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

by Christopher McDougall

  “’Kay” Jenn said, waving good-bye. “Sorry about the plants.”

  I helped her back into the sofa bed, then double-locked the door to prevent any further escapes. I checked the time. Damn, 3:30. We had to be out the door in ninety minutes, or there was no chance of meeting Caballo. At that moment, he was making his way out of the canyons and up to the town of Creel. From there, he’d guide us down into the Barrancas. Two days later, we all had to be at a certain spot on a trail in the Batopilas mountain range, where the Tarahumara would be watching for us. The big problem was the bus schedule to Creel; if we got a late start tomorrow, there was no telling when we’d arrive. I knew Caballo wouldn’t wait; for him, a choice between missing us or standing up the Tarahumara wasn’t a choice at all.

  “Look, you guys are going to have to go ahead,” I told Eric when I got back into the bedroom. “Luis’s dad speaks Spanish, so he can get you to Creel. I’ll follow with those two as soon as they can walk.”

  “How are we going to find Caballo?”

  “You’ll recognize him. He’s one of a kind.”

  Eric thought about it. “You sure you don’t want me to drill sergeant those two with a bucket of ice water?”

  “Tempting,” I said. “But at this point, I like them better asleep.”

  About an hour later, we heard noises in the bathroom. “Hopeless,” I muttered, getting up to see who was puking. Instead, I found Billy sudsing up in the shower and Jenn brushing her teeth.

  “Good morning,” Jenn said. “What happened to my eye?”

  Half an hour later, the six of us were back in the hotel van and hissing through the damp morning streets of El Paso, heading toward the Mexican border. We’d have to cross over to Juárez, then hopscotch from bus to bus across the Chihuahua desert to the edge of the Barrancas. Even with luck on our side, we were facing at least fifteen straight hours on creaking Mexican buses before we got to Creel.

  “The man who gets me a Mountain Dew can have my body,” Jenn croaked, her eyes closed and face pressed against the cool of the van window. “And Billy’s.”

  “If they race the way they party, the Tarahumara don’t have a chance,” Eric muttered. “Where’d you find these two?”

  CHAPTER 22

  JENN AND BILLY met in the summer of 2002, after Billy had finished his freshman year at Virginia Commonwealth University and returned home to lifeguard on Virginia Beach. One morning, he arrived at his stand to discover that the Luck of the Bonehead had struck again. His new partner was a Corona commercial come to life, a beauty who earned top marks in all the Bonehead scoring categories: she was a surfer, a secret bookworm, and a hard-core partyer whose ancient Mitsubishi had a life-size silhouette of gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson aiming a .44 Magnum stenciled on the hood.

  But almost instantly, Jenn began to bug him. She fixated on Billy’s University of North Carolina baseball cap and wouldn’t let up. “Dude!” Jenn said. “I need that lid!” She’d gone to UNC for a year before dropping out and moving to San Francisco to write poetry, so if there was any karmic justice on this beach, then she should be sporting the Tar Heels gear, not some pretty-boy surfer like him who only wore it to keep the pretty-boy bangs out of his eyes….

  “Fine!” Billy erupted. “It’s yours.”

  “Sweet!”

  “If,” Billy continued, “you run down the beach, bare-ass.”

  Jenn scoffed. “Dude, you are so on. Right after work.”

  Billy shook his head. “Nope. Right now.”

  Moments later, hoots and cheers rocked the boardwalk as Jenn burst out of a porta-potty, her lifeguard suit crumpled on the ground behind her. Yeah, baby! She made it to the next stand a block away, turned around, and came charging back toward the throngs of moms and kids she was supposed to be protecting from, among other things, full-frontal nudity by college dropouts goin’ wild. Amazingly, Jenn didn’t get canned (that came later, for shorting out the engine of her lifeguard captain’s truck by sticking a live crab under the hood).

  During quieter moments, Jenn and Billy talked big waves and books. Jenn revered the Beat poets so much, she was planning to study creative writing at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics if she ever dropped back into college and got a degree first. Then she picked up Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike and fell in love with a new kind of warrior poet.

