Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

  Fisher’s response was to go sort of nuts, just the way he had that time when he was surrounded by drug thugs in the Copper Canyons and only survived by going berserk. “It was a fixed race!” Fisher claimed. “They had a blonde, blue-eyed female they wanted to win, and she didn’t win.” Fisher claimed all the journalists had been bought off with a secret three-day bacchanal funded by the Leadville race directors and held at a luxury resort in Aspen. One journalist even tried to bribe him, Fisher told me, offering Fisher money to get Juan to hold back and tie with Trason. “This journalist, a very reputable guy, said it’s going to be a disaster if he wins, and the fact is, from the point of view of white runners, it was an absolute disaster that the Tarahumara won.” Why? “Because of this sick American idea that women can compete with men.” (Asked the journalist’s name, Fisher refused to answer.)

  Accusing Ken Chlouber and “the elite from the media establishment” of conspiring against the event’s star attraction made no sense at all, but Fisher was just getting warmed up. He claimed that one of his runners had been slipped a drugged Coke that caused him to “collapse and become deathly ill,” while another had been sexually molested by some “white person” who used the pretext of giving a post-workout rub-down to slip his hand under the Tarahumara’s breechcloth and “massage his penis and scrotum.” As for Rockport, Fisher claimed the company’s sponsorship was grudging at best and criminal at worst. “They promised to put a shoe factory in the Copper Canyons … the whole deal was a corrupt deal… when Rockport looked at the books, they found they’d been fleeced and the president of the company was fired …”

  The Tarahumara watched the chabochis scream at each other. They heard the angry words, and saw the angry arms chopping in their direction. The Tarahumara didn’t know what was being said, but they got the message. Faced with anger and hostility, the world’s greatest underground athletes reacted as they always had; they headed back home to their canyons, fading like a dream and taking their secrets with them. After their triumph in 1994, the Tarahumara would never return to Leadville.

  One man followed them. He was never seen in Leadville again either. It was the Tarahumara’s strange new friend, Shaggy—soon to be known as Caballo Blanco, lone wanderer of the High Sierras.

  CHAPTER 17

  And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?

  Those people were some kind of solution.

  —CONSTANTINE CAVAFY, “Waiting for the Barbarians”

  “THAT WAS TEN years ago,” Caballo told me, wrapping up his tale. “And I’ve been here ever since.”

  Mamá had kicked us out of her living-room restaurant hours before and gone to bed. Caballo, still talking, had led me down the deserted streets of Creel and into a back-alley bodega. We closed that place, too. By the time Caballo had brought me from 1994 to the present, it was two in the morning and my head was spinning. He’d told me more than I’d even hoped for about the Tarahumara’s flash across the American ultra landscape (and tipped me to how I could learn the rest by tracking down Rick Fisher, Joe Vigil, and company), but in all those tales, he’d never answered the only question I’d asked:

  Dude, who are you?

  It was as if he’d done nothing in his life before running through the woods with Martimano—or else he’d done plenty he wouldn’t talk about. Every time I probed, he sidestepped with either a joke or a non-answer that slammed the topic shut like a dungeon door (“How do I make money? I do stuff for rich people who won’t do it for themselves”). Then he’d power off on another yarn. The choice was clear; I could be a pest and piss him off, or I could back off and hear some great stories.

  I did learn that after the ’94 Leadville race, Rick Fisher went on the rampage. There were other races out there and other Tarahumara runners, and it wasn’t long before Fisher had regrouped and was careening from mayhem to mayhem like a frat boy on a road trip. First, Team Tarahumara was thrown out of the Angeles Crest 100-Mile Endurance Run in California because Fisher kept barging into a runners-only section of the course in the middle of the race. “The last thing I want to do is disqualify a runner,” the race director said, “but Rick left us no choice.”

  Then, three Tarahumara runners were disqualified after finishing first, second, and fourth in Utah’s Wasatch Front 100 because Fisher had refused to pay the entry fee. Then it was on to Western States, where Fisher threw another finish-line tantrum, accusing race volunteers of secretly switching trail markers to trick the Tarahumara and—true story—stealing their blood. (All the Western States racers were asked for a blood sample as part of a scientific study on endurance, but Fisher alone somehow smelled a ruse and blew up. “The Tarahumara blood is very, very rare,” he’s reported to have said. “The medical world wants to get its hands on it for genetic testing.”)

