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

by Christopher McDougall

  Now that was the kind of champion Caballo was looking for; not some showboat who’d use the Tarahumara to boost his own brand, but a true student of the sport who appreciated the artistry and effort in even the slowest runner’s performance. Caballo didn’t need any more proof of Scott Jurek’s worthiness, but he got it anyway: asked at the end of the interview to list his idols, Jurek named the Tarahumara. “For inspiration,” the article noted, “he repeats a saying of the Tarahumara Indians: ‘When you run on the earth and run with the earth, you can run forever.’”

  “See!” Caballo insisted. “He has a Rarámuri soul.”

  But hold on a sec…. “Even if Scott Jurek does agree to come, how about the Tarahumara?” I asked. “Will they go for it?”

  “Maybe,” Caballo shrugged. “The guy I want is Arnulfo Quimare.”

  This thing was never going to happen. I knew from personal experience that Arnulfo would barely even talk to an outsider, let alone hang with a whole gang of them for a week and guide them over the hidden trails of his homeland. I admired Caballo’s taste and ambition, but I seriously questioned his grasp of reality. No American runners knew who he was, and most of the Tarahumara weren’t sure what he was. Yet he was expecting them all to trust him?

  “I’m pretty sure Manuel Luna will come,” Caballo continued. “Maybe with his son.”

  “Marcelino?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Caballo said. “He’s good.”

  “He’s awesome!”

  I still had an after-image on my retina of the teenage Human Torch surging over that dirt trail as fast as a flame along a fuse. Well, in that case, who cared if Scott Jurek or any of the other hotshots showed up? Just the chance to run alongside Manuel and Marcelino and Caballo again would be worth it. The way Caballo and Marcelino ran, it was the closest a human could come to flying. I’d gotten just a taste of it out there on the trails of Creel, and I wanted more; it was like flapping your arms really hard and lifting a half inch off the ground—after that, how could you think of anything except trying again?

  “I can do this,” I told myself. Caballo had been in the same position I was in when he came down here; he was a guy in his forties with busted-up legs, and within a year, he was sky-walking across mountaintops. If it worked for him, why not me? If I really applied the techniques he’d taught me, could I get strong enough to run fifty miles through the Copper Canyons? The odds against his race coming off were roughly—actually, there were no odds. It wasn’t going to happen. But if by some miracle he managed to set up a run with the top Tarahumara of their generation, I wanted to be there.

  When we got back to Creel, Caballo and I shook hands.

  “Thanks for the lessons,” I said. “You taught me a lot.”

  “Hasta luego, norawa,” Caballo replied. Till the next time, buddy. And then he was off.

  I watched him go. There was something terribly sad, yet terribly uplifting, about watching this prophet of the ancient art of distance running turning his back on everything except his dream, and heading back down to “the best place in the world to run.”

  Alone.

  CHAPTER 18

  “YOU EVER HEARD of Caballo Blanco?”

  After I got back from Mexico, I called Don Allison, the longtime editor of UltraRunning magazine. Caballo had let slip two details about his past worth following up: he’d been a pro fighter of some kind, and he’d won a few ultraraces. Fighting is insanely difficult to fact-check, what with its tangled ganglion of disciplines and accrediting bodies, but in ultrarunning, all roads lead to Don Allison in Weymouth, Massachusetts. As the clearinghouse for every rumor, race result, and rising star in the sport, Don Allison knew everyone and everything, and that’s what made the first syllable out of his mouth doubly disappointing:

  “Who?”

  “I think he also goes by Micah True,” I said. “But I’m not sure if that’s really his name or his dog’s.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Yeah, hang on,” Allison finally responded. “I was just looking for something. So is he for real?”

  “You mean, is he serious?”

  “No, is he real? Does he really exist?

  “Yeah, he’s real. I found him down in Mexico.”

  “Okay,” Allison said. “Then is he crazy?”

  “No, he’s—” Now it was my turn to pause. “I don’t think so.”

