guys,” Shaggy said. “Let’s go get the bruja.”
Juan and Martimano barely understood anything the guy said, but they caught that all right: Shaggy was calling Ann a witch. They looked closely to see if he was serious, decided he wasn’t, and started laughing. This guy was going to be a kick.
“Yeah, she’s a bruja, but that’s cool,” Shaggy went on. “We’ve got stronger mojo. You understand that, mojo? No? Doesn’t matter. We’re gonna run the bruja down like a deer. Like a venado. Yeah, a venado. Got it? We’re gonna run the bruja down like a venado. Poco a poco—little bit at a time.”
But the bruja wasn’t backing off. By the time she summited Hope Pass for the second time, Ann had widened her lead from four minutes to seven. “I was heading up Hope Pass, and she just blew by me going the other direction—vroo-o-o-om!” a Leadville runner named Glen Vaassen later told Runner’s World. “She was cruisin’.”
She threaded her way to the bottom of the switchbacks and plunged back through the Arkansas River, fighting to keep from being swept downstream in the waist-deep water. It was 2:31 p.m. when she and Carl arrived back at the Twin Lakes fire station at mile 60. Ann checked in, got her medical clearance, and trudged up the twenty-foot dirt ramp to the trailhead. By the time Shaggy and the Tarahumara arrived, Ann had been gone for twelve minutes.
Coincidentally, Ken Chlouber was just arriving at the Twin Lakes aid station heading outbound when Juan and Martimano came through on their return trip. Everyone in the firehouse was buzzing about Ann’s record pace and ever-growing lead, but as Ken watched Juan and Martimano exit the firehouse, he was struck by something else: when they hit the dirt ramp, they hit it laughing.
“Everybody else walks that hill,” Chlouber thought, as Juan and Martimano churned up the slope like kids playing in a leaf pile. “Everybody. And they sure as hell ain’t laughin’ about it.”
CHAPTER 15
The flesh about my body felt soft and relaxed, like an experiment in functional background music.
—RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, Trout Fishing in America
“SUCH A SENSE of joy!” marveled Coach Vigil, who’d never seen anything like it, either. “It was quite remarkable.” Glee and determination are usually antagonistic emotions, yet the Tarahumara were brimming with both at once, as if running to the death made them feel more alive.
Vigil had been furiously taking mental notes (Look how they point their toes down, not up, like gymnasts doing the floor exercise. And their backs! They could carry water buckets on their heads without spilling a drop! How many years have I been telling my kids to straighten up and run from the gut like that?). But it was the smiles that really jolted him.
That’s it! Vigil thought, ecstatic. I found it!
Except he wasn’t sure what “it” was. The revelation he’d been hoping for was right in front of his eyes, but he couldn’t quite grasp it; he could only catch the glim around the edges, like spotting the cover of a rare book in a candlelit library. But whatever “it” was, he knew it was exactly what he was looking for.
Over the previous few years, Vigil had become convinced that the next leap forward in human endurance would come from a dimension he dreaded getting into: character. Not the “character” other coaches were always rah-rah-rah-ing about; Vigil wasn’t talking about “grit” or “hunger” or “the size of the fight in the dog.” In fact, he meant the exact opposite. Vigil’s notion of character wasn’t toughness. It was compas
sion. Kindness. Love.
That’s right: love.
Vigil knew it sounded like hippie-dippy drivel, and make no mistake, he’d have been much happier sticking to good, hard, quantifiable stuff like VO2 max and periodized-training tables. But after spending nearly fifty years researching performance physiology, Vigil had reached the uncomfortable conclusion that all the easy questions had been answered; he was now learning more and more about less and less. He could tell you exactly how much of a head start Kenyan teenagers had over Americans (eighteen thousand miles run in training). He’d discovered why those Russian sprinters were leaping off ladders (besides strengthening lateral muscles, the trauma teaches nerves to fire more rapidly, which decreases the odds of training injuries). He’d parsed the secret of the Peruvian peasant diet (high altitude has a curious effect on metabolism), and he could talk for hours about the impact of a single percentage point in oxygen-consumption efficiency.
He’d figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors’ backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you’d ever be hassled for going too fast.
That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man.
Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else. And like everything else we love—everything we sentimentally call our “passions” and “desires”—it’s really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We’re all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.
But the American approach—ugh. Rotten at its core. It was too artificial and grabby, Vigil believed, too much about getting stuff and getting it now: medals, Nike deals, a cute butt. It wasn’t art; it was business, a hard-nosed quid pro quo. No wonder so many people hated running; if you thought it was only a means to an end—an investment in becoming faster, skinnier, richer—then why stick with it if you weren’t getting enough quo for your quid?
It wasn’t always like that—and when it wasn’t, we were awesome. Back in the ’70s, American marathoners were a lot like the Tarahumara; they were a tribe of isolated outcasts, running for love and relying on raw instinct and crude equipment. Slice the top off a ’70s running shoe, and you had a sandal: the old Adidas and Onitsuka Tigers were just a flat sole and laces, with no motion control, no arch support, no heel pad. The guys in the ’70s didn’t know enough to worry about “pronation” and “supination”; that fancy running-store jargon hadn’t even been invented yet.