  By that point, even the Tarahumara seemed to be sick of dealing with the Pescador. They also noticed that he kept trading up for newer and nicer SUVs, while all they got for the long, lonely weeks away from home and their hundreds of miles of mountain running were a few bags of corn. Once again, dealing with the chabochis had left the Tarahumara feeling like slaves. That was the end of Team Tarahumara. They disbanded—forever.

  Micah True (or whatever his name really was) felt such kinship with the Tarahumara and such disgust with the behavior of his fellow Americans that he felt compelled to make amends. Immediately after he’d paced Martimano in the ’94 Leadville race, he talked his way onto a radio station in Boulder, Colorado, and asked anyone with an old coat to come drop it off. Once he had a pile, he bundled them up and set off for the Copper Canyons.

  He had no clue where he was going, putting his odds of actually finding his buddy Martimano on a par with Shackleton making it back from Antarctica. He wandered across the desert and through the canyons, repeating Martimano’s name to anyone he met, until he stunned both himself and Martimano by actually arriving at the top of a nine-thousand-foot mountain and the center of Martimano’s village. The Tarahumara made him welcome in their own wordless way: they barely spoke to him, but when Caballo awoke every morning, he found a little pile of handmade tortillas and fresh pinole by his campsite.

  “The Rarámuri have no money, but nobody is poor,” Caballo said. “In the States, you ask for a glass of water and they take you to a homeless shelter. Here, they take you in and feed you. You ask to camp out, and they say, ‘Sure, but wouldn’t you rather sleep inside with us?’”

  But Choguita gets cold at night, too cold for a skinny guy from California (or wherever he was really from), so after giving away all his coats, Micah waved adiós to Juan and Martimano and struck off on his own, pushing into the warm depths of the canyons. He meandered blindly past drug dens and desperadoes, avoided diseases and canyon fever, and eventually discovered a spot he liked by a bend in the river. He hauled up rocks to build a hut, and made himself at home.

  “I decided I was going to find the best place in the world to run, and that was it,” he told me as we walked back to the hotel that night. “The first view made my jaw drop. I got all excited because I couldn’t wait to get out on the trail. I was so overwhelmed, I didn’t know where to begin. But it’s wild out there. I had to give it some time.”

  He had no choice, anyway. The reason he was pacing at Leadville instead of racing was because his legs had begun betraying him after he turned forty. “I used to have trouble with injuries, especially with my ankle tendons,” Micah said. Over the years, he’d tried every remedy—wraps, massage, more expensive and supportive shoes— but nothing really helped. When he arrived in the Barrancas, he decided to chuck logic and trust that the Tarahumara knew what they were doing. He wasn’t going to take the time to try figuring out their secrets; he’d just tackle it swimming-hole style, by leaping in and hoping for the best.

  He got rid of his running shoes and began wearing nothing but sandals. He started eating pinole for breakfast (after learning how to cook it like oatmeal with water and honey), and carrying it dry with him in
a hip bag during his rambles through the canyons. He took some vicious falls and sometimes barely made it back to his hut on his own two feet, but he just gritted his teeth, soaked his wounds in the icy river, and chalked it up as an investment. “Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked,” Caballo said. “I learned pretty fast you’d better have respect for the Sierra Madre, ’cause she’ll chew you up and crap you out.”

  By his third year, Caballo was tackling trails that were invisible to the non-Tarahumara eye. With butterflies in his stomach, he’d push himself over the lip of jagged descents that were longer, steeper, and more serpentine than any black-diamond ski run. He’d slip-scramble-sprint downhill for miles, barely in control, relying on his canyon-honed reflexes but still awaiting the pop of a knee cartilage, the rip of a hamstring, the fiery burn of a torn Achilles tendon he knew was coming any second.

