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

by Christopher McDougall

  Austin? Last I’d heard, Scott was supposed to be two thousand miles away at that very moment, crossing Baja with his wife to catch the Chihuahua-Pacific train to Creel. And what was the deal with the urban marathon—why was Scott flying across the country for a junior varsity road race, when he was supposed to be fine-tuning for the showdown of a lifetime on trails? He was up to something, no doubt about it; and as usual, whatever strategy he was developing remained locked in his own head.

  So, until the moment I arrived in El Paso, Texas, that Saturday, I had no idea if I was leading a platoon or hucking solo. I checked into the airport Hilton, made arrangements for a ride across the border at five the next morning, then doubled back to the airport. I was pretty sure I was wasting my time, but there was a chance I’d be picking up Jenn “Mookie” Shelton and Billy “Bonehead” Barnett, a pair of twenty-one-year-old hotshots who’d been electrifying the East Coast ultra circuit, at least whenever they weren’t otherwise occupied surfing, partying, or posting bail for simple assault (Jenn), disorderly conduct (Billy), or public indecency (both, for a burst of trail-side passion that resulted in an arrest and community service).

  Jenn and Billy had only started running two years before, but Billy was already winning some of the toughest 50ks on the East Coast, while “the young and beautiful Jenn Shelton,” as the ultrarace blogger Joey Anderson called her, had just clocked one of the fastest 100-mile times in the country. “If this young lady could swing a tennis racket as well as she runs,” Anderson wrote, “she would be one of the richest women in sports with all the sponsors she would attract.”

  I’d spoken to Jenn once on the phone, and while she and Billy were wildly eager to join the trek into the Copper Canyons, I didn’t see any way they’d pull it off. She and the Bonehead had no money, no credit cards, and no time off from school: they were both still in college and Caballo’s race was smack in the middle of midterms, meaning they’d flunk the semester if they skipped out. But two days before my flight to El Paso, I suddenly got this frantic e-mail:

  Wait for us! we can get in by 8:10 pm.

  El Paso is texas, right?

  After that—silence. On the slim chance that Jenn and Billy had actually found the right city and finagled their way onto a flight, I headed over to the airport for a look around. I’d never met them, but their outlaw reputation created a pretty vivid mental image. When I got to baggage claim, I immediately locked in on a couple who looked like teenage runaways hitchhiking to Lollapalooza.

  “Jenn?” I asked.

  “Right on!”

  Jenn was wearing flip-flops, surf shorts, and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Her summer-wheat hair was in braids, giving her the look of a blonder, lesser-known Longstocking. She was pretty and petite enough to pass for a figure skater, an image she’d tried in the past to scruff up by shaving her head down to stubble and getting a big, black vampire bat tattooed on her right forearm, only discovering later that it was a dead ringer for the Bacardi rum logo. “Whatever,” Jenn said with a shrug. “Truth in advertising.”

  Billy shared Jenn’s raw good looks and beach-bum wardrobe. He had a tribal tattoo across the back of his neck and thick sideburns that blended into shaggy, sun-streaked hair. With his flowery board shorts and ripped surfer’s build, he looked—to Jenn, at least—“like some little yeti who raided your underwear drawer.”

  “I can’t believe you guys made it,” I said. “But there’s been a change of plans. Scott Jurek isn’t going to be meeting us in Mexico.”

  “Oh, fuck me,” Jenn said. “I knew this was too good to be true.”

  “He came here instead.” On my way to the airport, I’d spotted two guys jogging across the parking lot. They were too far away for me to see their faces, but their smooth-glide strides gave them away. After quick introductions, they’d headed to the bar while I continued to the airport.

  “Scott’s here?”

  “Yup. I just saw him on the way over. He’s back at the hotel bar with Luis Escobar.”

  “Scott drinks?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Suh-weet!!”

  Jenn and Billy grabbed their gear—a Nike shopping bag with a chiropractic stick jutting out the top and a duffel with the tail of a sleeping bag stuck in the zipper—and we began heading across the parking lot.