  “Because a guy by that name sent me a couple of articles. That’s what I was looking for. I got to tell you, they were just unprintable.”

  Now that’s saying something. UltraRunning is less like a magazine and more like those chatty family letters some people send instead of Christmas cards. Maybe 80 percent of every issue is made up of lists of names and times, the results of races no one ever heard of in places few but ultrarunners could ever find. Besides race reports, every issue has a few essays volunteered by runners opining on their latest obsessions, like “Using the Scale to Determine Your Optimum Hydration Needs” or “Headlamp and Flashlight Combinations.” Needless to say, you’ve got to work hard to earn a rejection slip from Ultra-Running, which made me afraid to even ask what Caballo, isolated in his hut like the Unabomber, had manifestoed about.

  “Was he, like, threatening or something?”

  “Nah,” Allison said. “It just wasn’t about running. It was more like a lecture on brotherhood and karma and greedy gringos.”

  “Did it mention this race he’s planning?”

  “Yeah, it talked about some race with the Tarahumara. But as far as I can see, he’s the only one in it. Him, and about three Indians.”

  Coach Joe Vigil had never heard of Caballo, either. I’d hoped that maybe they’d met on that epic day in Leadville, or later on down in the Barrancas. But right after the Leadville race, Coach Vigil’s life had taken a sudden and dramatic turn. It started with a phone call: a young woman was on the line, asking if Coach Vigil could help her qualify for the Olympics. She’d been pretty talented in college, but she’d gotten so sick of running that she’d given it up and was thinking of opening a bakery café instead. Unless Coach Vigil thought she should keep trying …?

  Vigil is a master motivator, so he knew just what to say: Forget it. Go make mochaccinos. Deena Kastor (then Drossin) sounded like a sweet kid, but she had no business even thinking about working with Vigil. She was a California beach girl who was used to running out her front door and along the Santa Monica trails under a warm Pacific sun. What Vigil had going was real Spartan warrior stuff—a survival-of-the-fittest program that combined a killer workload with the freezing, windswept Colorado mountains.

  “I tried to discourage her because Alamosa is not a California town,” Vigil would later say. “It’s a little secluded, it’s in the mountains, and it gets cold—sometimes thirty degrees below zero. Only the toughest people survive there in terms of running.” When Deena showed up anyway, Vigil was kind enough to reward her persistence by testing her basic fitness and training potential. The results did nothing to change Vigil’s mind: she was mediocre.

  But the more Coach Vigil pushed her away, the more intrigued Deena became. Posted on the wall of Vigil’s office was a magic formula for fast running that, as far as Deena could tell, had absolutely nothing to do with running: it was stuff like “Practice abundance by giving back,” and “Improve personal relationships,” and “Show integrity to your value system.” Vigil’s dietary advice was just as bare of sports or science. His nutrition strategy for an Olympic marathon hopeful was this: “Eat as though you were a poor person.”

  Vigil was building his own mini Tarahumara world. Until he could wrap up his commitments and decamp to the Copper Canyons, he would do his best to re-create the Copper Canyons in Colorado. If Deena even wanted to think about training under Vigil, she had better be ready to train like the Tarahumara. That meant living lean and building her soul as much as her strength.

  Deena got it, and couldn’t wait to start. Coach Vigil believed you had to become
a strong person before you could become a strong runner. So how could she lose? Grudgingly, Coach Vigil decided to give her a chance. In 1996, he began putting her through his Tarahumara-tinged training system. Within a year, the aspiring baker was on her way to becoming one of the greatest distance runners in American history.

  She crushed the field to win the national cross-country championships, and went on to break the U.S. record in distances from three miles to the marathon. At the 2004 Athens Games, Deena outlasted the world-record holder, Paula Radcliffe, to win the bronze, the first Olympic medal for an American marathoner in twenty years. Ask Joe Vigil about Deena’s accomplishments, though, and near the top of the list will always be the Humanitarian Athlete of the Year award she won in 2002.