  But it never came. He never got hurt. After a few years in the canyons, Caballo was stronger, healthier, and faster than he’d ever been in his life. “My whole approach to running has changed since I’ve been here,” he told me. As a test, he tried running a trail through the mountains that takes three days on horseback; he did it in seven hours. He’s not sure how it all came together, what proportions of sandals and pinole and korima, but—

  “Hey,” I interrupted him. “Could you show me?”

  “Show you what?”

  “How to run like that.”

  Something about his smile made me instantly regret asking. “Yeah, I’ll take you for a run,” he said. “Meet me here at sunup.”

  “Huh! Huh!”

  I was trying to shout, but it kept turning into a pant. “Horse,” I finally got out, catching Caballo Blanco’s ear just before he vanished around an uphill bend. We had set out in the hills behind Creel, on a rocky, pine-needled trail climbing through the woods. We’d been running for less than ten minutes and already I was dying for air. It’s not that Caballo is so fast; it’s just that he seems so light, as though he wills himself uphill by mind power instead of muscle.

  He turned and trotted back down. “Okay, man, lesson one. Get right behind me.” He started to jog, more slowly this time, and I tried to copy everything he did. My arms floated until my hands were rib-high; my stride chopped down to pitty-pat steps; my back straightened so much I could almost hear the vertebrae creaking.

  “Don’t fight the trail,” Caballo called back over his shoulder. “Take what it gives you. If you have a choice between one step or two between rocks, take three.” Caballo has spent so many years navigating the trails, he’s even nicknamed the stones beneath his feet: some are ayudantes, the helpers which let you spring forward with power; others are “tricksters,” which look like ayudantes but roll treacherously at takeoff; and some are chingoncitos, little bastards just dying to lay you out.

  “Lesson two,” Caballo called. “Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don’t give a shit how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go. When you’ve practiced that so long that you forget you’re practicing, you work on making it smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one—you get those three, and you’ll be fast.”

  I kept my eyes on Caballo’s sandaled feet, trying to duplicate his odd, sort of tippy-toeing steps. I had my head down so long, I didn’t notice at first that we’d left the forest.

  “Wow!” I exclaimed.

  The sun was just rising over the Sierras. Pine smoke scented the air, rising from dented stovepipes in the lodge-pole shacks on the edge of town. In the distance, giant standing stones like Easter Island statues reared from the mesa floor, with snow-dusted mountains in the background. Even if I hadn’t been sucking wind, I’d have been breathless.

  “I told ya,” Micah gloated.

  We’d hit our turnaround point, but even though I knew it would be foolish for me to try going more than eight miles, it was such a kick loping these trails that I hated heading back. Caballo knew exactly what I meant.

  “I’ve felt that way for ten years,” he said. “And I’m still just learning my way around.” But he had to hustle; he was heading home to his hut that day, and he’d barely have enough time to make it before dark. And that’s when he began to explain what he was doing in Creel in the first place.

  “You know,” Caballo began, “a lot has happened since that Leadville race.” Ultrarunning used to be just a handful of freaks in the woods with flashlights, but over the past few years, it had been transformed by an invasion of Young Guns. Like Karl Meltzer, who rocked “Strangelove” through his iPod while winning the Hard rock 100 three times in a row; and the “Dirt Diva,” Catra Corbett, a beautiful and kaleidoscopically-tattooed Goth chick who once, just for fun, ran all 211 miles of the John Muir trail across Yosemite National Park and then turned around and ran all the way back; and Tony “Naked Guy” Krupicka, who rarely wore more than skimpy shorts and spent a year sleeping in a friend’s closet while training to win the Leadville 100; and the Fabulous Flying Skaggs Brothers, Eric and Kyle, who hitchhiked to the Grand Canyon before setting a new record for the fastest round-trip run from rim to rim.