  “So what’s Scott like?” Jenn asked. Ultrarunning, like rap music, was split by geography; as East Coast playas, Jenn and Billy had done most of their racing close to home and hadn’t yet crossed paths (or swords) with many of the West Coast elites. To them—to just about all ultrarunners, actually—Scott was as much of a mythic figure as the Tarahumara.

  “I only caught a glimpse of him myself,” I said. “Pretty tough guy to read, I can tell you that much.”

  Right there, I should have shut my stupid mouth. But who can predict when the trivial will become tragic? How could I have known that a friendly gesture, like giving Caballo my running shoes, would nearly cost him his life? Likewise, I never suspected that the next ten words out of my mouth would snowball into disaster:

  “Maybe,” I suggested, “you can get him drunk and loosen him up.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “PREPARE TO MEET your god,” I said as we entered the hotel bar. “Sucking down a cold one.”

  Scott was on a stool, sipping a Fat Tire Ale. Billy dropped his duffel and stuck out his hand, while Jenn hung behind me. She’d barely let Billy get a word in the whole way across the parking lot, but now, in Scott’s presence, she was starstruck. At least I thought she was, till I saw the look in her eye. She wasn’t bashful; she was sizing him up. Scott might be hunting the Tarahumara, but he’d better watch who was hunting him.

  “Is this all of us?” Scott asked.

  I looked around the bar and did a head count. Jenn and Billy were ordering beers. Beside them was Eric Orton, an adventure-sports coach from Wyoming and longtime student of the Tarahumara who’d made me his personal disaster reconstruction project; over the past nine months, we’d been in weekly contact, sometimes daily, as Eric attempted to transform me from a splintery wreck into an unbreakable ultramarathon man. He was the one guy I’d been sure would turn up; even though he’d be leaving his wife behind with their newborn daughter in the middle of a fierce Wyoming winter, there was no way he’d be sitting at home while I was putting his art to the test. I’d flat-out told him he was wrong and there was no way I could run fifty miles; now, we’d both see if he was right.

  Sandwiching Scott were Luis Escobar and his father, Joe Ramírez. Luis was not only an ultrastud who’d won the H.U.R.T. 100 and raced Badwater, but also one of the top race photographers in the sport (his artistry aided, of course, by the fact that his legs could take him places no other shooters could reach). Just by chance, Luis had recently called Scott to make sure they’d be seeing each other at Coyote Fourplay, a semi-secret, invitation-only free-for-all described as “a four-day orgy of idiocy involving severed coyote heads, poisoned snacks, panties in trees, and one hundred twenty miles of trails you’ll wish you’d missed.”

  Fourplay is held at the end of February every year in the backwoods of Oxnard, California, and it exists to give a small band of ultrarunners a chance to whip each other’s butts and then glue said butts to toilet seats. Every day, the Fourplayers race anywhere from thirty to fifty miles on trails marked by mummified coyote skulls and women’s underwear. Every night, they face off with bowling tournaments and talent shows and endless guerrilla pranks, like replacing ProBars with frozen cat food and gluing the wrappers back shut. Fourplay was a battle royal for amateurs who loved to run hard and play rough; it wasn’t really for pros who had to worry about their racing schedules and sponsorship commitments. Naturally, Scott never missed it.

  Until 2006, that is. “Sorry, something came up,” Scott told Luis. When Luis heard what it was, his heart skipped a beat. No one had ever gotten photos of Tarahumara runners in full flight on their home turf, and for good reason: the Tarahumara run for fun, and having w
hite devils around wasn’t any fun. Their races were spontaneous and secretive and absolutely hidden from outside eyes. But if Caballo pulled this thing off, then a few lucky devils would get the chance to cross over to the Tarahumara side. For the first time, they’d all be Running People together.

  Luis’s dad, Joe, has the chiseled-oak face, gray ponytail, and turquoise rings of a Native American sage, but he’s actually a former migrant worker who, in his hard-scrapping sixty-plus years, made himself into a California highway patrolman, then a chef, and finally an artist with a flair for the colors and culture of his native Mexico. When Joe heard his kid was heading into the homeland to see their ancestral heroes in action, he set his jaw and insisted he was going, too. The hike alone could, quite literally, kill him, but Joe wasn’t worried. Even more than the ultrastuds around him, this son of the picking fields was a survivor.