  Lance wasn’t just some brute on a bike, she realized; he was a philosopher, a latter-day Beat, a Dharma Bum sailing the asphalt seas in search of inspiration and Pure Experience. She’d known Armstrong had bounced back from cancer, but she had no idea just how close to the grave he’d actually been. By the time Armstrong had gone under the knife, tumors were spreading throughout his brain, lungs, and testicles. After chemotherapy, he was too weak to walk but had to make an urgent decision: should he cash in an insurance policy worth $1.5 million, or turn it down and try rebuilding himself into an endurance athlete? Take the payout, and he’d be set for life. Turn it down and relapse, and he’s dead meat; he’d have no money, no health insurance, no chance of seeing age thirty.

  “Fuck surfing,” Billy blurted. Living on the edge wasn’t about danger, he realized. It was about curiosity; audacious curiosity, like the kind Lance had when he was chalked off for good and still decided to see if he could build a wasted body into a world-beater. The way Kerouac did, when he set off on the road and then wrote about it in a mad, carefree burst he never thought would see the light of print. Looking at it that way, Jenn and Billy could trace a direct line of descent from a Beatnik writer to a champion cyclist to a pair of Pabst Blue Ribbon-chugging Virginia Beach lifeguards. They were expected to accomplish nothing, so they could try anything. Audacity beckoned.

  “You ever heard of the Mountain Masochist?” Billy asked Jenn.

  “Nope. Who’s he?”

  “It’s a race, you crackhead. Fifty miles in the mountains.”

  Neither of them had even run a marathon before. They’d been beach kids all their lives, so they’d barely seen mountains, let alone run them. They wouldn’t even be able to train properly; the tallest thing around Virginia Beach was a sand dune. Fifty mountain miles was waaaay over their heads.

  “Dude, that’s totally it,” Jenn said. “I’m in.”

  They needed some serious help, so Jenn looked where she always did when she needed guidance. And as usual, her favorite chainsmoking alcoholics came through in the clutch. First, she and Billy dug into The Dharma Bums and began memorizing Jack Kerouac’s description of hiking the Cascadia mountains.

  “Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by,” Kerouac wrote. “Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”

  “Our whole approach to trail-running came from Dharma Bums,” Billy told me later. As for inspiration, that’s where Charles Bukowski stepped up: “If you’re going to try, go all the way,” the original Barfly wrote. “There is no other feeling like that. / you will be alone with the gods / and the nights will flame with fire…. you will ride life straight to / perfect laughter, it’s / the only good fight there is.”

  Soon after, surf fishermen noticed weird goings-on each evening as the sun set on the Atlantic. Chants would echo across the dunes— “Visionnnnns! O-O-O-O-O-mens! HallucinAAAAAtions!”—followed by the appearance of some kind of loping, howling, four-legged man-beast. As it got closer, they could see it was actually two people, running shoulder-to-shoulder. One was a slim young woman with a “Gay Pride” bandanna on her head and a vampire bat tattooed on her arm, while the other, as best they could make out, seemed to be a welterweight werewolf under a rising moon.

  Before setting out for their sunset runs, Jenn and Billy would snap a tape of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” into their Walkma
n. When running stopped being as fun as surfing, they had agreed, they’d quit. So to get that same surging glide, that same feeling of being lifted up and swept along, they ran to the rhythm of Beat poetry.

  “Miracles! Ecstasies! Gone down the American river!” they’d shout, padding along the water’s edge.

  “New loves! Mad generation! Down on the rocks of Time!”

  At the Old Dominion 100 a few months later, aid-station volunteers at the halfway mark heard screams echoing through the woods. Moments later, a girl in pigtails burst from the trees. She flipped up in a handstand, jumped back to her feet, and began shadowboxing.

  “This all you got, Old Dominion?” she shouted, throwing punches in the air. As the sole member of Jenn’s support crew, Billy was waiting with her favorite midrace meal: Mountain Dew and a cheese pizza. Jenn stopped bobbing and weaving and tore into a slice.