  Bit by bit, Coach Vigil was being drawn deeper into American distance running and further from his Copper Canyon plans. Before the 2004 Games, he was asked to establish a training camp for Olympic hopefuls high in the California mountains at Mammoth Lakes. It was a ton of work for a seventy-five-year-old man, and Vigil paid for it: a year before the Olympics, he suffered a heart attack and needed a triple bypass. His last chance to learn from the Tarahumara, Vigil realized, was gone for good.

  That left only one researcher in the world who was still pursuing the secret art of Tarahumara running: Caballo Blanco, whose findings were archived only in his muscle memory.

  When my article came out in Runner’s World, it sparked a good bit of interest in the Tarahumara, but something less than a stampede of elite trail-runners eager to sign up for Caballo’s race. Something less than one, to be exact.

  That may have been partly my fault; I found it impossible to describe him truthfully without using the word “cadaverous,” or mentioning that the Tarahumara called him “kind of strange.” No matter how psyched you might have been about the race, consequently, you’d have to think twice about putting your life in the hands of a mysterious loner with a fake name whose closest friends lived in caves and ate mice and still considered him the iffy one.

  It was no help, either, that it was so hard to find out where and when the race might actually take place. Caballo had gotten his Web site up, but swapping messages with him was like waiting for a note in a bottle to drift up on the beach. To check e-mail, Caballo had to run more than thirty miles over a mountain and wade through a river to the tiny town of Urique, where he’d cajoled a schoolteacher into letting him use the school’s creaking PC and its single dial-up line. He could make the sixty-some-mile round trip only in good weather; otherwise he risked slipping to his death off a rain-slicked cliff or getting stranded between raging creeks. Phone service had just reached Urique in 2002, so maintenance was spotty at best; a trail-weary Caballo could arrive in Urique only to find the line had been down for days. Once, he missed checking messages because he’d been attacked by wild dogs and had to abort his trip to go in search of rabies shots.

  Just seeing “Caballo Blanco” pop up in my in-box was always a huge relief. As nonchalant as he acted about the risks, Caballo was leading an extremely dangerous life. Every time he set out for a run, it could be his last; he liked to believe the drug assassins wrote him off as a harmless “gringo Indio,” but who knew how the drug assassins felt? Plus, there were his strange fainting spells: every once in a while, Caballo would suddenly pass out cold. Random blackouts are risky enough when you live in a place with 911, but out there in the lonely vastness of the Barrancas, an unconscious Caballo would never be spotted—or missed, for that matter. He once had a close call when he fainted shortly after running to a village. When he came to, he found a thick bandage on the back of his head and blood caked in his hair. If he’d gone down just half an hour earlier, he’d have been sprawled somewhere in the wilderness with a cracked skull.

  Even if he survived the snipers and his own treacherous blood pressure, death was still lurking at his feet; all it would take was one misjudged chingoncito on one of those dental-floss Tarahumara trails, and the only thing left of Caballo would be the echo of his screams as he disappeared into the gorge.

  Nothing stopped him. Running seemed to be the only sensual pleasure in his life, and as such, he savored it less like a workout and more like a gourmet meal. Even when his hut was nearly demolished by a landslide, Caballo snuck in a run before getting the roof back over his head.

  But come spring, disaster struck. I got this email:

  hey amigo, am in Urique after an eventful run and hobble down. I fucked my left ankle for the first time in many years! I’m not used to running with thick soles anymore. thats what I get for bragging, and wearing shoes while trying to save my light sandals for running faster and racing! Was 10 miles from Urique en La Sierra and knew that snap was not good, had to painfully crawl down into Urique because I had no choice but to get here, and my left foot looks like elephantitis!

  Crap. I had a sick suspicion his accident was my fault. Just before we’d said good-bye in Creel, I noticed we had the same size feet, so I fished a pair of new Nike trail shoes out of my backpack and gave them to Caballo as a thank-you gift. He’d knotted the laces and slung them over his shoulder, figuring they might come in handy in a pinch if his sandals fell apart. He was too polite to point the finger in his accident report, but I was pretty sure he was referring to my shoes when he mentioned he’d been wobbling around on thick soles when he crunched his ankle.