  These Young Guns wanted something fresh, tough, and exotic, and they were flocking to trail-running in such numbers that, by 2002, it had become the fastest-growing outdoor sport in the country. It wasn’t just the racing they loved; it was the thrill of exploring the brave new world of their own bodies. Ultra god Scott Jurek summed up the Young Guns’ unofficial creed with a quote from William James he stuck on the end of every e-mail he sent: “Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”

  As the Young Guns took to the woods, they brought everything that had been learned about sports science over the past decade. Matt Carpenter, a mountain runner in Colorado Springs, began spending hundreds of hours on a treadmill to measure the variations in body oscillations when, for instance, he took a sip of water (the most bio-mechanically efficient way to hold a water bottle was tucked into his armpit, not held in his hand). Carpenter used a belt sander and a straight razor to shave micro-ounces off his running shoes and plunged them in and out of the bathtub to gauge water retention and drying speed. In 2005, he used his obsessive knowledge to blast the record at Leadville—he finished in a stunning 15:42, nearly two hours faster than the fastest Tarahumara ever had.

  But! What could the Tarahumara do if pushed? See, that’s what Caballo wanted to know. Victoriano and Juan had run like hunters, the way they’d been taught: just fast enough to capture their quarry and no faster. Who knew how much faster they might have gone against a guy like Carpenter? And no one knew what they could do on their home terrain. As defending champs, didn’t they deserve the right to the home-field advantage at least once?

  If the Tarahumara couldn’t go back to America, Caballo reasoned, then the Americans would have to come to the Tarahumara. But he knew the fiercely shy canyon-dwellers would vanish back into the hills if surrounded by a pack of question-firing, camera-clicking American runners.

  However—and this was Caballo’s brainstorm—what if he set up a race the Tarahumara way? It would be like an old-time guitar picker’s battle—a week of sparring, trading secrets, studying each other’s style and techniques. On the last day, all the runners would face off in a 50- mile clash of champions.

  It was a great idea—and a total joke, of course. No elite runner would take the risk; it wasn’t just career suicide, it was suicide suicide. Just to get to the starting line, they’d have to slip past bandits, hike through the badlands, keep an eagle eye on every sip of water and every bite of food. If they got hurt, they were dead; not right away, maybe, but inevitably. They could be days from the nearest road and hours from fresh water, with no chance for a rescue chopper to thread its way between those tight rock
walls.

  No matter: Caballo had already begun working on his plan. That’s the only reason he was in Creel. He’d left his hut at the bottom of the canyons and trekked into a town he loathed because he’d heard there was a PC with a dial-up connection in the back of a Creel candy shop. He’d learned some computer basics, gotten an e-mail account, and had begun sending messages to the outside world. And that’s where I came in; the only reason “the gringo Indio” had gotten interested when I ambushed him back at the hotel was because I told him I was a writer. Maybe an article about his race would actually attract some racers.

  “So who are you inviting?” I asked.

  “Just one guy so far,” he said. “I only want runners with the right spirit, real champions. So I’ve been messaging Scott Jurek.”

  Scott Jurek? Seven-time Western States champ and three-peat Ultrarunner of the Year Scott Jurek? Caballo had to be high out of his skull if he thought Scott Jurek was coming down here to race a bunch of nobodies in the middle of nowhere. Scott was the top ultra-runner in the country, maybe in the world, arguably of all time. When Scott Jurek wasn’t racing, he was helping Brooks design their signature trail shoe, the Cascadia, or setting up sold-out running camps, or making decisions about what high-profile event he’d run next in Japan, Switzerland, Greece, or France. Scott Jurek was a business enterprise that lived and died by the health of Scott Jurek— which meant the last thing the company’s chief asset needed to do was risk getting sick, shot, or defeated in some half-assed pickup race in a sniper-patrolled corner of the Mexican outback.

  But somewhere, Caballo had read an interview with Jurek and felt an instant thrum of brotherhood. In his own way, Scott was nearly as mysterious as Caballo. While far lesser ultra stars like Dean Karnazes and Pam Reed were touting themselves on TV, writing self-glorifying memoirs, and (in Dean’s case) promoting a sports drink by running bare-chested on a sky-cammed treadmill over Times Square, the greatest American ultrarunner of them all was virtually invisible. He seemed to be a pure racing animal, which explained two of his other peculiar habits: at the start of every race, he’d let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and after he won, he’d roll in the dirt like a hyperactive hound. Then he’d get up, brush himself off, and vanish back to Seattle until it was time for his war cry to echo through the dark again.