  The aid-station volunteers stared in disbelief. “Hon,” one of them warned her. “You’d better take it easy. Hundreds aren’t halfway done till you hit the last twenty miles.”

  “Okay,” Jenn said. Then she wiped her greasy mouth on her sports bra, burped up some Dew, and bounded off.

  “You’ve got to get her to slow down,” one of the aid-station volunteers told Billy. “She’s going three hours faster than the course record.” Tackling one hundred miles in the mountains wasn’t like running some city marathon; get in trouble out there in the dark, and you’ll be lucky to get back out again.

  Billy shrugged. After a year of romance with Jenn, he’d learned she was capable of absolutely anything except moderation. Even when she wanted to rein herself in, whatever was building inside her—passion, inspiration, aggravation, hilarity—inevitably came fire-hosing out. After all, this was a woman who joined the UNC rugby team and set a standard considered previously unachievable throughout the sport’s one-hundred-seventy-year history: Too Wild for Rugby Parties. “She’d get so nuts, guys on the men’s team would wrestle her down and carry her back to her room,” Jessie Polini, her best friend at UNC, said. Jenn always went full speed ahead, only dealing with stone walls after she hit them.

  This time, the stone wall arrived with a vengeance at the seventy-five-mile mark. It was now six in the evening. An entire arc of the sun had passed since Jenn had started running at five that morning, and she still had a marathon to go. There was no shadowboxing this time as Jenn wobbled into the aid station. She stood in front of the food table, stupid with fatigue, too tired to eat and too fuzzy-headed to decide what to do instead. All she knew was if she sat down, she wouldn’t get back up.

  “Let’s go, Mook!” someone shouted.

  Billy had just arrived and was pulling off his jacket. Underneath, he had on surf shorts and a rock band T-shirt with the sleeves torn off. Some marathoners are thrilled when a friend paces them through the last two or three miles; Billy was jumping in for the full marathon. Jenn felt her spirits rising. The Bonehead. What a guy.

  “You want some more pizza?” Billy asked.

  “Ugh. No way.”

  “All right. Ready?”

  “Right on.”

  The two of them set off down the trail. Jenn ran silently, still feeling awful and debating whether to return to the aid station and quit. Billy coaxed her along just by being there. Jenn struggled through one mile, then another, and something strange began to happen: her despair was replaced by elation, by the feeling that damn, how cool it was to be wandering this amazing wilderness under a burning sunset, feeling free and naked and fast, the forest breeze cooling their sweating skin.

  By 10:30 that night, Jenn and Billy had passed every other runner in the woods except one. Jenn didn’t just finish; she was the second runner overall and the fastest woman to ever run the course, breaking the old record by three hours (to this day, her 17:34 record still stands). When the national rankings came out a few months later, Jenn discovered she was one of the top three hundred-mile runners in the United States. Soon, she’d set a world best: her 14:57 at the Rocky Raccoon 100 was—and remains—the fastest hundred miles on dirt trails ever recorded by any woman, anywhere.

  That fall, a photo appeared in UltraRunning magazine. It shows Jenn finishing a 30- mile race somewhere in the backwoods of Virginia. There’s nothing amazing about her performance (third place), or her getup (basic black shorts, basic black sports bra), or even the camera work (dimly lit, crudely cropped). Jenn isn’t battling a rival to the bitter end, or striding across a mountaintop with the steel-jawed majesty of a Nike model, or gasping toward glory with a grimace of heartbreaking determination. All she’s doing is … running. Running, and smiling.

  But that smile is strangely stirring. You can tell she’s having an absolute blast, as if there’s nothing on earth she’d rather be doing and nowhere on earth she’d rather be doing it than here, on this lost trail in the middle of the Appalachian wilderness. Even though she’s just run four miles farther than a marathon, she looks light-footed and carefree, her eyes twinkling, her ponytail swinging around her head like a shirt in the fist of a triumphant Brazilian soccer player. Her naked delight is unmistakable; it forces a smile to her lips that’s so honest and unguarded, you feel she’s lost in the grip of artistic inspiration.

  Maybe she is. Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the ’20s, Beat poets in the ’50s, and rock musicians in the ’60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance.