  By this point, I was cringing with guilt. I was screwing Caballo in every direction. First, I’d accidentally set a time bomb by giving him those sneaks, and then I’d written an article that made his eccentricities a little too public for PR purposes. Caballo was killing himself to make this thing happen, and now, after months of effort, the only one who might show up was me: the lousy, half-lame runner bringing him the most grief.

  Caballo had been able to blind himself to the truth in the pleasure of his rambling runs, but as he lay hurt and helpless in Urique, reality came crashing down. You can’t live the way he did without looking like a freak, and now he was paying the price: no one would take him seriously. He wasn’t even sure if he could persuade the Tarahumara to trust him, and they were just about the only people in the world who knew him anymore. So what was the point? Why was he chasing a dream everyone else thought was a joke?

  If he hadn’t busted his ankle, he’d have waited a long time for his answer. But as it was, he was still recovering in Urique when he received a message from God. The only god he’d been praying to, at least.

  CHAPTER 19

  I always start these events with very lofty goals,

  like I’m going to do something special. And after a point

  of body deterioration, the goals get evaluated down to

  basically where I am now—where the best I can hope for is

  to avoid throwing up on my shoes.

  —Nuclear engineer and ultrarunner EPHRAIM ROMESBERG, sixty-five miles into the Badwater Ultramarathon

  A FEW DAYS EARLIER, in the tiny Seattle apartment he shared with his wife and a mountain of trophies, America’s greatest ultrarunner was also confronting the limits of his own body.

  That body still looked great; it was plenty fine enough to turn women’s heads whenever Scott Jurek and his willowy blonde wife, Leah, were pedaling around their Capitol Hill neighborhood, hitting the bookstores and coffee shops and their favorite vegan Thai restaurants, a beautiful young hipster couple on the mountain bikes they owned instead of a car. Scott was tall and supplely muscled, with soulful brown eyes and a boy-band smile. He hadn’t cut his hair since Leah gave him a buzz cut before his first Western States victory, leaving him six years later with a headful of Greek god curls that rippled when he ran.

  How the gangly geek known as “Jerker” became an ultra star still baffles those who knew him growing up back in Proctor, Minnesota. “We harassed the crap out of him,” said Dusty Olson, Proctor’s star jock when he and Scott were teenagers. During cross-country runs, Dusty and his buddies would pelt Scott with mud and take off. “He could never catch
up,” Dusty said. “No one could understand why he was so slow, because Jerker trained harder than anyone.”

  Not that Scott had much time for training. When he was in grade school, his mother contracted multiple sclerosis. It was up to Scott, as the oldest of three kids, to nurse his mother after school, clean the house, and haul logs for the woodstove while his father was at work. Years later, ultrarunning vets would sniff at Scott’s starting-line screams and flying kung-fu leaps into aid stations. But when you’ve spent your childhood working like a deckhand and watching your mother sink into a nightmare of pain, maybe you never get over the joy of leaving everything behind and running for the hills.

  After his mother had to be moved to a nursing home, Scott found himself alone with empty afternoons and a troubled heart. Luckily, just when Scott needed a friend, Dusty needed a sidekick. They were an odd couple, but oddly well-suited; Dusty was hungry for adventure, Scott for escape. Dusty’s taste for competition was insatiable; soon after he won both the junior nationals for Nordic skiing and the regional cross-country championship, he convinced Scott to join him in the Minnesota Voyageur Trail Ultra 50- Mile Footrace. “Yeah, I conned him into it,” Dusty said. Scott had never run half that distance but revered Dusty too much to say no.

  In the middle of the race, Dusty’s shoe came off in the mud. Before he could get it back on, Scott was gone. He tore through the woods to finish his first ultra in second place, beating Dusty by more than five minutes. “What the heck is going on?” Dusty wondered. That night, his phone rang relentlessly. “All the guys were making fun of me, going, ‘You loser! You got dropped by the Jerker!’”