  “How about that barefoot guy?” I asked. “Is he still coming?”

  A few months before, someone who called himself “Barefoot Ted” began blitzing Caballo with a torrent of messages. He seemed to be the Bruce Wayne of barefoot running, the wealthy heir of a California amusement-park fortune who devoted himself to battling the worst crime ever committed against the human foot: the invention of the running shoe. Barefoot Ted believed we could abolish foot injuries by throwing away our Nikes, and he was willing to prove it on himself: he ran the Los Angeles and Santa Clarita marathons in his bare feet and finished fast enough to qualify for the elite Boston Marathon. He was rumored to train by running barefoot in the San Gabriel Mountains, and by pulling his wife and daughter through the streets of Burbank in a rickshaw. Now, he was coming to Mexico to commune with the Tarahumara and explore whether the key to their amazing resilience was their nearly bare feet.

  “He left a message that he’d be getting here later,” Luis said.

  “I guess that’s everyone, then. Caballo is going to be psyched.”

  “So what’s the story with this guy?” Scott asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t really know much. I only met him once.”

  Scott’s eyes narrowed. Billy and Jenn turned from the bar and cocked their heads, suddenly more interested in me than the beers they were ordering. The atmosphere of the whole group instantly changed. Seconds ago, everyone was drinking and chatting, but now, it was quiet and a little tense.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I thought you were really good buddies,” Scott said.

  “Buddies? Not even close,” I said. “He’s a total mystery. I don’t even know where he lives. I don’t even know his real name.”

  “So how do you know he’s legit?” Joe Ramírez asked. “Shit, he may not even know any Tarahumara.”

  “They know him,” I said. “All I can tell you is what I wrote. He’s kind of strange, he’s a hell of a runner, and he’s been down there for a long time. That’s all I found out about him.”

  Everyone sat for a sec and drank that in, myself included. So why were we trusting Caballo? I’d gotten so carried away with training for the race, I’d forgotten that the real challenge was surviving the trip. I had no clue who Caballo really was, or where he was leading us. He could be totally demented or merrily inept, and the result would be the same: out there in the Barrancas, we’d be cooked.

  “So!” Jenn blurted. “What are you guys up for tonight? I promised Billy some big-ass margaritas.”

  If the rest of the crew had hit a crossroad of doubt, they’d put it behind them. Scott and Luis and Eric and Joe all agreed to pile into the hotel courtesy van with Jenn and Billy and head downtown for drinks. Not me, though. We had a lot of hard miles ahead, and I wanted all the rest I could get. Unlike the rest of them, I’d been down there before. I knew what we were heading into.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I was jerked awake by shouting nearby. Very nearby—like, in my room. Then, a BANG shook the bathroom.

  “Billy, get up!” someone yelled.

  “Leemee here. I’m fine.”

  “You’ve got to get up!”

  I snapped on a light, and saw Eric Orton, the adventure-sports coach, standing in the doorway. “The kids,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know, man.”

  “Is everyone all right?”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  I sat up, still groggy, and went to the door of the bathroom. Billy was sprawled in the tub with his eyes closed. Pink vomit was splattered all over his shirt… and the toilet… and the floor. Jenn had lost her clothes and found a shiner; she was wearing only shorts and a purple bra, and her left eye was swelling shut. She had Billy by the arm and was trying to haul him to his feet.

  “Can you help me lift him?” Jenn asked.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “JUST LEAVE ME HERE!” Billy was shouting. He cackled like an archvillain, then passed out cold.

  Jesus. I squatted over him in the tub and looked for nonsticky places to get a grip. I got him under the arms, but couldn’t find any soft flesh to grab hold of; Billy was so muscular, trying to hoist him was like lifting a side of lean beef. I finally managed to drag him out of the tub and into the sitting room. Eric and I had planned to share a room, but when Jenn and Billy showed up with no reservation or, it seemed, any money for a room, we said they could crash with us.