  “So why not marathons?” I asked Jenn when I called to interview her about the Young Guns. “Do you think you could qualify for the Olympic Trials?”

  “Dude, seriously,” she’d said. “The qualifying standard is 2:48. Anyone can make it.” Jenn could run a sub-three-hour marathon while wearing a string bikini and chugging a beer at mile 23—and she would, just five days after running a 50- mile trail race in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  “But then what?” Jenn went on. “I hate all this hype about the marathon. Where’s the mystery? I know a girl who’s training for the Trials, and she’s got every single workout planned for the next three years! She’s doing speedwork on the track like, every other day. I couldn’t take it, man. I was supposed to run with her once at six in the morning, and I called her up at two a.m. to tell her I was shitfaced on margaritas and puh-robably not gonna make it.”

  Jenn didn’t have a coach or a training program; she didn’t even own a watch. She just rolled out of bed every morning, downed a veggie burger, and ran as far and as fast as she felt like, which usually turned out to be about twenty miles. Then she hopped on the skateboard she’d bought instead of a parking pass and kicked off to class at Old Dominion, where she’d recently dropped back into school and was making straight As.

  “I never really discussed this with anyone because it sounds pretentious, but I started running ultras to become a better person,” Jenn told me. “I thought if you could run one hundred miles, you’d be in this Zen state. You’d be the fucking Buddha, bringing peace and a smile to the world. It didn’t work in my case—I’m the same old punk-ass as before—but there’s always that hope that it will turn you into the person you want to be, a better, more peaceful person.

  “When I’m out on a long run,” she continued, “the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn’t going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It’s just me and the movement and the motion. That’s what I love—just being a barbarian, running through the woods.”

  Listening to Jenn was like communing with the Ghost of Caballo Blanco. “It’s weird how much you sound like a guy I met in Mexico,” I told her. “I’m heading down there in a few weeks for a race he’s putting on with the Tarahumara.”


  “No way!”

  “Scott Jurek may be there, too.”

  “You. Are. Shitting me!” the budding Buddha exclaimed. “Really? Can me and my friend go? Oh no. Shit! We’ve got midterms that week. I’m going to have to pull a fast one on him. Give me till tomorrow, okay?”

  The next morning, as promised, I got a message from Jenn:

  My mom thinks you’re a serial killer who’s going to murder us in the desert. Totally worth the risk. So where do we meet you guys?

  CHAPTER 23

  WE WHEEZED into Creel well after nightfall, the bus shuddering to a stop with a hiss from the brakes like a sigh of relief. Outside the window, I spotted Caballo’s ghostly old straw hat bobbing toward us through the dark.

  I couldn’t believe how smoothly we’d crossed the Chihuahua desert. Ordinarily, the odds of getting across the border and catching four buses in a row without one of them breaking down or chugging in a half-day late were on a par with beating a Tijuana slot machine. On just about any trip through Chihuahua, someone is sure to have to console you with the local motto: “Nothing works out according to plan, but it always works out.” But this plan, so far, was turning out to be foolproof, booze-proof, and cartel-proof.

  Of course, that was before Caballo met Barefoot Ted.

  “CABALLO BLANCO! That’s YOU, RIGHT?”

  Before I could make my way off the bus in Creel, I could hear a voice outside booming away like a siege gun. “YOU’RE Caballo! THAT IS SO COOL! You can call me MONO! THE MONKEY! That’s ME, the MONKEY. That’s my spirit animal—”

  When I stepped through the door, I found Caballo staring in appalled disbelief at Barefoot Ted. As the rest of us had discovered during the long bus ride, Barefoot Ted talked the way Charlie Parker played the sax: he’d pick up on any cue and cut loose with a truly astonishing torrent of improvisation, seeming to breathe in through his nose while maintaining an endless flow of sound out of his mouth. In our first thirty seconds in Creel, Caballo got blasted with more conversation than he’d heard in a year. I felt a twinge of sympathy, but only a twinge. We’d been listening to The Mixed-Up Files of Barefoot Ted for the past fifteen hours. Now it was Caballo’s turn.