Their training was as primitive as their shoes. They ran way too much: “We ran twice a day, sometimes three times,” Frank Shorter would recall. “All we did was run—run, eat, and sleep.” They ran way too hard: “The modus operandi was to let a bunch of competitive guys have at each other every day in a form of road rage,” one observer put it. And they were waaay too buddy-buddy for so-called competitors: “We liked running together,” recalled Bill Rodgers, a chieftain of the ’70s tribe and four-time Boston Marathon champ. “We had fun with it. It wasn’t a grind.”
They were so ignorant, they didn’t even realize they were supposed to be burned out, overtrained, and injured. Instead, they were fast; really fast. Frank Shorter won the ’72 Olympic marathon gold and the ’76 silver, Bill Rodgers was the No. I ranked marathoner in the world for three years, and Alberto Salazar won Boston, New York, and the Comrades ultramarathon. By the early ’80s, the Greater Boston Track Club had half a dozen guys who could run a 2:12 marathon. That’s six guys, in one amateur club, in one city. Twenty years later, you couldn’t find a single 2:12 marathoner anywhere in the country. The United States couldn’t even get one runner to meet the 2:14 qualifying standard for the 2000 Olympics; only Rod DeHaven squeaked into the games under the 2:15 “B” standard. He finished sixty-ninth.
So what happened? How did we go from leader of the pack to lost and left behind? It’s hard to determine a single cause for any event in this complex world, of course, but forced to choose, the answer is best summed up as follows:
$
Sure, plenty of people will throw up excuses about Kenyans having some kind of mutant muscle fiber, but this isn’t about why other people got faster; it’s about why we got slower. And the fact is, American distance running went into a death spiral precisely when cash entered the equation. The Olympics were opened to professionals after the 1984 Games, which meant running-shoe companies could bring the distance-running savages out of the wilderness and onto the payroll reservation.
Vigil could smell the apocalypse coming, and he’d tried hard to warn his runners. “There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.
Vigil wasn’t beating his chest about the purity of poverty, or fantasizing about a monastic order of moneyless marathoners. Shoot, he wasn’t even sure he had a handle on the problem, let alone the solution. All he wanted was to find one Natural Born Runner—someone who ran for sheer joy, like an artist in the grip of inspiration—and study how he or she trained, lived, and thought. Whatever that thinking was, maybe Vigil could transplant it back into American culture like an heirloom seedling and watch it grow wild again.
Vigil already had the perfect prototype. There was this Czech soldier, a gawky dweeb who ran with such horrendous form that he looked “as if he’d just been stabbed through the heart,” as one sports-writer put it. But Emil Zatopek loved running so much that even when he was still a grunt in army boot camp, he used to grab a flashlight and go off on twenty- mile runs through the woods at night.
In his combat boots.
In winter.
After a full day of infantry drills.
When the snow was too deep, Zatopek would jog in the tub on top of his dirty laundry, getting a resistance workout along with clean tighty whities. As soon as it thawed enough for him to get outside, he’d go nuts; he’d run four hundred meters as fast as he could, over and over, for ninety repetitions, resting in between by jogging two hundred meters. By the time he was finished, he’d done more than thirty-three miles of speedwork. Ask him his pace, and he’d shrug; he never timed himself. To build explosiveness, he and his wife, Dana, used to play catch with a javelin, hurling it back and forth to each other across a soccer field like a long, lethal Frisbee. One of Zatopek’s favorite workouts combined all his loves at once: he’d jog through the woods in his army boots with his ever-loving wife riding on his back.
It was all a waste of time, of course. The Czechs were like the Zimbabwean bobsled team; they had no tradition,
no coaching, no native talent, no chance of winning. But being counted out was liberating; having nothing to lose left Zatopek free to try any way to win. Take his first marathon: everyone knows the best way to build up to 26.2 miles is by running long, slow distances. Everyone, that is, except Emil Zatopek; he did hundred- yard dashes instead.
“I already know how to go slow,” he reasoned. “I thought the point was to go fast.” His atrocious, death-spasming style was punch-line heaven for track scribes (“The most frightful horror spectacle since Frankenstein.” … “He runs as if his next step would be his last.” … “He looks like a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt”), but Zatopek just laughed along. “I’m not talented enough to run and smile at the same time,” he’d say. “Good thing it’s not figure skating. You only get points for speed, not style.”
And dear God, was he a Chatty Cathy! Zatopek treated competition like it was speed dating. Even in the middle of a race, he liked to natter with other runners and try out his smattering of French and English and German, causing one grouchy Brit to complain about Zatopek’s “incessant talking.” At away meets, he’d sometimes have so many new friends in his hotel room that he’d have to give up his bed and sleep outside under a tree. Once, right before an international race, he became pals with an Australian runner who was hoping to break the Australian 5,000- meter record. Zatopek was only entered in the 10,000- meter race, but he came up with a plan; he told the Aussie to drop out of his race and line up next to Zatopek instead. Zatopek spent the first half of the 10,000- meter race pacing his new buddy to the record, then sped off to attend to his own business and win.
That was pure Zatopek, though; races for him were like a pub crawl. He loved competing so much that instead of tapering and peaking, he jumped into as many meets as he could find. During a manic stretch in the late ’40s, Zatopek raced nearly every other week for three years and never lost, going 69-0. Even on a schedule like that, he still averaged up to 165 miles a week in training.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen Page 10