  And crash they did. As soon as Eric yanked out the fold-out sofa, Jenn dropped like a sack of laundry. I stretched Billy out beside her with his head hanging over the edge. I got a wastebasket under his face just before another pink river gushed out. He was still retching when I hit the lights.

  Back in the adjoining bedroom, Eric filled me in. They’d gone to a Tex-Mex place, and while everyone else was eating, Jenn and Billy had had a drinking contest with fishbowl-sized margaritas. At some point, Billy wandered off in search of a bathroom and never returned. Jenn, meanwhile, entertained herself by snatching Scott’s cell phone while he was saying good night to his wife and shouting, “Help! I’m surrounded by penises!”

  Luckily, that’s when Barefoot Ted turned up. When he got to the hotel and heard that his traveling companions were out drinking, he commandeered the courtesy van and convinced the driver to shuttle him around till he found them. At the first stop, the driver spotted Billy asleep in the parking lot. The driver hauled Billy into the van while Barefoot Ted gathered the others. Whatever Billy was lacking in pep, Jenn made up for; during the ride back to the hotel, she did backflips over the seats until the driver slammed on the brakes and threatened to throw her out if she didn’t sit the hell down.

  The driver’s jurisdiction, however, only extended as far as the van door. When he pulled up in front of the hotel, Jenn burst loose. She ran into the hotel, skidded across the lobby, and crashed into a giant fountain full of water plants, smashing her face against the marble and blackening her eye. She emerged soaking wet, waving fists full of foliage overhead like a Kentucky Derby winner.

  “Miss! Miss!” the appalled desk clerk pleaded, before remembering that pleading doesn’t work on drunks in fountains. “Get her under control,” she warned the others, “or you’re all out of here.”

  Gotcha. Luis and Barefoot Ted smothered Jenn in a tackle, then wrestled her into an elevator. Jenn kept wriggling, trying to break free while Scott and Eric were dragging Billy aboard. “Let me gooooo!” the hotel staff could hear Jenn wailing as the doors slid shut. “I’ll be good! I promiiiiiiissse. …”

  “Damn,” I said. I checked my watch. “We’re going to have to haul their drunk asses out of here in five hours.”

  “I’ll carry Billy” Eric said. “Jenn is all yours.”

  Sometime after 3 a.m., my phone rang.

  “Mr. McDougall?”

  “Hmm?”

  “This is Terry at the front desk. Your little friend could use some help getting upstairs. Again.”

  “Huh? No, that’s not her this time,” I said, reaching for the light. “She’s right—” I looked around. No Jenn. “Okay. Be r
ight down.”

  When I got to the lobby, I found Jenn in her bra and shorts. She gave me a delighted smile, as if to say, “What a coincidence!” Beside her was a big ol’ boy with cowboy boots and a rodeo belt buckle. He glanced at Jenn’s black eye, then at me, then back to her black eye as he tried to decide whether to kick my ass.

  Apparently, she’d woken up to use the toilet, but wandered right past the bathroom and ended up out in the hall. After relieving herself next to the soda machines, she heard music and started to explore. A wedding party was going on down the hall.

  “HEY!!!” everyone shouted when Jenn poked her head in.

  “HEY YA!” Jenn shouted back, and boogied in to get herself a drink. She butt-grinded with the groom, downed a beer, and fended off the guys who assumed that the wobbling, half-dressed hottie who magically appeared at 3 a.m. was their personal party favor. Jenn eventually meandered on, finally winding up in the lobby.

  “Sweetie, you’d better not drink like that where you’re going,” the desk clerk called as Jenn wobbled toward the elevator. “They’ll rape you and leave you for dead.” The clerk knew what she was talking about; our first stop on the way to the canyons was Juárez, a border town so lawless that hundreds of young women Jenn’s age had been murdered and dumped in the desert over the previous few years; five hundred other people were killed in one year alone. Any doubts about who ran the show in Juárez were cleared up when dozens of police commanders quit or were killed after drug lords nailed a list of their names on telephone poles.